Reflections on not flying: one year on

Gareth E. Hamilton, University of Latvia

Today on the way to the office, I witnessed a small piece of traffic chaos. It took place just after I had taken the photograph above, outside Riga’s central train station. A lorry carrying stones had got stuck in between the two lanes of traffic, causing a blockage affecting a number of buses and trolleybuses, including the one I was waiting on. The driver of the first queuing bus got out and remonstrated mildly with his lorry counterpart, and the numbers waiting at this busy stop grew. Thankfully a solution was found and transport restarted, but it feels somewhat typical for Riga. As can be seen in the photo, works are taking place there for the building of Rail Baltica, which I discuss in the article I published in the journal on travelling as an academic while not flying. This was part of an issue on autobiography in anthropology. I had discussed the benefits Rail Baltica would bring, but I suppose in order to be eventually able to avail of these, some teething issues in terms of mobility have to be endured. At the moment, these feel very acute as the railway cuts across Riga in strategic locations, and the (re)building of bridges, tramlines, public areas are all taking place full steam ahead. However, it made me cast my mind back to the paper and also to the events of last year.

I wrote the article originally as a paper for a panel at the EASA conference in Stockholm in 2018. The pandemic made travelling difficult, of course. But when it was time last year to return to in-person conference participation, it was a nice coincidence that the travel in my paper, to Northern Ireland, was that the conference itself involved. EASA then asked me to write the non-flying conference travel advice. This blog post is a short update on that paper and about the experience of offering travel advice.

In the pandemic’s early phases, it was a somewhat strange experience to travel at all. I had had a paper accepted to present at London Met, at a symposium on ‘the animal gaze reconstructed’ in early March 2020, and this unluckily coincided with the expansion of the pandemic. (I did apparently have an unwitting co-residence with it on holiday in Bergamo in December 2019 but managed to evade what the unfortunate citizens of that place did not.) The appearance of hand sanitiser at the conference and pioneering mask wears on the Tube was a bit of a realisation that things were getting serious, but it still seemed oddly far away. On the trains back towards Riga, registration forms and the like made things somewhat closer. And on the last leg, waiting for the bus from Vilnius to Riga, the news that I should best now isolate on arrival in Latvia was a somewhat odd experience.

I did not leave the country until July 2021 after vaccination, and did so by train and bus again. However, at that point the whole experience seemed very unreal once again. I did not get as far as Northern Ireland, as the UK’s four constituent countries all had rather strict rules. It was only for the EASA conference that I was able to go back, and also to visit my parents. It was a nice coincidence that the conference was to be in Belfast.

Writing the advice for travel was complex because it required making the ‘task’ of taking land- and sea-based means of travel seem possible, but also not so much of a chore that these would also seem impossible. In my article in the journal, I mention the episode of a woman telling me a four-hour coach journey is long. Getting to Belfast would potentially mean being on trains, buses and ferries for much longer than four hours! It is not a secret that Belfast is on an island (Ireland), and I assume that most European anthropologists are on the continental mainland. Further, most of the means of getting to that island require transiting via another island (Great Britain). If not flying, then at least one ferry is required (as Boris Johnson never got to build his bridge, oddly enough).

It would be likely easier to fly. To leave for Belfast from Riga would require a flight of approximately three hours to Dublin and then a bus requiring another two. On land, it requires a bus to Warsaw of twelve hours, then a six-hour train to Berlin, then more trains to Brussels, then Eurostar, then a train to Wales, then a boat to Dublin, then a train. The boat itself requires about the same time as a flight would. The money involved too is somewhat higher taken altogether, especially if having to stop overnight. 

Another issue was being geographically balanced. It is easy to ‘stickle brick’ journeys together, e.g. from Bucharest rather than Riga, you would still end up having to do the same final steps, but the initial ones would be different. However, with Brexit, maybe it would be easier to take a direct boat from France to Ireland? Further, do you end up feeling a bit silly telling people how to get from Turkey to Belfast given that those steps are so numerous it might make the whole episode seem totally ridiculous to even attempt? I decided that it was best to try and fill in as much as possible, and defer to experts like Mark Smith from Seat61.com when necessary.

EASA’s 2022 conference theme was ‘transformation, hope and the commons’. At the moment, I do hold hope that Rail Baltica will be worth the current mobility problems which must be faced whether in a car, bus or tram when getting around the city. There will certainly be some transformation over time, whether in the public realm in Riga or in connected mobility to the rest of the EU for the Baltic states. This transformation, I hope, will allow more travel to take place with less carbon being used, which we as academic travellers can take part in.

The vignette above was not really how I was going to begin this piece. I was going to mention now preparing to make the journey again to Northern Ireland, and beginning to worry about the piece-by-piece nature and how it might be affected by strikes, the weather on the Irish Sea and other things unknown. This is part of the autobiographical part of this travel – well, the rough seas in any case travelling back and forward over many years! However, these journeys must keep on going. We know as anthropologists that kin relations are important, and we should maintain these.

Next year, EASA’s conference will take place in Barcelona. I have already in my mind how this travel might take place. I have heard news that better connections between the Spanish and French railway networks are planned. I look forward to travelling on a Spanish AVE high-speed train. EASA is keen on making sure the carbon impact of its conferences is as low as possible. In that regard, perhaps we will see each other on the train to the Catalan capital!