• Summer 2020.
• In the first six months of 2020, the world became a different place. Travel, as we knew it, changed radically. Briefly, for many of us, travel amounted to no more than a weekly visit to the supermarket, or a 30 minutes circuit of our immediate neighbourhood. As lock-down eased, a short drive to that nearby beauty spot, to which we used to scarcely give a glance on our way to the airport, became a significant day out.
• This unprecedented hiatus then became a period to reflect on the environment and climate. Car journeys and flights are two of the fastest growing contributors to CO2 emissions and climate change. Could this be the light-bulb moment, that rarest of opportunities to change the way we travel for the good of the planet? Would people, for at least some of their holiday allocation, look to domestic destinations? Will we, in significant numbers, take to the train on short breaks in the UK. And then, when overseas travel becomes safer, swap budget flights for train trips deep into Europe?
• Already airlines are leading the revival of foreign travel, and it will be some time before trains are considered safe enough for leisure trips, even within the UK. It’s too early to predict how people will respond to the current curtailed travel landscape, but change there must be. The tourist industry will suffer, in some places grievously. But as long haul aspirations are modified, and mass tourism restrained, some of that change, in the long run, may yet benefit us all.

Background.

Gareth has been travelling since the 1960s, and writing about the world since he first joined the Sunday Times in 1981.

Today he contributes travel and destinations articles to the Mail on Sunday, Viestra Magazine and Hourglass, the Extinction Rebellion newspaper.

His curiosity about the world is as keen as ever, leading him to the ancient walls of Derry in N Ireland, to the modern phenomenon of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, new cities rising out of the desert, to the thrill of new, booming Berlin.

In his reports from the world Gareth strives to be different, fresh, inquisitive. And above all, well-informed.

Read in Full