Avoiding Aviation: Amsterdam to Krašići
We live in a society that rarely rewards sustainable choices. Whether it's an extra 50 cents for oat milk in your coffee or the premium price of plant-based meat and dairy alternatives, the environmentally conscious option is regularly more expensive, more time-consuming, and less available.
This is particularly true in the case of international travel, with a European rail network plagued by overcrowding, underfunding, and rising ticket prices demonstrably failing to give consumers a viable alternative to the abundance of unsustainably cheap aviation options. Yet as the Climate Crisis amplifies, making environmentally conscious decisions has never been more essential.
With this in mind, and a two-month research internship in Montenegro on the horizon, I decided to make the return journey from Amsterdam without flying, using only buses and trains wherever possible. In addition to calculating the difference in carbon emissions, I was interested to see if I could keep costs competitive with the available flight options.
Amsterdam to Krašići.
Krašići is a village located on the Luštica peninsula in the Bay of Kotor, Montenegro. From Amsterdam, it is approximately 1991km by road, or four and a half hours by plane with a stopover in Belgrade.
Starting with an overnight train from Amsterdam to Vienna, my route took me through Graz into Slovenia, before zigzagging across the border to Zagreb and onto another overnight train bound for Split. For the final leg of the trip, I swapped trains for buses, first to Dubrovnik, then along winding coastal roads to the Montenegrin town of Tivat. Unfortunately, due to an erratic local bus service, a taxi was required to take me to my accommodation in the neighbouring village of Krašići. A mere 48 hours after boarding the metro at Amsterdam Zuid, I arrived.
This was effectively the quickest route I could take, with some alarmingly short stopovers including a desperate midnight dash between platforms in Zagreb to avoid an unplanned night in the Croatian capital.
So how did things stack up against flying? The only real surprise for me was the cost of the rail and bus option being significantly less expensive than the plane. In addition to the affordable Balkan bus services, this was likely aided by Tivat airport operating only limited services outside of the high season, pushing the flight costs higher. Even with 4hrs30 factored in for airport security and transfers, flying would have been 40 hours quicker than my trip, but with *some* sleep on night trains, it certainly didn’t feel as long as it looks on paper.
Ultimately though, it is the carbon emissions which are the deciding factor, with the bus and train option emitting 80% less than choosing to fly, for some context, 182kg of carbon emissions is enough to power the lights of the Eiffel Tower for 3 days. It's not a particularly relatable comparison (https://ecotree.green/en/), but it does sound more interesting than someone boiling the kettle 10,000 times.
Krašići to Amsterdam:
For the return journey, I took a different approach. Instead of prioritising speed, I planned out a 4-5 day trip that included overnight stops in Split, Ljubljana, and Bled, culminating with an overnight train from Munich back to Amsterdam.
Traveling through the Croatian countryside
Unfortunately, the return journey didn’t quite go as smoothly as anticipated. There was a replacement bus from Split to Zagreb, and a severely delayed train crossing the Slovenia/Austria border that meant I missed my overnight train back to Amsterdam from Munich. In addition to the additional travel time, I had to fork out an extra €55 on a Flixbus departing from the Bavarian city at 03:50 am. This definitely skewed the costs heavily in favour of the plane, however, the €343 does include three nights at hostels and any metro/city bus trips I made.
While a direct comparison of journey duration isn't useful, the delays and additional expenses on my journey were pretty frustrating, and cheaper flights from Tivat in April meant that flying was easily more cost-effective this time.
So, what did I uncover from this interesting yet wholly unscientific experiment? In regard to carbon emission comparisons, nothing too surprising. Flying emits a huge amount more CO2 than trains and buses, and when NOx and other GHGs are included, the emissions can effectively double. Although the outbound trip provides a good comparison and does highlight that a compromise on journey time (and perhaps comfort) allows you to select a more sustainable option at an affordable cost, this is set in the context that time is a luxury that many people do not have.
It is good for my own conscience and eco-anxiety levels to have reduced my emissions, and it was nice to have saved money on the outbound trip. However, it was altogether unsurprising that my rail travel featured delays, replacement bus services, and additional costs. Talking to other Europeans on my travels, the desire to avoid flying and travel by train is there, but the required infrastructure is not.
When reflecting on the journey, I had to acknowledge that my main learning was something not easily quantified. It was rediscovering the joy of independent travel, embracing the unpredictability, and enjoying the opportunity to connect with new people and places along the way. Amongst the highlights were the Resistance Museum in Vienna, some amazing vegan restaurants in Dubrovnik and Ljubljana, spending my birthday with a Portuguese food influencer at Lake Bled, and even managing to find a pub serving English Ale on tap.
For sure, entering into a hostel kitchen full of 20-year-olds playing drinking games is no less intimidating as a 32-year-old than it was 14 years ago as a fresh-faced sixth-form graduate on Interrail, but a willingness to step out of your comfort zone will always reward you with stories, experiences and connections that last far longer than the backache after a cross-continent Flixbus.
The cost of rail travel compared to flying remains a massive barrier to uptake, but we urgently need to re-evaluate our relationship with air travel in order to bring down GHG emissions. The increase in affordable and regular coach services from Flixbus and BlaBlaCar may not be the most glamorous option, but they do help supplement the rail offering and facilitate the adventures that make slow travel such an important experience.
Slow travel that avoids flying is not a feasible option for everyone, and it requires time, a certain freedom of responsibilities, and a willingness to endure some long and often unplanned journeys. But if you have the time, your employer permits it, or you can take a couple of days off your holiday, traveling by rail and road will lower your carbon footprint, can sometimes save you money, and will always give you some interesting stories.
To ascertain an estimate of spent and avoided emissions, I explored a range of online carbon calculators, journey planners, railway maps, and environmental data to see what impact was compared to the suggested flight options. The main source I used was https://ecotree.green/en/. Flight emissions calculations did not consider NOx and other GHG emissions.