Here be dragons (aka griffins)

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here's how to find fantasy beasts via a trip through London. This post is by Nicola Baird 


I love visting the City's griffins. The picture above looks rather like a sacrifice, although it really shows Nell trying to climb on to one of the City's guardians between Temple and Blackfriars tube. Using the old I-spy game a griffin deserves at least 10 points (a pigeon would be 2, a cathedral 6), and there are plenty of griffins to find in the Square Mile, so a good way of exploring London as you look around the protest site at St Pauls.

Griffin ID please
Look for the body of a lion, the head and wings of an eagle and furry horse ears & what do you see? Scales. Clearly the griffins guarding the City are actually dragons. I doubt such a mish-mash beastie could ever have been real - although the Greeks and ancient Egyptians made statues of them. As for dragons, I've always assumed they are a folk lore memory of dinosaurs (or at any rate dino bones).

More info about Griffins on Wikipedia here. And if you want to remind yourself about I-spy books, then look here.

If it's London dragons you want though, then go to the National Gallery and enjoy Uccello's St George and the Dragon - a slaying of what appears to be the lady in pink's pet.

Egypt

Pete, Nicola, Lola and Nell love to travel, in as low-carbon a way as they can. This post is from Nicola

Here in London - maybe the UK - the Egyptian drama unfolding in Cairo and Alexandria is an ever changing story, but for us so much safer. We just get to see the photos, watch the TV, and in the Evening Standard read the tales of all the British families who are taking flight back here. I'm not entirely sure why the coverage is so good... I'm sure there are many oil-driven, scared of the Muslim Brotherhood reasons, although military history lessons must factor too. My dad's National Service, back in the 1950s, was in Egypt - though he is sadly long dead which means I can't quiz him much about the whys of that post.

Anyway the result ensures Egypt takes a higher news position than say, Colombia.

It's the Facebook messages from Egyptian friends that worry me so much. Yes the internet is a big place but Murabak seems very capable of paying people to track down those who aren't on his side. Never has watching history unfold been so nerve-wracking.

One thing that has puzzled me is the allure of Egypt for tourists before all this. Until these pictures of the million on a march started flooding BBC, the Guardian, Skynews etc most of the noise about Egypt was what a lovely spot it is to visit - swimming in the Nile, touring the pyramids, taking a dive tour, avoiding that rogue maneater shark at the main tourist hotspot, Sharm El-Sheik on the Red Sea. Quizzing them now it seems none of these visitors had the slightest idea about Egypt's politics, let alone that the president has kept his seat tightly for 30 years. It makes me feel that before you are allowed into a country you should be given a mini quiz about it's most basic history and politics. Just like a British nationality test, only a lot easier!

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Where to watch the World Cup 2010?

Pete, Nicola, Lola and Nell spent the summer of 2007 travelling around Britain without resorting to planes (simple!). Now they're home and keep up the carbon-lite world travel habit in all sorts of ways. This post is by Nicola

So where's the best place to watch the World Cup this July? I'm asking this less for myself, more as a puzzle. I know one sports writer/lecturer who is taking her toddler to South Africa for the full atmosphere (but worrying as much about which malaria tablets to take as how to get tickets). My Brazilian-based friend plans to come back "home" to London just in case England does really well - I also happen to know he likes being around the UK for the soft fruits season, so that's two draws. Meanwhile his wife thinks it might be more fun in Brazil, just in case her team does really well. While the Dads group from Nell's school look set to fall back on a CAMRA (ie, real) pub near Baker Street that serves Abbot Ale and when they drank there last undoubtedly set up England's recent victory in the friendly against Egypt. A winning ritual should not be broken they claim.

Where you watch and how you get to that place can be a brilliant way of sharing the joys and blows of being a football follower, or it can be rubbish (yes, that's why there's a picture of the rat infested rubbish truck from the recent Rio carnival!). I'm guessing I'll see some of the games with friends and family on outdoor screens, walkable distances from my home.

It's been 10 years - this coming April - since Lola and I took our last flights (first as well in her case as she was not quite two years). Nell is nine years and still hasn't gone on a plane. Pete has flown in the past 10 years but only twice, once for fun and once for work, so our family footprint has stayed low for a significant length of time compared to our friends.

Our no-plane boast is not so great if we compare with our own childhoods - Pete never took a plane journey with his family, it wasn't until he was 18 that he set off for an airport check-in. I think I made one return flight to Northern Ireland as a toddler (apparently noisily confusing nuns with Father Christmas) and then another aged 15 when my Dad suddenly took us all to Paxos, a Greek island.

Our family's experience shows you can have fun at home in the World Cup (why, even Lola was born at the start of the 1998 kickathon), in fact home is probably the only place you can watch every game, keep up to date with every bit of information and still keep that carbon footprint a blistering zero. Here's to an England win...

Out of Africa

Pete, Nicola, Lola, now 11, and Nell, a just-turned-nine, spent summer 2007 travelling around Britian. They're back home now (not so far from Tower Bridge) but still trying to find ways to see the world without racking up their carbon footprint. This post is by Nicola.

Thanks to my friend Nicky, who I met at university, I've been to many places in the world I would have thought weren't for me - starting with Chitral in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan. This was back in 1987 and my first trip to Asia. I really enjoyed it thanks mostly to Nicky who was living with her family there. Another summer we trained it around Europe (1984) - eurorailing was a belated right of passage for us both.

Nicky is a menace with the air miles (although I get to benefit and stay in touch as she comes by London Heathrow frequently as does 10-year-old Xander, see pic below with Lola and Nell). But last year, after nearly 10 years based in Zimbabwe, she and husband Robert (another uni friend) took their kids out of school and on to the dirt roads of Africa so that they could drive north-south from Cairo to the Cape and back again to Zim - a 25,000 mile road trip.

Robert is a fabulous photographer (that pic of Tower Bridge is his), films anything, and a good writer too so the blog entries on his trip, enlivened by the kids' entries, have been great. I loved popping to their blog between cups of tea and dull tasks, and now their route and adventures have also been poured over by Saturday Guardian readers - see here.

Six months cost their family £12,500, which sounds a hideous amount, but for an adventure fo a lifetime in which their children learnt so much - and not just how to use sand ladders to escape out of sand dunes and a combination of GPS and stars to navigate - it seems to me money well spent. Here at Baird Towers it would have gone on wine, bike services and energy efficiency which is nothing to write about... except that I do, see here.

If all of us could just take longer to get to places, perhaps we'd reduce the amount of mini trips made. Robert says there's a Swahili* word for this - mahali - the place that becomes a journey. That's exactly what this blog attempts to do as we wander around the world without ever needing to leave Britain.

*Swahili is spoken throughout east africa, including Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

Egyptian princess

Pete, Nicola, Lola and Nell are finding novel ways to travel the world without leaving Britain. Just been to Egypt without even leaving the kitchen table...

Nell adores leraning about ancient Egypt and her dad would dearly like to see the pyramids. Luckily for us there's the British Museum to snoop around. After a school visit Nell made her own ancient Egyptian jewellery (crown, arm amulet and gaudy necklace) from paper and string, see photo.

Then a few days ago my friend Nicky - who is driving across Africa with her sons - sent a birthday gift wrapped up in Arabic tape postmarked from a hotel near the pyramids. Nell was thrilled. She sepnt nearly 15 minutes studying the brown paper wrapped parcel, fiddled with the tape and traced the hieroglyphs until finally she could not resist opening it up.

Inside was a beautiful wooden box -not quite made from cedar or suitable for the world-famous Alexandria library - but nearly, and in that was a dashing blue beaded hat that turns Nell into an Egyptian princess. Though I think she prefers the idea of being a bellydancing babe.

China's green tea eggs

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 9, and Nell, 6, spent three happy months during summer of 2007 travelling around Britain. Now we’re home, but the travel bug is still there. Join us for the occasional sightseeing plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint. This post is from Nicola

Four of my MA students at Middlesex University – who have also done a short internship with the publications team at Friends of the Earth – came round to dinner recently. We had a lot of fun trying to guess what age each person was – and how many people lived in China (1.25 billion), Egypt (80 million) and Turkey (71 million).

The world total is now more than 6 billion which is why these are numbers are so huge.

The only people who were shocked that the UK is so tiddly, with just 60 million people (!) were Lola, Nell and me. It is astonishing how much impact our little home has had on the world, and how many people still want to spend a long time in cities like London.

Perhaps because the Olympics are in Beijing this year, and because one out of every five people in the world live in China the girls are enjoying a special China Week at school. There’s even noodles and dim sum planned one lunch time for the kids – so it was very good that Xu-Song (who prefers to call herself Emily in the UK as we are so rubbish at pronouncing her Chinese name) brought around green tea eggs (see pic above). I liked them – tea and eggs can’t be a bad mix – but Lola and Nell were very nervous. I do wonder how they’ve ended up with such unadventurous tastes despite the many food choices they see, or are even offered, every single day.

It also made me puzzle over the dish I'd take if I was doing international food - I suspect a tooth-rotting, super sweet batch of flapjacks.

Egyptian salad

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 9, and Nell, 6, spent three happy months during summer of 2007 travelling around Britain. Now we’re home, but the travel bug is still there. Join us for the occasional sightseeing plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint. This post is from Nicola

And here’s an Egyptian salad (see pic and story above and below), made by Alia.
Mix pasta, peas, tomatoes, lettuce and garlic together. Then add a dressing – oil, vinegar plus a dab of mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Alia (which means Princess in Arabic) recommends a favourite breakfast - rice, meat, tomato salad and flat bread.

Travel hub

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 9, and Nell, 6, spent three happy months during summer of 2007 travelling around Britain. Now we’re home, but the travel bug is still there. Join us for the occasional sightseeing plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint. This post is from Nicola

Here’s a pic of some of my MA students from the University of Middlesex who have also worked on internships at Friends of the Earth – Papatya, Muge, Emily and Alia pose with Lola and Nell. They are respectively from Turkey x 2, China and Egypt.

I know getting on planes is bad for climate change (though better if you stay for months like these students) but I do love meeting people from other countries and the genuine surprises one gets from finding more out about them.

Here's an example: in Turkey you call sleepyheads chicken, because hens go to bed so early...

Recently we’ve started video conferencing at my Friends of the Earth job for our Monday team meetings (so London staff can see the boss in Leeds) and it works really well. Now if someone could just organise video conferencing parties I think we could crack our restless need to travel the world and tick off all those places that must be seen...