Finding Your Way Here
Some advice on getting to our school without flying
Two weeks have gone by since we shared our plan to start ‘a school for culturemakers’ here in central Sweden — and we’ve been heartened by all the interest and enthusiasm this has generated. The invitation to our first course, Finding Our Way Home (4–8 June), has brought enquiries from near and far. As we read them, it’s caused us to reflect further on how we bring people together — and one question that is on our minds is the amount of flying that this school ends up being responsible for.
For years now, much of my work has been concerned with the role of culture under the shadow of climate change. All too often, I’ve sat in rooms full of marvellous people who have come together to spend time around this work, knowing that half of those present came in on long-haul flights to take part in a week-long course. It’s not a comfortable feeling.
So when we put together the website for HOME, we included a section inviting people to ‘think twice about flying’ to get here.
To be clear, we’re not drawing a hard line — among our company of scholars in June, there will certainly be some who have come by plane, and we’re not interested in layering on guilt over this. (Nor are we keen to recycle the familiar debate about whether or not flying is the right place to focus.)
What we are interested in is creating a culture in which it no longer seems normal to get on a plane. Where this becomes something we might do occasionally, for a powerful reason, but not a default part of our way of living.
To that end, it’s encouraging how many people have enquired about the practicalities of getting here from the UK or elsewhere in Europe without flying. So I’ve put together the guide below, based on our own experiences. (Please add comments, questions or suggestions.)
Once again, if something specific in the invitation to our school speaks powerfully to you and you live too far away for it to be realistic to get here over land and sea — or your budget is such that it’s a choice between flying and not coming — don’t let this stop you getting in touch with us.
If what you’re feeling is a more general call to be part of something like this, then you may want to check out some of these schools in other corners of the world:
- The Westcountry School of Myth & Story, England
- The short courses on offer at Schumacher College, England
- The Orphan Wisdom School, Canada
- Bolad’s Kitchen, New Mexico
- The Wyrd School, Ireland
- Lunga School, Iceland
Each has its own history and its own flavour, but all of them are in some sense companions in the work of regrowing a living culture.
Travelling Close to the Ground
For those in a position to make the journey to Ängelsberg over land and sea, there are now two networks that you can use for long-distance close-to-the-ground travel in Europe: the interlocking national railway networks (linked together by Deutsche Bahn’s international ticket system or by the Interrail card) and the FlixBus network of long-distance coaches.
Both offer flexible and fairly cheap ways to get between the UK (or other corners of Europe) and Sweden.
The Bus Option
FlixBus started out in Germany and now has a network that covers 1400 cities around Europe. We haven’t tried it yet, but we’re told that the legroom is more generous than on the old-school National Express coaches. So if you don’t mind sleeping in a reclining chair, then this is probably the simplest and certainly the cheapest option.
- Right now, you can book an overnight bus from London to Cologne, setting off from Victoria Coach Station at 21.00 on Friday 1 June and arriving at Cologne South at 09.30 on Saturday 2 June for €29 — then make your way into the city and spend the day stretching your legs, before catching a 17.05 overnight bus from Cologne North to Stockholm (with a breakfast-time change in Copenhagen) arriving at 17.35 on Sunday 3 June for €55.
- Alternatively, you could leave London at 15.30 on Saturday 2 June with a midnight transfer in Brussels and get to Hamburg for 10.00 on Sunday 3 June (currently €55.99) — then take the 15.45 direct service to Stockholm, arriving at 7.00 on Monday 4 June (currently €59.50), which gives you plenty of time to get the train out to Ängelsberg, where the course starts at lunchtime that day.
You can beat these prices by buying an InterFlix pass which costs €99 is valid for five direct journeys. (So London to Stockholm on either of the routes described would use up three of those five.) The only snag with the pass is that you can’t use it for a direct return journey (e.g. Hamburg-Stockholm-Hamburg)— but you could get around this by travelling outbound via Copenhagen, then back via Hamburg, or vice versa.
You can figure out other options with the FlixBus network — and if you’re setting off from Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham or a few other places between there and London, then you can also use FlixBus for the UK leg of your journey.
The Rail Option
If you feel like your all-night coach journey days are behind you, then the alternative is to go by rail. We’ve been making a couple of trips a year like this for the last few years as a family.
You can either book cheap tickets for specific trains using the offers available on Bahn.com — or buy a “five days within a period of 15 days” Interrail pass.
Things worth knowing about Interrail:
- Until recently, it only covered journeys outside your home country — but that has changed. On your first and last day of travel, you can now use the Interrail pass on all trains within your home country, in order to get to wherever you are leaving from. If you’re coming from Cornwall or Scotland, then that’s a significant difference.
- It’s now possible to use an Interrail pass on Eurostar — but you need to pay a €30 reservation fee. The London-Brussels Eurostar link is the fastest way to start the journey from the UK. You can book a reservation here. (If you’re starting out somewhere near the east coast, you might consider a ferry crossing — the Harwich-Hook of Holland route is well-integrated with the rail network at both ends and offers a 30% discount for Interrail passholders. From the northeast, you could take the Newcastle-Amsterdam route, but this involves a long coach ride at the Amsterdam end and you’ll need to take out some Euros on the boat to buy the coach ticket, as there’s no cash machine in the terminal.)
- You will need to pay for a reservation on the Swedish high-speed trains. You can make the journey between Brussels (or Hook of Holland) and Copenhagen using the ICE Intercity trains and other connections, without encountering any mandatory reservations. But on the SJ high speed trains that run from Copenhagen or Malmö to Stockholm, you’ll need to make a reservation — these cost 60 SEK (about €6) and can be made through the SJ website, following these instructions.
- Interrail is a great deal for families. This probably won’t be relevant for coming to our course — but it’s worth knowing anyway: for every adult travelling, up to two children aged under 12 get a free pass.
- There’s currently a 15% off sale on Interrail passes, until the end of March. So right now a “five days in fifteen” pass is £201. Here’s where you buy one.
The alternative to Interrail is to book discount tickets with Bahn.com. They offer discounted international tickets for journeys that start or end in Germany — so you can cover the London to Stockholm journey with two tickets. If you break the journey in Hamburg, then all the travelling can be done by day. (The disadvantage of booking discount tickets for specific trains is that you don’t have the flexibility of Interrail — so it’s advisable to have an overnight stay at the mid-point, rather than risk being delayed and missing your onward journey.)
At the moment, you can book London-Hamburg-Stockholm in early June for €79.90 + €59.90, so if you get those fares then the total cost of a round trip with Bahn.com is just under €280 plus the cost of accommodation.
Whichever way you travel, going by rail, you will end up needing to break the journey for a night somewhere. Depending on how you stagger the journey, one option is to do the last leg on the night train from Malmö (just over the bridge from Copenhagen) on the Sunday night, which will get you to Stockholm in good time for the two hour journey out to Ängelsberg. If coming by Interrail, bear in mind that there is an extra charge for accommodation on the night train and you will need to make a reservation for that.
Further Down the Line
There’s a lot to be said for travelling at a slower pace. You can avoid the disturbingly early starts, the bureaucratic inquisition and the commercial assault of the airport terminal. You see more of Europe and meet more people along the way. It feels like an adventure. But it can also be heavy-going at times.
One of the longer-term projects we want to work on with scholars at HOME is the creation of the cultural infrastructure for close-to-the-ground travel — networks that make it easier and cheaper for culturemakers to travel across Europe and beyond. This is one of the themes we’ll explore during the latter part of Finding Our Way Home.
Meanwhile, we salute those of you who are considering making this journey — as we pack our own rucksacks to set off for England via Amsterdam and Brussels on our annual family expedition, leaving on the night train from Stockholm tomorrow evening.
Read more about Finding Our Way Home (4-8 June 2018) on the HOME website.
