Orbost to Orbost 1
Orbost to Orbost is an idea that has been churning away in the back of my mind for years. The seed was planted when I stumbled across The Man in Seat 61 (seat61.com), the home of all train travel nerdery, and saw the map showing how you could travel from Singapore to London almost entirely by train.
Last train leaving Orbost Station in 1987
Meanwhile, I discovered that Orbost, the small town in East Gippsland where I went to high school, was named after a farm on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Orbost, Australia was once the end of the Gippsland rail line from Melbourne, while Orbost, Scotland is just a short ferry ride from the end of the West Highland Line in the north-west of Scotland. In theory, you could once have boarded a train in Orbost, travelled to Melbourne, taken the Overland to Adelaide, joined the Ghan to Darwin, hopped (yes, not a train) into Indonesia, crossed Java, ferried to Singapore, and then carried on almost uninterrupted* by rail all the way to the Mallaig–Skye ferry in Scotland.
The idea of connecting the two Orbosts stuck with me. And this trip is my chance to try it.
*China only opened the the Laos-China railway in 2021, connecting the capital of Laos, Vientiane, with Kunming in Southern China as another part in the belt and road. This was the first true rail connection between South East Asia and China, replacing a series of busses from Thailand through Cambodia to Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.
The Orbost to Orbost Route
When I first thought of this trip, before COVID, the route was relatively straightforward: train across South-East Asia, hop up into China, and then take the Trans-Siberian or Trans-Mongolian Railway into Europe. That’s not really an option anymore. COVID gave governments an excuse to tighten borders, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has all but closed off the Siberian route to travellers like me.
So Georgie and I reimagined it. She’d long wanted to see Central Asia, which gave us a natural alternative. Instead of pushing through Russia, we’ll travel west through the Silk Road countries, cross the Caucasus into Turkey, and then make our way up through Europe. It’s not entirely trains, there will be a few flights to skip the impossible stretches, but the core idea remains: to travel from Orbost, Victoria, to Orbost, Scotland, mostly overland.
Why this journey?
I’ve spent the first five years of my professional life as a consultant, learning from people who know far more than me about Australia’s energy system: who produces it, who consumes it, and the paths we might take to decarbonise. I feel like I now have a decent grounding in how Australia works. But I also want some perspective of how the rest of the world approaches energy, and how far behind (or ahead) are we really?
But I would love to have some broader global context and knowledge base to draw on when thinking about how far behind (or maybe ahead?) Australia is in a changing energy world. This is how I plan to channel the energy I usually spend going down Wikipedia rabbit holes with the goal of picking up and explaining to myself and anyone else who wants to listen something interesting* about each region/country we are travelling through.
*Interesting is in the eye of the beholder.
Leg 1: Orbost to Singapore (via Japan)
The journey, of course, begins in Orbost. From there we drove west through the Latrobe Valley, finished packing up our lives in Melbourne and waved goodbye to friends and family, headed to the High Country for a week of Australian road trip, and on to Sydney. This took us through Yallourn and Mount Beauty, the SEC towns that shaped Victoria’s power system, which I’ve written about here.
View down into one of Snowy Hydro’s reservoirs in the Snowy Mountains.
As much as I’d like to imagine a full overland journey across Australia, the reality is that the country is too big and too expensive to cross by train for this trip. So Sydney was where the overland journey promise was first broken and the flights began.
Wind turbines operating in snowy conditions in Hokkaido, northern Japan.
Our path out of Australia was a hopscotch: Sydney → Brisbane → Cairns → Japan. A stop in Japan with a group of friends is of course mandatory for every good Australian holidaymaker of the last two years so we explored cities, embarrassed ourselves at Karaoke, skied, and took an impractically long Shinkansen journey halfway down the country from Hokkaido to Hiroshima. Eventually we boarded one last flight into Singapore, the city where the overland journey truly begins (See my Singapore post here).
Energy Nerdery
TBC, I have to finish the carbon emissions calcs.
What’s next
That’s the first leg. Orbost to Singapore, via Japan, mostly by air. The journey so far has covered the distance from East Gippsland to South-East Asia, and with it, our emissions tally has already spiked.
From here, the story shifts. In Leg 2 we’ll head north through South-East Asia by train, bus and boat, linking Malaysia, Thailand and Laos on our way towards connecting into China. It will be slower, cheaper, and liekly far less carbon-intensive than the flights that got us here. And along the way, I’ll keep digging into the question that frames this whole trip: what can Australia learn from the way the rest of the world produces, consumes, and transitions its energy?