MANCHESTER TO MALTA: An overlanding travel adventure feat. the legendary Milan-Catania sleeper train

All right. So it is like 4:10 in the morning. We are just about to leave the house and go to Piccadilly Station in Manchester on our first leg of what is going to be an absolute mental, long, but hopefully really fun trip to Malta. Are we going to London or Sheffield?! No, we're going to London. So that's the end of leg two. We're in London. We just need to get over onto the Eurostar. We’re currently in London St Pancras, We're gonna get brunch while the Eurostar queue dies down. Pretty decent b

reakfast. Flying sucks! We are on the Eurostar now. We just came through security at St Pancras. The experience is like completely different to an airport and it's just more relaxed. So we we’re in Paris, just changing between Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon. So far, so good. Pretty smooth, and yeah quite exciting to think this morning we woke up in Manchester, and now we’re in France! I much prefer this way of travelling than flying. How was that? Great. What was it, seven and a half hours? Yeah.

Dead smooth. Beautiful views through the Alps or like the bottom of the Alps. We're now in Milan, so we should get to our hotel like, 10:00 o’clock? Half ten?. After. Yeah. About half ten, and then we're going to go get some food. George and I have been talking about carbon admissions and flying like most people our age for such a long time. And I think there's been a guilt every time we've travelled via plane. Loads of our Australian friends have come over to Europe and it was one of those onc

e in a lifetime trips. We basically committed to doing it all overland, and then the group decided to go to Malta. It's an island off an island. It's quite complicated to get there. But I think what once we learned that that was some really fun modes of transport that we could take, like the sleeper train, we actually kind of realised ‘actually we can make it something fun. We think the fly flying is really convenient, but this has been so far way smoother and way more enjoyable. Slower, definit

ely, but way more enjoyable. This is about us flipping, travel on its head and saying the journey can be fun. How epic are all the stations in Milan? 25 minutes off the train. it's a really exciting feeling. Genuinely. You don't get this in an airport. This sense of, like, oldschool adventure is how I would describe it. We've made it onto the train. This is the sleeper train. All of these are the cabins. The one that we've got is a four person, so we've got there’s me and Bryony, there's another

lad, and then there’s a Dad of a family that's next door. It's basically like travelling in first class! For context, this is our room. A seat, a seat, with a little table. Double seat here, and this gets turned into a bed. Morning, George. So we are at the tip of the toe of long-legged Italy, right at the very bottom, in this little place called Villa San Giovanni. And believe it or not, this train is now going to get on a boat! We’re about to depart from the south of Italy to Sicily on this b

ig ferry. The last of our train journeys there. We are in Catania, in Sicily. We got off the train, and then we tried to get a bus from Catania to Pozzallo where we’re staying the night. But apparently they're not running today. So we've come back to the station and we're now getting two trains. So we are laden up with our bags, yet again. It's our fourth day. Fourth day travelling, 80 hours. We woke up in Sicily this morning, now we are walking along the seafront to the ferry port. 85 hours of

travelling. Nine legs, three and a half days, including a pit stop in Milan. It feels like the start of a new approach for George and I and Broaden more generally. We've saved almost ten times the amount of carbon we’d have used flying. It's taken us easily ten times as long. Has it been ten times as enjoyable? I'd say yes. If you strap in, prepare for the ride, it is undeniably more enjoyable.