Hannah sent us this one. She says after the fear of flying episode, she kept thinking about a different question, which is whether flying has to be the default at all. Living in Israel makes it vivid, because leaving the country basically means getting on a plane. You can cross into Jordan or Egypt, but between border waits, visas, long drives, and the fact that you still have to continue onward, it's not a real substitute for most trips. Ferries are gone except cruises or private boats, and Lebanon and Syria are not options. She has this fantasy of peace with all the neighbors, a fast train from Jerusalem north through Turkey into Europe, maybe all the way to the UK and Ireland, or a huge road trip across Europe and back. And she asks why we accept flying as the only serious long-distance option when it's become so unpleasant, cramped seats, packed airports, endless security, passport control, the environmental impact. Anything happening with airships? And she wants the weird stuff, cargo ships, ferries, sleeper trains, vehicle relocation, overland routes, mixed train and ship journeys, anything strange or old-fashioned or newly experimental. What are the ways people actually travel long distances without flying, especially where the train network isn't great?
The first thing I want to say is that Hannah has identified something real, which is that flying isn't a technology choice anymore, it's an infrastructure lock-in. The reason it feels like the only option isn't that alternatives are impossible, it's that we spent seventy years dismantling them and building everything else around airports.
The geographic trap. Israel is an extreme case, but the same logic applies to Iceland, to New Zealand, to anywhere borders or terrain make overland travel impractical. The question isn't just why do we fly, it's why did we stop building the alternatives.
Right, and the answer is a series of choices that got made in the mid-twentieth century. Jet fuel was cheap, airports were built with public money, the hub-and-spoke model made connections efficient, and meanwhile train networks were being ripped up in favor of highways and runways. The United States is the starkest example, but it happened across Europe too, just less completely.
So flying won because it was fast and cheap and standardized, and then the victory became self-reinforcing. Borders are designed around airports. Visa systems assume you'll fly. The entire apparatus of international travel is built around the assumption that you arrive by plane.
And the unpleasantness is a symptom of that victory, not a bug. Cramped seats are a function of airline economics, yield management, ancillary revenue. Packed airports are a function of hub consolidation. Endless security is post-9/11 policy layered on top of pre-existing passport control. None of this is inevitable. It's a series of choices that got made by specific people at specific times, and then everyone forgot they were choices.
Which is why Hannah's fantasy of a train from Jerusalem to Europe isn't just about peace. It's about a different way of moving through the world. Slower, more connected, less extractive. But let's talk about what actually exists right now, because the alternatives are more real than most people think.
The realistic stuff first. Sleeper trains in Europe have had a genuine resurgence. Nightjet, which is the Austrian Federal Railways brand, has been adding routes through the twenty-twenties, and there was a period where it looked like night trains were dead, they'd been cut back for years, and now they're coming back because people are willing to pay for the experience of waking up in a different city without having gone through an airport. EuroNight is the broader category of European night trains, and there are new routes being added regularly.
The economics of a sleeper train are interesting, because you're paying for a hotel room and a train ticket at the same time, and the hotel room is moving. So the comparison isn't train versus plane, it's train plus hotel versus plane plus hotel, and the train starts to look better if you value your time in a certain way.
You leave Vienna at eight in the evening, you wake up in Venice at eight in the morning, and you've lost no daytime to travel. Versus flying, which means getting to the airport two hours early, the flight itself, getting out of the airport on the other end, and you've burned half a day either way. The sleeper train is competitive if you're going city center to city center and the distance is in the sweet spot of about five hundred to a thousand kilometers.
And then there are ferries. The Mediterranean used to have a dense network of ferry routes, and most of them are gone, but the ones that remain are useful. Greece still has a huge ferry network, Italy to Greece, Italy to Croatia, Spain to Morocco. The decline of Mediterranean ferries is a story of cheap flights undercutting them, but the routes that survived are the ones where the geography makes flying pointless.
Which brings us to cargo ships. This is one of my favorite obscure travel options. Cargo ships carry passengers on a limited basis. The Safety of Life at Sea convention sets a limit of twelve passengers on a cargo ship without requiring passenger ship certification, so most freighters that take passengers take twelve or fewer. There's no formal passenger service, you book through specialized agents, and the booking process takes three to six months.
And the experience is apparently strange. You're on a working ship, you eat with the crew, you have a cabin that's usually spare officer quarters, and the schedule is whatever the schedule is. Weather, port congestion, mechanical issues, all of it can delay you, and there's no recourse.
That's the part that fascinates me. You're surrendering control over your arrival date in a way that modern travel has completely eliminated. When you book a flight, you know you'll arrive at a specific time on a specific day, barring something catastrophic. On a cargo ship, you'll arrive when the ship arrives. That's the entire contract.
There's something appealing about that, honestly. The idea that travel is something that happens to you, not something you execute.
And then there's vehicle relocation. This is the one that sounds like a scam and isn't. Companies like imoova and Transfercar match travelers with vehicles that need to be moved between locations. Someone rents a campervan in Auckland and drops it in Christchurch, the company needs it back in Auckland, so they let you drive it back for a nominal fee, sometimes a dollar a day, sometimes free, sometimes they pay for fuel.
The catch being that you have to go where the vehicle needs to go, on the schedule the vehicle needs to get there. It's not a free road trip, it's a road trip with a job attached.
Right, and the routes are limited to places where there's an imbalance in rental demand. Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada. You're not going to do a vehicle relocation from Jerusalem to Berlin, because the rental market doesn't work that way.
So the realistic alternatives are sleeper trains, ferries, cargo ships, vehicle relocation. But Hannah also asked about the Israel-specific reality, and that's where it gets grim.
The border crossings to Jordan exist. Allenby Bridge, the Yitzhak Rabin crossing, they're real and they function. But they're slow, unpredictable, require visas and advance coordination, and once you're across, you still have to continue onward. You've crossed into Jordan, now what? You're in Amman, and you still need to get to Europe, or Asia, or wherever you're going. The overland route from Israel to Europe would require crossing Turkey, which is theoretically possible but practically arduous, and the infrastructure simply doesn't exist for it to be a realistic substitute for flying.
The fantasy of a fast train from Jerusalem to Europe is exactly that, a fantasy, for now. The political obstacles are obvious, but even setting those aside, the engineering is enormous. You'd need to build hundreds of kilometers of new track through difficult terrain, standardize gauge, negotiate border procedures, and the demand would have to justify it. It's not impossible, but it's a multi-decade project even in the best case.
And this is where the misconception comes in. People think overland travel from Israel to Europe is just a matter of willingness, like if you really wanted to, you could do it. And technically you could, in the sense that you could string together buses and taxis and border crossings and eventually end up in Istanbul. But it would take days, cost more than a flight, and involve a level of unpredictability that most people can't absorb for a regular trip.
So flying won because of infrastructure and economics. But what does that actually look like on the ground? Let's talk about the environmental angle, because Hannah mentioned it and it's worth being precise about.
Aviation accounts for roughly two to three percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. That sounds small, but it understates the impact. Aviation also produces contrails and other effects that contribute to radiative forcing, which means the total warming impact is higher than the carbon dioxide number alone suggests. And critically, only a small fraction of the world's population flies regularly. So the emissions are concentrated among a relatively wealthy minority.
The question isn't can we fly less, it's what would it take to make the alternatives viable at scale. And that's where it gets interesting, because the alternatives already exist, they just don't have the infrastructure or the economics behind them.
That's the realistic stuff. Now let's get weird. Hannah asked about airships, and I want to give her a real answer, because there's actually more happening than most people realize.
The romantic appeal is undeniable. The slow, elegant crossing, the view, the sense of occasion. But what's the actual state of the technology?
Airships are having a moment, but not for passenger travel yet. The Airlander 10, which is made by Hybrid Air Vehicles in the UK, has been through certification hurdles for years. It's a hybrid airship, which means it gets some of its lift from helium and some from aerodynamic shape, and it's designed for cargo and surveillance and niche tourism. LTA Research, which is funded by Sergey Brin, has the Pathfinder 1, a four hundred foot airship being tested in California. Four hundred feet is enormous, it's longer than a football field.
Four hundred feet. And it's not carrying passengers.
Not yet. The Pathfinder 1 is a test vehicle, it's proving the technology, and the eventual goal is cargo and humanitarian missions. Passenger airships are still years away, and the economics don't work for scheduled service. An airship is slow, it's affected by weather in ways that planes aren't, and the infrastructure for docking and ground handling doesn't exist anymore. The Hindenburg wasn't the only reason airships died, it was the final nail in a coffin that was already being built by economics and the rise of faster, cheaper airplanes.
So the fantasy of a slow, elegant crossing is still a fantasy, but it's a fantasy with real engineering behind it. That's a meaningful distinction. It's not science fiction, it's just not practical for mass passenger travel.
And the cargo angle is where it gets interesting. Airships can carry heavy loads to remote places without needing runways. Think mining equipment to a site in the Arctic, or generators to a disaster zone, or wind turbine blades to a mountaintop. The places where roads don't exist and helicopters are too small. That's the niche where airships make sense.
So airships aren't coming back as a passenger option anytime soon, but they're plausibly coming back as a cargo option for specific use cases. That's a more nuanced answer than the usual either it's happening or it's dead.
Now let's talk about mixed train and ship journeys, because this is where the obscure stuff lives. The classic example is the Trans-Siberian Railway combined with a ferry across the Sea of Japan. You take the train from Moscow to Vladivostok, which is itself a seven day journey, and then you take a ferry to Sakhalin Island or to Japan. These aren't marketed as single tickets, which is part of why they're obscure. You have to assemble them yourself.
The train-ferry-train route from Europe to North Africa is another one. You take the train to southern Spain, ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco, and then continue by train through Morocco. It's not a single bookable itinerary, it's a series of legs that you stitch together.
And that's actually a big part of why these alternatives remain obscure. The travel industry is built around the idea of a single ticket, a single booking, a single itinerary. If you have to assemble the journey yourself, it's automatically niche, because most people won't do the work.
But the people who do the work get something that the single-ticket travelers don't. They get the experience of the journey itself, not just the destination. The Trans-Siberian isn't a way to get to Vladivostok, it's the point. The ferry across the Sea of Japan isn't a shortcut, it's a transition.
And then there are the places where the train network isn't great, which is most of the world. In much of Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, long-distance travel without flying means buses, shared taxis, and informal networks. The experience is radically different, slower, more social, more unpredictable, but it's how most of the world actually moves.
This is the thing that's easy to forget from a Western perspective. The majority of humans who travel long distances do so without ever getting on a plane. They take buses, they take shared taxis, they take whatever's available. The plane is the exception, not the rule, globally speaking.
And the bus networks in places like Africa and South America are sophisticated. They're not formalized in the way that European train networks are, but they're dense and they work. You can get from Nairobi to Kampala by bus, it takes all day, and you'll be sitting next to someone's chickens, but you'll get there.
Someone's chickens. That's the detail that makes it real.
The social dimension is actually important. Travel by bus or shared taxi is inherently social in a way that flying isn't. You're in a confined space with strangers for hours, you talk to people, you share food, you learn things. Flying is designed to minimize human contact, to isolate you in your seat with your screen. The alternatives force you to be present.
If alternatives scaled, what would actually change? This is the second-order question that Hannah's prompt opens up.
Border infrastructure would need to be redesigned around trains and roads, not airports. Visa regimes would need to accommodate overland arrivals. And the travel experience itself would shift from a stressful sprint through chokepoints to something more gradual and connected to the landscape.
The airport is a chokepoint by design. You're funneled through security, through passport control, through the sterile zone, and the whole experience is about processing you as efficiently as possible. A train station is different. You arrive, you get on the train, you leave. The border crossing happens while you're moving, or it happens at a small station where there's no need for the same level of security theater.
And the landscape is the point. When you fly, you skip the landscape entirely. You get on in one city and get off in another, and everything in between is a blank. When you travel overland, the landscape is the experience. You watch the terrain change, you see the borders, you understand the geography in a way that flying never allows.
That's the fantasy Hannah is describing, I think. The train from Jerusalem to Europe isn't just about getting to Europe. It's about watching the landscape change from desert to mountains to forests, about crossing borders one at a time, about the gradual accumulation of distance.
The slow travel movement has been building for years, and it's not just nostalgia. It's a reaction to the way flying compresses distance into nothing. When you fly from Tel Aviv to London, you don't experience the distance. You just arrive. The slow travel movement says the distance is the point, the journey is the destination, all of that.
Which sounds like a cliché, but it's actually a real response to a real loss. We've optimized travel for speed and cost, and in doing so we've eliminated the experience of travel itself. The alternatives are ways of getting that experience back.
Let me talk about the decline of the ocean liner, because it's the clearest example of how a technology can win and then lose. The ocean liner was the default for transatlantic travel for over a century. The Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, these were the flagships of their era. And then the jet plane came along and killed them in about a decade. The last scheduled transatlantic ocean liner service ended in the nineteen sixties.
And now the only way to cross the Atlantic by ship is a cruise, which is a completely different thing. A cruise is a floating resort that happens to cross the ocean. An ocean liner was transportation that happened to be comfortable.
The distinction matters. A cruise is designed to keep you on the ship, to make the ship the destination. An ocean liner was designed to get you somewhere, and the comfort was a means to that end. They're different products with different economics.
Could ocean liners come back? The same question as airships, really. The technology exists, the economics don't work for scheduled service, and the infrastructure is gone. But for a certain kind of traveler, the experience is worth paying for.
There are occasional attempts. The Queen Mary 2 is still in service as a transatlantic liner, the last one. She does scheduled crossings between Southampton and New York, and she's booked solid months in advance. The demand exists, it's just not enough to support a fleet.
One ship. The entire transatlantic liner industry is one ship.
That's what a century of aviation does. It reduces an entire mode of transport to a single vessel.
Let's talk about the places where the train network isn't great, because Hannah specifically asked. She said especially in places where the train network isn't great, what are the ways people actually travel long distances without flying.
The answer is buses, mostly. In Africa, the bus is the backbone of long-distance travel. Companies like Modern Coast in East Africa run routes that are thousands of kilometers long, and they're not comfortable in the way that a European train is comfortable, but they're real and they work. In South America, the bus network is even more developed. You can take a bus from Lima to Buenos Aires, it takes days, and the buses have seats that recline into beds.
The semi-cama and cama distinction. In South America, bus seats are classified by how far they recline, and the top tier is basically a bed. You can cross the continent lying down.
In Southeast Asia, the network of buses, minivans, and shared taxis is incredibly dense. You can get from Bangkok to Hanoi overland, it takes days and involves multiple border crossings, but people do it all the time. The infrastructure is informal, it's not bookable through a single platform, but it exists and it's how most people actually move.
The informal networks are the key insight. The formal alternatives, the sleeper trains and the ferries, are the exception. The informal networks, the buses and shared taxis, are the rule. Most of the world's long-distance travel happens through informal networks that don't show up in travel apps.
That's a lesson for the future. If we want alternatives to flying to scale, they need to be formalized enough to be bookable, but flexible enough to serve the places where the formal infrastructure doesn't exist. The bus networks in Africa and South America are a model, not a problem.
Where does this leave us? Flying won because it was fast and cheap and standardized, and now we're stuck with it because the alternatives were dismantled. But the alternatives are still there, in reduced form, and some of them are coming back.
The resurgence of sleeper trains in Europe is the most hopeful sign. It's proof that the demand for slow travel exists, and that it can be served profitably. The airships are a longer shot, but the technology is real and the cargo niche is plausible. The cargo ships and vehicle relocation schemes are never going to be mass market, but they're real options for people who want them.
The fantasy of a train from Jerusalem to Europe is still a fantasy, but it's a fantasy that points at something real. The desire for a different way of moving through the world, one that's slower and more connected and less extractive, that's not nostalgia. It's a legitimate critique of what flying has become.
The critique is sharpening. The environmental impact of flying is real and growing. The unpleasantness of the airport experience is real and growing. The gap between what flying promises and what it delivers is real and growing. The alternatives are there, waiting.
Hilbert: You're both talking like these alternatives are obscure. They're obscure now. They weren't obscure forty years ago. My grandmother crossed the Atlantic by ship in nineteen fifty-two and thought nothing of it. That was just how you went.
The weirdness is the default, not the alternative.
Hilbert: I worked as a booking agent for a cargo ship passenger service in the late nineties. Tiny operation. We arranged passage on freighters for retirees and oddballs who wanted to cross the Atlantic without flying. I still have a laminated schedule from nineteen ninety-seven that I refuse to throw away.
A laminated schedule.
Hilbert: The bookings always included a clause about no guarantee of arrival date. You'd pay for passage, but the ship could be delayed by weather, port congestion, mechanical issues, and you had no recourse. I had a passenger stuck in Rotterdam for eleven days once. He called the office every morning and I'd tell him the ship was still waiting for a berth. Eleven days.
Eleven days in Rotterdam, and he had no recourse. That's the surrender of control you were talking about.
The thing is, that's not a bug in the system, it's the system. When you fly, the airline has to get you there, there are compensation rules, there are alternatives. On a cargo ship, the ship arrives when the ship arrives, and you're just along for the ride.
Hilbert: The passengers we booked, they understood that. They weren't in a hurry. That was the whole point. They wanted to be on a ship for two weeks, they wanted to eat with the crew, they wanted to watch the ocean. The eleven days in Rotterdam was just part of it.
Would you do it now? Book passage on a freighter?
Hilbert: If I had the time. The schedule's different now, fewer ships take passengers, and the ones that do are booked through agents. But the basic deal is the same. You pay your money, you get on the ship, and you arrive when you arrive. There's something honest about it.
The honesty is the appeal. Flying pretends to be precise, and then it's delayed and you're stuck in a terminal with two thousand other people. A cargo ship never pretends. It says from the start that the schedule is approximate, and then it delivers exactly that.
Hilbert: The thing I always wondered about, with the airships. If they ever get the passenger version working, would it have the same clause? No guarantee of arrival date. Because an airship is even more weather-dependent than a ship. You'd pay for a crossing and then sit in a hangar for a week waiting for the wind to change.
The airship romanticism never accounts for the weather. You imagine the elegant crossing, but you don't imagine the eleven days in a hangar in Newfoundland waiting for the jet stream to move.
The Airlander 10, the one I mentioned, it's designed to handle weather better than the old rigid airships, but it's still slower than a plane and more affected by wind. The operational reality would be somewhere between a ferry and a plane, and the schedules would have to be flexible.
Hilbert: I'd take the hangar over the terminal. At least the hangar's quiet.
The cutting room floor detail I wanted to mention. The Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest railway line in the world, and the ferry from Vladivostok to Sakhalin Island carries entire train cars. You don't get off the train, the train gets loaded onto the ferry, and then it continues on the other side. That's a mixed train-and-ship journey where the train itself is the passenger.
That's the kind of thing that makes you realize how much infrastructure we've lost. Train ferries used to be common all over the world, and now they're a curiosity. The idea that a train could cross water without you getting off is almost incomprehensible to a modern traveler.
The open question is this. If flying is the default because of infrastructure and economics, what would it take to change that? Is the resurgence of sleeper trains in Europe a model, or an exception? And what does it mean that the most romantic alternatives, the airships and the ocean liners, are also the least practical?
The answer, I think, is that the change won't come from a single technology. It'll come from a shift in how people value time and experience. The sleeper train resurgence happened because people started valuing the journey itself, not just the destination. If that shift continues, the alternatives will keep growing. If it doesn't, they'll stay niche.
The fantasy of a train from Jerusalem to Europe, the one Hannah described, it's not just about peace. It's about a different way of moving through the world. Slower, more connected, less extractive. That's the thing worth holding onto, even if the train never gets built.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave a review, it helps other people find the show. We'll be back soon.
