Getting from the UK to Riga for GUADEC 2023

I’ve just booked travel for getting to Riga, Latvia for GUADEC 2023, and I thought I’d quickly write up my travel plans in case it saves someone else some time in planning travel.

I am not flying, because planes are too polluting. Instead, I am taking the train to Lübeck in Germany, then an overnight ferry to Liepāja, and then a bus the following morning to Riga. It’s a bit slower, but means it’s a bit easier to get some hacking done, stretch my legs and move around, and not fund fossil fuel companies as much. I’ll get enough stopover time in Köln, Hamburg and Lübeck to quickly look round, and a night in Liepāja to see it.

Overall the travel time is just over 2 days, with half of that spent on trains, and half on a ferry. By comparison, a flight is about 7 hours (5 hours flying, 2 hours faffing in airports) plus travel time to the airport.

The carbon emissions (140kgCO2e return) are roughly a quarter of those from flying (520kgCO2e), and interestingly a significant part of those emissions (46kgCO2e) is the 3 hour bus journey to get from Liepāja to Riga, though that’s quite sensitive to the occupancy level of the bus.

The financial cost (£800 return) is about two times that of flying (£380), though I have not factored in the costs of getting to/from airports and have not fully explored the hidden fees for baggage and other essentials so the ratio might be a little lower. This is quite upsetting. A disproportionate part of the cost (£178 return) is the Eurostar, because it’s oversubscribed and I missed the early ticket releases due to waiting for grant approval. Perhaps I should not wait next time.

The journey

On 2023-07-22:

  • Eurostar from London to Brussels-Midi, departing 07:04
  • Train from Brussels-Midi to Lübeck-Travemünde Skandinavienkai, departing 10:25 (ICE 15, ICE 200, RE 11428, RB 11528)
  • Nice walk from there to the ferry terminal for half an hour
  • Overnight ferry from Lübeck/Travemünde to Liepāja, departing 23:30

On 2023-07-23: On the ferry all day, then stay overnight in Liepāja

On 2023-07-24: Bus from Liepāja to Riga, departing early morning

Alternatives

I strongly looked at taking the train from Hamburg to Stockholm, and then the ferry from there to Ventspils. Unfortunately, it has limited capacity and there is track maintenance planned for around my travel dates, so I could not get suitable tickets. It would have made the timings a little more convenient overall, for about the same overall carbon emissions and cost.

Join me

If anybody else is going overland from the UK or far-western Europe, this is hopefully a sensible route for you to take, and it would be lovely if you wanted to join me. I will be arriving 2 days early for GUADEC (as we’re having an Endless OS Foundation meetup), but if you wanted to do the same journey 1 or 2 days later then it shouldn’t differ significantly. In any case, I can put you in touch with others making this journey if you want.

5 thoughts on “Getting from the UK to Riga for GUADEC 2023”

  1. Sam Thursfield

    Useful info, thanks for sharing the route! I didn't know about the ferry.

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  4. Allan Day

    Thanks for sharing this, Philip! I would have loved to have travelled overland this year, but didn't largely due to a) cost and travel budgets being tight, and b) child care at home being a precious resource.

    I'd be interested to know your process for researching these overland journeys. Are there any resources that you'd recommend?

    1. Philip Withnall Post author

      tl;dr: seat61.com will get you most of the way.

      My process is basically to use a combination of rome2rio.com, omio.co.uk and seat61.com to look at routes at a high level. Picking a high level route, I’ll take travel time, rough cost and rough carbon emissions into account (by multiplying each leg’s distance by the emissions factor of the mode of transport from https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint). Once I’ve picked a high-level route, I’ll work through the ticket bookings for each leg of it, making sure the changeover times line up, working out overnight possibilities, etc. Generally I find that pinning times to an overnight train/ferry helps with working out the overnights.

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