Next month, in the three and half weeks before I start a new full time position, my girlfriend and I will be taking a bike trip across Eastern Europe. Below is an approximate map of our route:

View Ride for Climate Eastern Europe in a larger map

We choose this because we wanted a relatively first world experience for our first tour together, and neither Lindsey nor I have been to Eastern Europe (we call it “exotic Europe”). I actually know extremely little about these countries. I don’t even know what the currencies are or what variation of the alphabet they use. I do know that Poland has been repartitioned many times by surrounding powers, that Slovakia was once part of Czechoslovakia, Hungary is not spelled Hungry, Serbia and Bosnia were at war very recently (and you can’t camp in Bosnia for fear of landmines), and Croatia has very nice beaches and bad traffic.

The total mileage should be around 600 to 800 miles.

This is primarily a vacation, but perhaps because I don’t know how to travel without blogging and writing about climate change, I’ll be posting here about the trip and also about what climate change means for these countries. I want to know how they are vulnerable and how they are responding. It will be informal, and hopefully, fun. I will download some papers about the region for the flight, and talk to people along the way.

(And yes, we are buying carbon offsets for our flights.)

Here are some basic facts about the countries we’ll be riding across:

Poland
Population: 38 million
GDP per capita (ppp): $20,300
CO2 emissions per capita: 8.3 metric tons

Slovakia
Population: 5.4 million
GDP per capita (ppp): $23,300
CO2 emissions per capita: 7.0 metric tons

Hungary
Population: 10.0 million
GDP per capita (ppp): $19,600
CO2 emissions per capita: 5.5 metric tons

Serbia(we might not make it here!)
Population: 7.1 million
GDP per capita (ppp):$10,600
CO2 emissions per capita: 5.1

Croatia
Population: 4.3 million
GDP per capita (ppp): $18,200
CO2 emissions per capita: 5.3 metric tons

Bosnia and Herzegovina
Population: 3.8 million
GDP per capita (ppp): $8,100
CO2 emissions per capita: 8.3 metric tons

(Populations are for 2011, as are GDP per capitas. CO2 emissions are for 2008. All these figures come from the great source of information we call Wikipedia.)

Well, now I know that every country is relatively wealthy, except Bosnia and Serbia, which are on the cusp between developing and developed. In my own, non-expert experience, that is what I call countries at the $10k mark for gdp per capita — I’ve also found those are usually the best countries to bike across. We’ll find out soon.

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