A train letter from master's students in Sustainability
Team 'Wet Zero', consisting of four students in Sustainability at UiB, won the Sustainability Game 2025, earning an all-expenses-paid train journey to the Climate Conference in Durham. Below is their travel letter.
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Durham Durham…we had no idea how beautiful and special you were going to be, but we were all excited to meet you. We started our adventure in Bergen, exchanging ideas on how to explore life along the rails to you. Our goal was to maximize our experience in each city we visited or stayed at: sitting, walking, jogging, eating, and breathing.
We all have different ways of appreciating travelling and different wishes on how to do so. We also have different ways to see the world and should be free to express how we experience it. However, on our way to you, we all agreed that some things should be and some things should not. That the world we live in is worth combining small and big actions for sustainability.
Ready for the first stage, night train from Bergen to Oslo.
“I cho cho choose the (electric) train”. “Train should be the cheapest option”. “Be the change you want to make”. We carried these sentences in our minds, but also on our backpacks, hoping that others would see them and carry them to others in return. Nonetheless, this journey would not have been possible if we had had to pay for everything. Slow travel comes with costs, and the costs are high. We became increasingly aware of this, train after train, and day after day. One has to pay to eat, sleep, and travel over several days. Sustainability does not come cheap. However, slow travel also comes with joy. The joy of discovering new places that we would never have thought about going to, the joy of trust in the trains to transport you and the people to help you, the joy of the company along the way. We discussed how people traveled before taking the plane. If everyone were to take the train, does it mean going back in time or making a change for the future?
For us, slow travel meant fully being in the present. While the game we played, “Eyes of the future”, that brought us to you, reminded us to appreciate our hometown, this journey taught us to appreciate and share for a little while what others “have”. Being snow, birds, hills, fields, castles, or even fries; we saw, we heard, we tasted, we reflected, and admired.
Our journey was filled with many human emotions, and of course, stress is one of them. The anxiety of not doing enough or doing too much. Of dealing with time. But we also kept our brains busy with work, readings, writing, and games. This is one thing that trains bring you when travelling from Norway to England: time to do things you might not do otherwise. This experience is accompanied by a strange duality of time. Although we had a schedule to respect, for the conference we participated in and for the trains to catch, the chronology of this experience does not matter. We travelled before meeting you, and when we left you, but it's the overall experience that we will remember, not the time itself.
Finally in Durham.
When we arrived to you Durham, with sunshine on our skin and smiles on our lips, time did not exist anymore. Flowers were blooming, and music was being played, making our entrance grandiose. You probably have your flaws Durham, but you hide them very well. Like many other cities we visited during our journey, you opened your doors and we did not know what was behind. In a way, this is what made us appreciate you so much. We came with a fresh mind and open eyes, and you shared many magical surprises with us through the people who preciously preserve your spirit and keep you alive. As life went on for us too, we had to leave and pursue our journey. It is not with sadness that we left you, but with the feeling of being lucky to have met you.
We are proud of this adventure and it is such a great feeling. Words such as “we need climate action” are important to spread. But it is something else to join words with actions. This experience allowed us to join both of them. However, we are aware of how privileged we are and not naive to the fact that we are just a drop in the ocean. We are not oblivious to the big guy influencing our choices and impacting the life of our planet. We are not ready to compromise our whole well-being either, but it would not change much anyway. Nonetheless, we did ONE action, and we are hungry for more. This is what you brought to us, Durham. A humane way to bring ourselves to you. A will to act in a similar way to bring ourselves to other places in the world. A reminder that the world does not start or end with us.
'Eyes of the future'
The international Sustainability Game, 'Eyes of the future', is a competition developed by the University of Utrecht that challenges students to develop innovative solutions to global sustainability challenges. The game encourages players to envision a sustainable future while deepening their understanding of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
