I love Iranian breakfasts – fresh bread, eggs, goats or sheep cheese, creamy butter, village jam and honey with black tea. Nice.

Sadly, in hotels at least, they have gone for per-packed portion controlled servings in plastic with a boiled egg. The whole lot is cling-filmed to the plate for the purposes of hygiene apparently. I know…I know…

For the purpose of consumer research I tried one. The butter was weird and slick, the cheese was like dairy lee, the honey was just syrup water and the jam a bright red blob of jelly that tasted of no fruit at all. Grim, worse than tasteless and resulting in a plateful of everlasting trash.

What to do for breakfast instead?

Ask to have the bread and egg separate and unattached to the plate.Explain that clingfilm and plastic are carcinogens. Ask for some cucumber or fruit instead of poison wrapped spreads. You are missing nothing by refusing this rubbish and helping to endorse the use of local products which are far superior

For more posts on plastic in Iran read up here

Find lots more pictures of Iranian plastic pollution here at
Planet Trash and Flickr  Plastic Is Rubbish

Want to travel plastic free – check out the plastic free backpack

Plastic rubbish in India is a real problem. Plastic lasts for centuries, doesn’t rot and is inedible. Burning it at best smells bad and adds to the green house effect, at worst is lethal. In short plastic cannot be easily disposed of. Plastic waste requires special disposal facilities which much of India does not have. A lot of plastic trash ends up dumped.

Steralised Water Machines

So it is really good to see water bottle refill kiosks appearing at train and bus stations. As they sound, they refill your bottle with cool, safe water for a few rupees.

Water Refill Places

Here is some specific information for towns I have visited. Some of it is rather old now and may be out of date.

Please add any refill schemes you know of in the comments below.

 Arambol

Go to Double Dutch Restaurant and get your water bottle refilled with safe, clean filtered water for a fraction of the cost –  saving money and the environment.

Kaza

The good folk atecosphere Kaza will  refill your water bottle with steralised water for free though they would like you to leave a donation.

Leh

Boiled, filtered water refills can be got from the Woman’s Alliance, Ladakh Ecological Development Group LEDeG, Dzomsa and some other places. You can pick up a map from LEDeG showing all of them or download it here.

Dzomsa. This shop refills your water bottle with boiled filtered water. They have shops on Old Fort Road and Main Street and maybe one more (though they are not all open out of season).

Rajasthan Jhodpur

Refill your water bottle from the water cooler in the square by the clock tower. It tastes good, is indeed cool and there is no charge. We treated ours with our steripen water treatment system – see the end of the post for details.

Udaipur

Has refill kiosks at the train and bus station.

Varanasi 

There is a water refill kiosk at the Train station. In the streets, shops will refill your bottle from water dispensers. Tastes fine but those of you with suspicious natures might want to steripen it too.

MORE

No refill place? Sterilise your own water.

When travelling in far flung places we will not buy water in plastic bottles. NO its just wrong. Instead we sterilize our own using a Steripen. The easiest way to make safe pleasant tasting water.

EVEN More

For other water refill points the world over check our big list
More plastic-free travel posts? Try the index
And of course….. how to back pack plastic free

For those of you planning to go overland through Russia this year, here are some plastic free tips. If you are going by train you will of course be travelling on what is known as  the trans Siberian. This is not, as I first thought, the name of  a particular type of train like the Orient Express. It refers to a net work of railway lines traversed by a multitude of trains. These trains are of differing ages, standards and facilities which is reflected in the price of the journey. We traveled on a number of different trains but always the cheapest which means grottiest and always  top bunk Koupe class.

Koupe class means there are four bunks  to a cabin. They are fixed in place so you can lie on your bunk at any time. The top bunk is cheaper than the bottom because the views out are limited. And you might find yourself perched up there quite a lot of the time. In most of our trains the bottom folk wanted to stretch out most of the time which meant we were pretty much consigned to sitting on our bed or spending time in the restaurant car.

I have heard the better class of trains have showers – none of ours did. On our trains there were two toilets per coach (and this goes for first class too), which were extremely old, battered and ugly but clean enough. That’s on a not- too- picky scale. In the toilet cubicle was a small sink with no plug.

The food in the restaurant car looked and smelt appalling. It was served wherever possible using disposable plastic products,  and all the condiments came in plastic sachets. Even the first class tour group got their prison slop doled out in plastic bowls. They were not best pleased. Some tickets include food which means your meals are sent out to you from the restaurant car in polystyrene boxes. From what we saw going out in those clam shells I would not recommend this option.

All drinks came in plastic bottles except beer which came in glass and  juice in tetra paks. Hot water was available in unlimited quantities from the boiler at the end of each carriage. Glass cups with handles were available from the stewardess for making drinks in. They may also  sell you tea bags and  sachets of coffee and powdered milk. everything

The amount of waste each train produced was frightening. At certain stops they would empty the train of sackfulls of garbage and guess what? Yup all plastic. They had to have a mini tractor to tow it off down the platform.

So what can be done to make this train ride as plastic free as possible.

Plastic Free Journey

Firstly, and I would recommend this for all train users not just the plastic free kind, don’t eat in the restaurant. Thankfully the train does stop some times for as long as 45 minutes and at each stop there are opportunities for stocking up. Often, though not always, there will be an army of women waiting to sell you home cooked things ranging from the humble boiled egg to the extremely strange deep-fried, meat-filled doughnut. For these you will need some kind of moisture proof bag so come prepared with your own supply of bio bags (corn starch bags – made from vegetables they are fully compostable.

Most station do have shops but the food they sell is pretty much all plastic packed. You can buy the spreadable cheese triangles wrapped in foil and packed in cardboard  boxes.  Occasionally there will be unwrapped bread and there is usually a poor selection of expensive fruit.

For drinks we mainly made do with green tea made with hot water from the boiler or cold water made with cooled down hot water from the boiler.

We bought some food on board with us though not nearly enough. Next time I do this I will load up with fruit.

Plastic we used on board

Several large Coks.

To sit in the restaurant car we had to buy something. Though it would have been culturally acceptable, it was physically impossible for us to start drinking beer in the early morning, so  we bought juice. It came in a plastic lined cardboard carton and was called Cok. How my fellow travellers laughed.

“Give me  large Cok” they would ask smothering giggles.

“Do you want some Cok?” they would offer chortling away.

“I love Cok”, was a side splitter every time.

Yes they were boys.

When we tired of Cok (fenur fenur)  we would occasionally have beer with plastic lined caps

3 tins of olives.

Two paper wrapped packets of crackers though almost certainly plastic lined paper.

One packet of green tea with plastic wrapper.

Want to find more travel related plastic free tips? Check out the travel category

Related articles

• Clever Baggers (plasticisrubbish.wordpress.com)

Being plastic free in central Tallinn is hard work because unlike other European towns there are no small shops selling tasty food stuff. In amongst the endless amber emporiums, (big in the Baltic is amber), we found one very expensive deli and one bakery. Everything else comes from the supermarkets.

As we were self catering we spent some time in them and they can be categorized s follows:

A normal one called Rimi in the town center

The posh Viru Keokus Supermarket in the basement of this very plush shopping arcade built by the bus station

Eastern block throwback – a strange smelling, grubby place near the No 4 tram stop – I would not recommend it.

All of the supermarkets were far too fond of plastic but even so there were some good things to be found.

In Rimi in central Tallin Estonia you can buy biodegradable corn starch bags essentail for plastic free shopping. You can also buy quite a good range of loose fruit and veg but you need to use your own bags. They do have some loose meat and fish but you will find better unwrapped selection over at Viru Keokus Supermarket.

Viru Keokus Supermarket also did unwrapped smoked salmon, fish and meat, loose cakes and buns, nuts and dried fruit. The apricots were a rather raddled and chewy but they kept us going through the long bus journey to Moscow.

The best place to shop plastic free is the market opposite the Tallin school of services which doubles as a hostel in Summer. Catch the No. 4 tram to Tallinn School of Service Hostel Lastekodu Street 13, Tallinn, Estonia . It’s a short journey – a few stops -5 to 10 minutes max. Here you wil find a rather institutional hostel and the central market which sells everything your greedy little heart could desire, mostly unwrapped and much cheaper then the superstores.

For all the above you need to take your own bio bags which you will have bought in Rima.

You can find more foreign plastic free places here…..