Last Carriage

Anyone who's had to fly this Christmas knows how bad the experience can be. If the trip out to the airport, which by necessity is incredibly inconveniently located, isn't bad enough, then there's the queues, delays and cancellations once there. And after that, the flight - stuck in a seat with no leg room, for hours.

Fortunately, just in time for the new year, The Guardian has provided a list of ten non-flying trips. Of course, you have to be in Europe, first...

When arriving in a new city, the sheer volume of accomodation options can be daunting. Where's the best place to stay? Is it safe? Is it clean? Is it noisy? And then there's the all important question: how much does it cost? Here's a quick guide to choosing a hostel to help you along.

1. Location. In order to reduce costs, many hostels are located on the outskirts of towns, where land is cheaper. Before deciding on a hostel, it's worth determining how difficult it is going to be for you to get from the hostel to the areas that you're most interested in seeing. In big cities, this is less likely to be a problem, as they will usually have frequent public transport. On the other hand, if you're trying to save money, the added expense of a daily transport ticket may just be the difference in price between an inconvenient outer-suburbs hostel, and a well located inner city place.


2. Facilities. Travel isn't just about the places you go, it's about the people that you meet. A hostel with a good social area, where you can relax, read, chat, perhaps play billiards or darts is going to be much more fun than a hostel where the only place you can kick-back is in your dorm-room, with the smell of your room-mates' dirty towels to accompany you. A kitchen where you can prepare your own meals will go some way to saving you money, and you'll stay healthy, too.


3. Meals. Breakfast at a cafe in Melbourne or Sydney will set you back at least AU$10-$12 these days, and in Europe it could easily double that. Staying in hostels that include breakfast in the price of overnight stays can save you a fortune over a number of weeks. Be aware, however, that standards of breakfast vary from country to country; I've found breakfasts in Swiss, British and Scandinavian hostels to be excellent - a large variety of food to choose from, and plenty to eat. On the other hand, in almost every Italian hostel that I've been to, breakfast has been nothing short of abysmal - little more than a bread roll and a cup of cocoa. Also look out for hostels who provide lunches and dinner - another great way to save money, get a good meal and be able to socialise with your fellow travellers.


4. Noise. Nothing makes your stay worse than a hostel where you can't get any sleep. Look out for those located next to busy roads; in some countries - and here, Germany springs very prominently to mind - the traffic never seems to stop. Your fellow hostellers might be part of the problem, too. A hostel full of schoolgroups can be a nightmare, so watch out for these, especially if you're staying in one of the Hostelling International hostels, as they tend to attract many schools at certain times of year. On the other hand, many low-cost backpacker places will attract the party crowd, and that can be a nightmare scenario too.


5. Cost. The Hostelling International hostels tend to be at the upper end of the price scale, for dorm-style hotels, whereas many of the independent backpacker places can be cheaper. Nevertheless, you tend to get what you pay for, in terms of cleanliness, as the HI hostels are generally spotless and well kept.


6. Security. It's hard to tell in advance, unless you've got a good guidebook on hand or have access to the internet while you're travelling, but try to stay in a hostel that provides secure lockers. While you shouldn't ever leave anything valuable in your luggage, it does give you that extra peace-of-mind while you're out for the day, or while you're sleeping, that your possessions won't simply disappear, causing you much inconvenience. Rooms that can be locked from the inside are a distinct advantage, too, especially if the hostel has a free-for-all policy on visitors.

Travel through much of Europe is about to become considerably easier: in three days' time, on December 21st, nine more states will be added to Europe's Schengen Zone, allowing travel without passport checks across an area that stretches from Portugal in the west to Hungary in the east.

Most of the new countries to the treaty are former communist states; Slovenia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Lativa and Estonia. The other new addition is Malta, which will now become the frontier border for illegal immigration from northern Africa.

The UK and Ireland are still hold-outs, having not joined Schengen at all, and while Switzerland and Liechtenstein have joined, they haven't yet implemented the treaty.

The upshot of this is that travellers will no longer have to put up with regular, and often gruff, passport checks as they travel from Germany into Poland or the Czech Republic, or Austria into Slovakia or Hungary. On the downside, passport checks on the eastern borders will probably get worse.

I recall on one trip from Bosnia into Croatia by bus, my passport was checked three times in the space of about 30 minutes; first officers came through, and inspected passports; then another person came through and collected all of the passports and took them into a building, where they were stamped - and then returned, rather haphazardly, by being given to a passenger to hand out. This was followed by more officers coming through to check them again - presumably Croatian police, this time. Annoying, but not too bad, in the general scheme of things. What's been your worst border-control experience?

As of December 9th, it's now much easier to cross Switzerland from north to south, with the opening of a new high speed rail link, in a tunnel through the Alps. Known as the Lötschberg tunnel, it runs from Frutigen to Raron, and will shave off around 30 minutes on trips from Bern to Brig.

International travel will also improve, with six daily trips from Bern/Basel to Milan starting in 2008.

Since December 7th, the French rail corporation SNCF has been trialling wifi internet access on its TGZ Est services (Paris to Strasbourg), and if successful, this will be extended to all SNCF trains (with estimates of all TGV lines having access by 2010).

I can't imagine too many backpackers would want to carry their laptop with them (I know that I hate dragging mine around with me), but as small devices like PDAs and mobile phones with wifi access become more common, this could reduce the need for travellers to seek out dodgy internet cafes to find accomodation and communicate with home cheaply.

Continuing our look at free online language courses, this week we're going to look at Spanish, which is spoken not only in Spain, but across vast tracts of Central and South America. The total number of speakers worldwide is estimated to be between 400-500 million.

There's plenty of free Spanish courses available on the web, but unfortunately, few of them really make the cut. Most of what I could find were riddled with bad web design, very little content, and extremely hard to follow.

Possibly the best grammar lessons to be found were at 123teachme.com - beginner and intermediate, and MIT has some very comprehensive courses in their OpenCourseware section: Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Spanish 3 and Spanish 4.

Finally, top marks again to the BBC for their multimedia course, one of the better interactive courses available.

It's far from independent travel, but North Korea has become just a little bit more accessible, with the opening of the southern city of Kaesong to very tightly managed tour groups.

Travels on these tours can expect a heavily organised trip, with no ability to wander off and look around for themselves.

Ever since the September 11 attacks, governments around the world have been slowly making it more and more difficult for travellers to enter their countries. We've previously detailed how the United States and Japan have been treating travellers as if they were criminals, by fingerprinting them upon entry.

Now it's the United Kingdom's turn - everyone who enters the UK for longer than six months will require a biometric visa, which will include their fingerprints. Once again the question must be asked: how does this prevent terror attacks?

Anyone heading to Malta or Cyprus over the new year break should be planning ahead, as on January 1st, 2008, these two countries will be dropping their local currency (the pound and the lira, respectively) and will replace them with the euro.

This will bring the number of countries in the euro zone to fifteen, and will make life much easier for travellers, removing the need to exchange currencies upon entry from other eurozone countries.

Of course, if their experience of the euro switchover is anything like mine was, living in Amsterdam at the time of the 2002 changeover, then prices will rise dramatically.

As part of our series of online language courses, this week, we're looking at French.

Spoken by anywhere from 100 million to 500 million people (estimates vary) worldwide, knowledge of French is invaluable to a traveler. In Europe, it is spoken in France (obviously), as well as Luxembourg, and parts of Belgium and Switzerland. It is also spoken in Canada, parts of Central and South America, huge swathes of Africa, and parts of the South Pacific.

• BBC Languages - Learn French: some excellent audio-visual material, with a focus on conversational French. There's little grammar instruction, although a later course provides some quiz material on it.


• Jacques Leons' French Language Course: a heavily grammar-based course, with a bit of audio. Makes a good complement for the above BBC course.


• Wikibooks' French Course: extensive lessons, with a good range of vocabulary presented. Also has a separate guide detailing grammar.


• The French Tutorial: Another heavily grammar based course, this tutorial is very extensive, but suffers from having every individual section on a separate web page, making it rather cumbersome to use.

Next week: Spanish

It's so rare to see an article on the tiny European state of Liechtenstein that I'll forgive the fact that it's mostly about something as dull as winetasting.

Liechtenstein is minute. You could drive in from one side of it and out the other in about ten minutes; you could pass it on the freeway that makes up its entire western border in just twenty minutes, without even knowing that it was there.

Vaduz, the capital city - perhaps town would be a better word for it - has no railway station of its own, the closest being in Schaan, to the north; but given the size of the country, this means it's only about three kilometres away.

Trains run only a few times daily, between Buchs in Switzerland (3 minutes) and Feldkirch in Austria (18 minutes).

I wish I'd known about this, when I was last in Berlin: Alternative Berlin, a series of tours of that give visitors a taste of everyday Berlin, rather than just sights from a guidebook - everything from graffiti to driving Soviet style tanks. The main tour leaves from Alexanderplatz every day at 11am, and they recommend that you have a daily public transport ticket.

Thanks Drew!