Last Carriage

With a southern-hemisphere summer well and truely in motion, there have been a number of articles in the papers about Australia. Starting with The Guardian, there's a look at Bruny Island, just off the south-eastern coast of Tasmania, along with some photos.

The Dominion Post visits Adelaide, possibly Australia's most underrated city. The Post also goes houseboating on the Murray River, which is sadly still experiencing the effects of a severe drought.

From The Telegraph, we have possibly the least imaginative trip possible, a surfing holiday on Bondi Beach; but then it recovers with a couple of stories on South Australia's Flinders Ranges, and New South Wales' southern coast.

Finally, the NZ Herald has a glimpse at a different side of Sydney.

With reports that Ryanair is to, once again, increase their checked baggage levy, I have to now ask the question - is it really worth the hassle flying a budget airline? How many passengers can really travel with only cabin luggage? And do you really want to be flying aboard an airline where you're fighting to get past everyone else's baggage?

It's rare now to see a day pass without yet another story-from-hell about a budget airline. In recent days, there has been talk on the radio in Australia that the new entrant to the skies here, Tiger Airways, does not allow passengers to consume their own food on-board, forcing them to buy their on-board meals, if they wish to eat. Perhaps not an issue on a short-hop Melbourne to Sydney flight, but on a long flight to Perth, you could be quite hungry if you don't want to be stuck paying through the nose for their meals.

There has been more trouble with Tiger, with reports of passengers being stranded in Melbourne when Tiger cancelled its Sunday flight to Mackay, telling them they'd have to wait until the following Friday.

Today, there's a report of budget airline Pacific Blue hunting down its passengers who were last aboard, to remove them from the flight, due to understaffing.

Add to this the fact that many budget airlines use inconvenient airports - for example, in Melbourne, a number of Jetstar flights leave from Avalon Airport, which is even more difficult to get to than Melbourne's already badly accessible Tullamarine Airport - and in many cases, costs of getting from the airport to your final destination may well exceed what you paid for the flight. Not to mention the time wasted getting there.

I tend to stick to flying with Qantas, in Australia. Yes, it generally costs a bit more, but they still do have good deals advertised on their website - and I can then be reasonably confident that if they cancel my flight, I'll be booked onto a replacement flight quite quickly.

Anyone who has flown a long-haul flight knows just how bad jet-lag can be. Having done an Australia to Europe crossing (and back) every year from 1999 until 2005, I've had more than my fair share of a week of waking up at 1am, absolutely unable to sleep, and then collapsing the following day around 2pm.

The good news is that researchers have found one of the contributing factors to post-flight fatigue is swollen ankles and that by wearing tights could go some way to alleviating the problem.

Unfortunately, this still won't help with the major time shifts that your body is subjected to when dragged halfway across the planet in such short time, so what other options are available?

My personal jet-lag routine is to dose-up on caffeine when I arrive at my destination, spend as much time outside in sunlight as I can, and try to fight off the urge to sleep in the late afternoon. Sleeping tablets, or those herbal tablets that result in drowsiness can help with lying awake in the middle of the night, but can also result in grogginess the next morning.

Another option is melatonin tablets. I tried these once, and they seemed to help, but there are questions over certain adverse health affects that they might have, and furthermore, they're illegal in some countries.

What do you do to combat jet-lag?

Travelodge is building a hotel in West London made from 86 modified shipping containers. When completed in June, it is expected that rooms in the hotel will cost around €25 per night, less than a third of the cost of the nearest Travelodge in Slough, and cheaper than the nearest youth hostel.

The rooms are pre-fabbed in China, shipped out to the UK, where they are installed and then will be decorated. It is intended that the rooms are recyclable and although the words eco-friendly have been touted in relation to this building, I have to wonder what the insulation is going to be like. How are shipping containers going to deal with an unusually hot summer?

With a European winter now in full swing, the newspapers are full of European alpine ideas. Firstly, we have the New York Times with an article on night skiing in St Moritz - if you can afford to stay there, that is. Fortunately, it's not the only resort they list.

Still on Switzerland, the Independent goes ballooning in Château d'Oex, but at €227 for an hour's flight, it makes the aforementioned accomodation in St Moritz look like a night in a run-down motel.

The Independent also has a look at skiing in some of the lesser known areas of Austria's Tyrol region; and while you're there, why not have a weekend in Innsbruck?

With oil prices now trading at US$114 per barrel, Qantas has now increased its fuel surcharge to $210 on flights to Europe, and to $165 to Africa and the Americas, which means higher airfares for anyone travelling to or from Australia.

The really interesting aspect to all this, however, is that oil prices decreased for a short period, at the beginning of 2007; where was the corresponding decrease to Qantas' fuel surcharge?

I was intrigued to read this story from a New Zealand newspaper, today, about a Scottish man who is trying to visit every place in the world with the word "mullet" in its name (eg, Mullet Creek, Australia), and it reminded me of an idea I'd had a couple of months back.

There's plenty of people out there undertaking similar odd travel adventures; from the fascinating - Ed Gillespie's Slow Travel, an attempt to travel around the entire globe without flying; to the pointlessly dull - Winter's mission to visit every Starbucks on the planet.

One that I particularly like is the Degree Confluence Project, a project whose goal is to "visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world" (obviously not by the same people). What I like most about it is being able to pick a random location in a country, to see what the terrain looks like.

My idea was far less interesting; it's a slight play on the typical graduate student's first trip to Europe, where they visit every capital city that they can fit in within two weeks, and then fly back home. Obviously this has been done ad-nauseum, and isn't particularly interesting. Rather, as a resident of Australia's second largest city, I'd like to visit every one of Europe's second cities (preferably over a long period of time, so that I actually come away with memories of the town, rather than just the train ride in). It would certainly produce a unique set of towns to visit; Antwerp, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Århus, Bergen, Gothenburg, Lyon, Geneva, Milan, Brno, Łódź and Debrecen, to name just a few of many.

I'd be interested to hear about other people's ideas for travel themes.