Entries by Paul

I've just noticed on the Scanrail website that their railpass, which covered rail travel in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, is no longer available; sales of this pass ceased on December 31st, 2007.

This is a shame, because it was possible to purchase the Scanrail pass even after a traveller had arrived in Europe, although with a few restrictions. The only remaining equivalent is the Eurail Scandinavia Pass, which is not available to European residents, and cannot be purchased by travellers already in Europe.

The Northern Territory News reports today that a new luxury passenger service is planned for The Ghan, the famous inland Australia railway line that runs from Adelaide to Darwin.

Prices have not yet been announced, but the article mentions that GSR, the operators of the Ghan, had been studying a similar service that operates in South Africa for $1000 per night. According to GSR's website, they expect the service to begin in late 2008.

Of course, for those of us who can't afford to pay four figures for every night of a trip, there are still the standard classes of travel on the Ghan; it's worth noting on that table that there are significant discounts for members of YHA Australia.

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.

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.