countries

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?

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!

Continuing on from the series we started last week on online language courses, this week we'll be looking at German.

For European travellers, German is probably the second-most useful language one could learn, after English. It's spoken by approximately 100 million native speakers worldwide, and is spoken in Germany, Austria, a large part of Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, parts of Belgium, and pockets of Denmark, Poland, Italy and Hungary. It's also well known as a second language in eastern Europe, particularly by older people.

• Deutsch - warum nicht. Germany's international radio broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, has been broadcasting this course to the world on shortwave radio for years. It's now available for free as a podcast, with accompanying literature and is a great way to learn the language if you don't have time to undertake a univesity course.


• BBC Language: German. The BBC's online course is fairly basic, concentrating mostly on learning to deal with common situations like meeting people and buying food. I'd recommend it for anyone who needs to quickly pick up a few phrases before they jet off.


• Exeter University Beginner's German. A fairly comprehensive course, with a focus on picking up a good vocabulary.


• Advanced Learning's German for Beginners. Covers quite a bit of ground, but the website design makes it hard to learn.


• Babelnation's German for Beginners. Seems quite comprehensive, but the layout makes it difficult to follow.

Next week: French

I've previously noted that the United States is treating tourists as if they were criminals, and now it appears that this practice is now spreading further, with Japan set to require foreign tourists to be fingerprinted and photographed upon entry.

While it is hard to see how this will help one iota to reduce terrorism (especially given that the only terrorist attacks upon Japan have come from within), it's clear that such measures result in a drop in tourist numbers, as travellers find there are more convenient places to enjoy.

One of the hardest aspects to travel is having to negotiate your way around countries where you don't speak the language. While knowledge of English is becoming very widespread, you'll get a much better reaction from locals if you try to learn a bit of the local language before you go and are willing to try it out.

Of course, you don't always have the time to attend a face-to-face course before you leave; preparing for your trip is going to be difficult enough as it is. Fortunately, the internet has come to our rescue - there's plenty of online courses for many languages out there, it's just a matter of finding them.

This is the first article in a new weekly series, looking at what's available. This week, we'll begin with Swedish, purely for the reason that it's a favourite of mine.

Swedish is spoken by 9.3 million people, predominantly in Sweden, but also in Finland (on the west-coast and the Åland islands). It's a northern Germanic language, and is very closely related to Danish and Norwegian (and is considered to be mutally intelligible with these two languages) - and more distantly, is related to German, Dutch and English.

• Björn Engdahl's Swedish Course is a web-veteran; it's been around for a very long time. It's highly grammar oriented, although each section has vocabulary table at the beginning, which can help you pick up some handy phrases. One nice feature is that many of the chapters are accompanied by audio files, so you can get a good handle on pronunciation.


• Aaron Rubin's "A Swedish Language Course" is another long-time web survivor. There's no audio, and it's not as in-depth as Björn Engdahl's course, but it might be easier for beginners to get their teeth into.


• Introduction to Swedish, from the Stockholm School of Economics, starts off by getting the reader familiar with a number of common phrases, and then launches into the grammar lessons. It makes good use of audio, with recordings not only of single words, but full sentences, which is very handy. Strangely, Chapter 8 is missing.
  

Next week: German

After reading this article, which describes an itinerary that will get you from London to Marseilles in six hours, with the newly opened UK high-speed leg of the Eurostar, it made me wonder just where you can get to within six hours, without needing to fly.

Virtually all of Belgium is now within easy reach, taking in the very popular Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, and of course, Brussels.

London to Amsterdam comes in at five hours and 34 minutes, with a change to an Intercity train at Brussels. Theoretically, the Thalys train on the Brussels to Amsterdam leg should be a little faster than the Intercity service, given it has fewer stops, but it's probably not worth the extra fare.

London to Frankfurt only just overshoots the mark, coming in at six hours and seven minutes, but just once a day: the 14:32 service, changing at Brussels (arrive 17:23. depart 17:59).

Strasbourg comes in at an average of five hours and 45 minutes, with the shortest trip being five hours and thirteen minutes (departs London at 10:30, arrive Paris Nord 13:53 and then stroll across to Paris Est to catch the TGV Est service to Strasbourg at 14:24).

Luxembourg can be reached via either Brussels or Paris, and ranges from five hours 40 minutes to six hours, with ten departures a day.

The area around Cologne, in Germany, is easily reachable in five hours and ten minutes - and two trains a day will get you there in only four hours and 48 minutes, departing London at 6:57 or 10:00 and changing in Brussels).

Lyon, too, with its high speed TGV line, is an easy destination, coming in anywhere between five and six hours, the shortest trip being just four hours and 50 minutes (departing London 11:05).

Sympathy must go to any travellers currently in France or planning to be there in the next day or so, as a strike by rail workers has currently crippled most of the French system.

This has left several lines of the Paris metro not running, and it's estimated that only 90 out of 700 TGV services were still in service. One interesting side-effect of this was the newfound popularity of Paris's free bicycle scheme, in the wake of the strike.

Be warned, however that if you plan to try to avoid the strikes by somehow escaping to Germany, rail workers there are planning to strike on Thursday, also. I would recommend heading for Belgium or Spain, instead...

After ten years of work, London's history St Pancras railway station has been restored to its former glory, and reopened by Queen Elizabeth, in a ceremony on Tuesday.

Passenger services from St Pancras International, which previously went to the rather unimpressive Waterloo International station, will begin on November 14th, to Paris (two hours, fifteen minutes) and Brussels (one hour and 51 minutes).

Pictures from the BBC.

One of the many certainties of travel is that a trip to Rome or Venice will have you negotiating your way through crowds of other travellers, competing with them for accomodation and queueing behind them to enter museums and other historic attractions. This is to be expected, of course, given the world-renowned status of these cities.

After a while, however, the throngs of people wear you down, and the sheer business of tourism takes much of the authenticity away from these cities. Is it possible to see a piece of historic Italy without having to share it with thousands of other alien invaders like yourself?

Perhaps it might be worth putting Genoa on your itinerary, and bypassing the larger towns, as recommended in this article.

Located on the Italian Riveria, not far from the French border, Genoa has a history old city, parts of which are recognised on the UNESCO World Heritage List. With a population of only around 600000, it is not a large city by world standards, and doesn't get anywhere near the amount of tourist traffic seen by its more popular Italian siblings, which makes it ideal for a relaxing trip.

Genoa is served by several InterCity rail routes: Milan (1.5 hours), Turin (1 hour 50 minutes), Florence/Pisa (3:20/2:10), and also by international trains from Nice (3 hours) and Zurich (6.5 hours). Additionally, there are overnight services to Naples and Palermo.

There have been a few articles on destinations in the former Soviet Union, this week. Firstly we have The Age, with a story on Moscow's club scene, which is currently booming; mind you, the price of the recommended hotel at the end of the article isn't exactly geared for the independent traveller.

Next up, the New York Times spends 36 hours in Riga, the capital of Latvia, now proudly out of the Soviet sphere of influence and firmly ensconced in the EU.

Finally, for a really out-of-the-way trip, The Guardian recommends visiting Almaty, previously the capital of Kazahkstan, now just its largest city.

Getting There

Unless you're planning on cheating by flying, a trip to Riga or Moscow will most likely take you through Poland. Riga is a tad inconvenient to get to by train, requiring a journey from Warsaw to Vilnius, and then another from Vilnius to Riga. Moscow, on the other hand, is quite straightforward - there are a number of direct services from Warsaw, and even one or two from Berlin.

Almaty is another story altogether; a train trip from Moscow takes an excruciating 78 hours, departing at 22:40, arriving at 7:11, three days and eighteen hours later.

Looking for a really different destination for your next trip? Well, maybe Siberia is for you...

Germany is well-known for some of its historic cities that look like they're straight out of a fairytale, and Lübeck, the former capital of the Hanseatic League, certainly falls into this category. If you're a medieval-architecture aficionado, you'll be in your element here, with three areas listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The old city area is situated on an island in the middle of the river Trave. The town is famous for the towers that form one of its two remaining city gates, the Holstentor, located in the west of the city and likely to be the first landmark you see if you arrive by train.

Other famous sights include the Marienkirche, the imposing 14th-century Gothic-style cathedral - the third largest church in Germany; the Heiligen-Geist Hospital, a medieval almshouse; the Burgtor, the Castle Gate to the north of the city; and the 13th century town-hall in the centre of the city.

Lübeck has two youth hostels: the Altstadt hostel, located in the old city, about ten minutes walk from the railway station (84 beds, €17,10 per night), and Vor dem Burgtor, located at the north end of the city (211 beds, €16,00 per night).

There's an hourly Regionalexpress rail service from Hamburg (50 minutes), and also from Kiel (one hour and twelve minutes), so Lübeck can make an ideal day trip from either of those two locations. Lübeck is also served by the rail/ferry service to Copenhagen, Denmark (four hours), via Puttgarden, and hence makes a worthy stop on a trip to Scandinavia.