Posts Tagged ‘trains’

Leaving Cambodia

So after we finished seeing temples in Cambodia, we didn’t want to deal with another border like the last one we dealt with.  So we flew to Vietnam, the land of delicious food and a really long coastline!  In fact, it was so long that we spent about half our time travelling!

We ended up not being so happy about this, but c’est la vie.  We used a number of different modes of transportation – trains, planes AND automobiles!  Our favorite was the train, where we took a first class sleeper car from Da Nang to Hanoi.  There were four people in the cabin and nice comfy beds to sleep in, along with air conditioning (though the weather was pretty mild anyway).  We’ve found that trains gently rock you to sleep whereas planes and cars don’t have nearly the same relaxing feel to them.

Our least favorite mode of transportation was the bus.  We took two overnight buses in Vietnam, and one was definitely better than the other but they are both suboptimal when it comes to rest quality.

Sleeper Bus Vietnam Style

At first it seems really cool!  Everyone (almost) gets their own bed, separated from the others, and there’s a bathroom on board.  But the truth comes a little later when the reality of Vietnamese roads sets in – the driver is going crazily fast, causing you to float out of your bed on occasion, and he doesn’t hesitate to use his really loud horn (at all hours of the night) to warn other drivers of the speeding bullet hurtling down the road at completely unsafe speeds.

Then you find that your second overnight bus has no bathroom and that you are shoved into a communal platform-bed with 4 other travellers in the back of the bus where it’s even more bumpy.  At that point you become convinced that the train is worth the extra cost!

The plane was pretty much as expected.  It was convenient, reasonably comfortable, and most importantly it was fast!  The only downside is that airports tend to be really far from the downtown areas of town.  But if you have the cash, this is the way to go!

Our plan to leave Budapest was a good one — take the overnight train to Belgrade (Serbia) and then take the train the next day to Sofia, in Bulgaria. This would be a long, but not ridiculous train journey that took us most of the way down through Eastern europe and get us to a place where the travel time to Istanbul would be reasonably short. It didn’t turn out that way — in a thankfully rare instance where the Eurail pass failed us — because it turns out that Eurail “Global” passes (the ones with travel through the entire Eurail network) were not valid in Serbia! This is written in fine print in a few places but was not noted on our map or on our ticket. Thankfully we discovered this fact before we boarded the sleeper train (we would probably have been kicked off at the Serbian border) and made a hasty decision to reroute through Bucharest, in Romania. That way we’d be able to arrive the same day as before and also to use up the same number of days on our Eurail pass.

Unfortunately that also meant that we’d be on the train for nearly 24 hours! We boarded the sleeper train in Budapest and found that we had much more friendly cabin-partners who spoke English. They also didn’t mind leaving the beds out the whole time so we each had our own little space the whole sleeper train. Hazel and I both enjoy sleeper trains; the swaying motion of the train car is much more relaxing than an automobile or airplane. The motion on a train tends to rock you to sleep instead of jolting you awake. Another benefit – free coffee! What could be bettter! And Romanian scenery is really beautiful so we were entertained the whole time.

We only had about an hour once we arrived in Bucharest, unfortunately, because it turned out not to be enough time to prepare for our trip on to Sofia. First, the ATM wouldn’t dispense money — I guess Romania is a risky area for Visa and so they just block any withdrawals. We only tried to take out a small amount to buy lunch with, but they wouldn’t have it. On top of that, the places wouldn’t take Euros and would only accept credit cards with a PIN! So we were unable to buy any food for lunch or dinner which would pass on the coming train ride.

That ride was the worst train on our entire Eurail trip! It was a cabin which had 4 people on either side all crammed together. Combine that with no showers for a day and 100 degree weather, and you have the makings for a really horrible ride. We also only had one sausage (luckily we bought a big enough one to last us the day), one loaf of bread, and half a big bottle of water to last us. The water was the first to go. I think that the heat really increased our need for water because we normally wouldn’t drink that much all at once; we felt pretty parched by the end of the journey. Then the bread went and I ate the rest of the sausage and then we were out. A quick glance at our watches told us we still had a few hours left on the train! We managed, but the only nice parts about the end of the ride were that all of our cabin-partners left us and that the temperature got a lot nicer. I don’t know if we would have survived otherwise!

Our troubles were not quite at an end, though, because we arrived in Sofia after dark. Hazel and I hate to arrive anywhere after dark with all our stuff and this was one of the worst places we’ve done that, because the train terminal was empty and we had to walk to the bus terminal a few hundred yards down the road to catch a taxi to our hostel. Of course it was raining and the taxi driver got the wrong name from the hostess at the taxi rank. So we were taken to a different hostel than we had booked! After the taxi driver tried to get the directions to the other hostel from a few hookers on the corner near the first hostel, we wrote down the address and finally convinced the driver to use his GPS to take us to the other hostel. So we arrived — finally — and crashed in our super nice room at the hostel, wiped out but safe and sound.

Smurf!

We decided to break up our train journey from Prague to Slovenia with a stop in Vienna.  Now this is a city that you hear a lot about, so we thought we shouldn’t miss it.  With the way the trains were scheduled we had just about a four hour stop.  We did our usual routine of finding a map and heading for the sights.  Fortunately, our Eurail pass was valid on the city train, so we were able to easily get into town from the train station.  As usual, click any of these pictures to see the gallery.

First up, the cathedral

The weather was miserable.  Cold, windy, and little drops of rain now and then.  Even the carriage horses needed coats.

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Many of you are probably thinking: Why haven’t they gone up to see the castle yet!  It’s so spectacular!  I don’t know, but we never did end up going to see the castle.  We heard rumors of another sight not far from Prague that sounded so much more unique and exciting to me that we went there instead!  It was the Sedlec Ossuary, a church whose cellar is completely full of (and decorated with) human bones!  This is not the type of thing that even exists in the US so we jumped at the chance to go.  It took a two hour train ride to get to the town, a suburb of the city of Kutna Hora.

Sedlec Ossuary

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We left Berlin heading for Prague, but since it was a pretty long train journey we decided to make a stop in Dresden, in the south of Germany, to break things up a little. We were supposed to have a few hours to walk around, but because we misread the train schedule we ended up only having about an hour and a half.

Dresden has a fairly compact center, so we were able to walk from the train station and just spend some time wandering around. There are many really beautiful buildings to look at. We first walked through a kind of shopping mall area, and then arrived at the older part of town.

Since we didn’t have time to investigate much I’ll just post some of the pictures we took and leave you with the same kind of general impression that we got. Click any of the photos below to see our whole gallery.  It looks like it would be a good place for a holiday…

Shopping mall area

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After lounging around in the Copenhagen first class lounge it was finally time to go to Sweden. The train ride was uneventful, but we could notice a change already – there was no free chocolate on the Swedish trains! I suppose this was offset, though, by the free internet access provided to first class customers.

We arrived in Stockholm and tried to find our hostel, called Interhostel. A few things got in our way, though; first thing was that we weren’t able to find the street we needed when we left the station! It turned out that we got off at the wrong level of the station. This taught us our first lesson about Stockholm: the bridges are very important! Eventually we found our way to the side of the station and looked down on a cross street 100 feet below, which turned out to be the one we wanted. Anyway, we took this road for a while (in fact until it changed names) but the next turn was nowhere to be found! We were beginning to get a little weary at this point, but we pressed on along the new road and found our turn after two more blocks. We were relieved at this point because the hostel was less than a block away.

Interhostel was a pretty nice place. The beds were comfortable and spacious, the hostel was cheap, and our room was nearly empty the whole time we were there. Of course in Scandinavia the norm is to charge travelers for bed linens (we used our sleep sacks), which was a little unusual to us, but on the whole we approved.

Our Bunk At Interhostel

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This was a really exciting time for us, as we were about to embark on a type of journey that neither of us had experienced before: a sleeper train. With our Eurail ticket, the train fare was included but unfortunately not the bed reservation, which can be very expensive! Our ticket, being first class, allowed us to get 1st class beds – one bunk each in a 2 bunk room – but there were two reasons we decided not to get that. First, those beds cost over 100 euros EACH! Of course we were not going to purchase those tickets at that price. Second, we could not have reserved beds in the same room! They were single-sex only. These two things completely convinced us to downgrade to a 2nd class sleeper car which cost 26 euros each and was 2 bunks in the same room with 6 bunks total. That’s right, we were able to book bunks together in 2nd class. How strange!

Sleeper Car

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Because of the stress we encountered upon entering Europe, we decided to remedy our poor planning as soon as possible and reserve 1 week or more of our upcoming accomodation and transportation.  Of course, nothing is that simple – our hotel, being the cheapest in Luxembourg, did not have internet available (but, interestingly, it did have an ashtray in the shared bathroom), so we went on a quest to find some cheap or free wifi in town.  This also afforded us a chance to sightsee along the way into town!

Valley and Bridge

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