Riona Walsh recounts her fast-paced trip inter-railing across Europe…
Riona Walsh
Contributing Writer
The Eagles once sang ‘Life in the fast lane, you know it feels good’. If I had to sum up interrailing in ten words for someone, I would refer them to that classic line. Interrailing, for me, was an experience akin to pressing the fast forward button on life. Experiences that should be accumulated over a number of months were packed into the a few weeks. Decisions that should take a few days ponderment at least, were made on the spur of the moment. A thrill of happiness, of discovery, could last for days or could be quickly devoured by a surge of stress. Sights that deserved a day or two of reflection to fully process, were bundled hurriedly into the back of my mind as the next big adventure hurtled towards me. We only had three weeks to traverse Europe. Time was of the essence, and yet, somehow, time meant nothing.
My interrailing adventure was my first big travel experience and it was to blow a big dent into my life savings. Uncharacteristically, it was a journey I decided to take at the very last moment with two close friends of mine, Laura and Rachel. A few days after exams finished, interrailing passes were purchased, emergency passports were obtained by certain individuals, flights were booked from Dublin airport to wherever-was-cheapest, parents were informed that their precious daughters were hitting up Europe, and an old Oxygen tent was located and split between two rucksacks and a flowery suitcase. Nobody was quite sure whether this hastily planned trip would actually come to fruition, until our taxied out onto the runway in Dublin airport. We were going… somewhere…
We had a plan of course. Sort of. We had originally planned to focus on Australia and had looked into motorhome hire Cairns as a cheap way to do it, but then we thought it might be a tight squeeze for three of us, so interrailing it was. We had decided over tea one evening what countries we wanted to visit. We made a rough plan of the route we would take across Europe. We looked up hostels in each prospective destination and booked our beds for the first three nights online. We knew we were starting off in Berlin, Germany, and that we had to reach Marseille, France eventually as we were meeting a friend there. Not a hugely detailed plan. But life, we reasoned, did not always go according to plan. And life in the fast lane most certainly does not.
The first destination of choice was Berlin which we found to be a fantastic experience. We stayed in a large hostel full of young travelers, many of whom may even have been as naive as ourselves. We bonded quickly with two roommates of ours – an English girl traveling across Europe with only her incredible humor for company, and a German cyclist who we took horrible advantage of as a sort of free tour guide. Euro2012 was in full swing, and much to our delight Germany won a match on our first night in the country. Those crazy Germans have no law against the public consumption of alcohol and as they had just won the football, we reasoned that a massive street rave would inevitably ensue. We found an off license, purchased some jagermeister (don’t worry, we have more horrendous clichés where that came from) and excitedly found our way via the U-bahn into ‘Parizaplatz’ as the clock struck midnight. By which time, unfortunately, the fine upstanding citizens of Germany had packed up the party and retreated to bed. All that remained were a few drunken stragglers who took it upon themselves to teach us about the value of communism.
The first thing we did in each city was take a free walking tour with Sandelmans which I would recommend to any non-hungover traveler in any large European city. The guides are paid by tip only so they make a painfully big effort to put on a good show. Berlin had an incredible amount to offer by way of sites to see. Its history is nothing short of astounding. What really got to me was the closeness of Berlin’s past, it seemed to me that the citizens of Berlin carried the ghosts of the city’s past with them every day.
We also saw the balcony from which Michael Jackson once dangled a baby, which was pretty cool.
After being cultured and visiteing two art galleries and sampling the local cuisine, we got a chance to experience the underground universe that is Berlin’s techno club scene. We were persuaded by some English girls on our last night in Berlin to follow a Swiss boy called Henry to a little known local techno spot. Without dwelling on the point, it was scary. I would take Alchemy any day. We decided it was time to leave Berlin.
Next destination: Prague.
Waiting for us in the lobby of our hostel the next morning were three travelers from New Zealand who actually followed through on our friendly drunken offer of being travel buddies we’d made in the club the night before, despite only having landed in Berlin the day before. Our other friend Becci was leaving us for Munich. But we had somehow picked up three new 24-hour friends. This was the essence of interrailing.
Old Town Prague is very beautiful and its winding cobbled streets beckon irresistibly to be wandered down. Our hostel was quaint and old-worldy, with a rickety wooden stairs and an intricately decorated façade. In it, we met an American girl called Suzannah, who invited us to go on a pub crawl with her. Off we went to discover Prague’s famous beer-culture. Five hours later we returned wobbily to our wobbly bunk beds, having thoroughly experienced American drinking culture.The organised pub-crawls in Prague are nothing short of a tourist trap aimed at our cousins from across the pond. If you want to live any J1 glory days, drinking shooters and playing exceptionally serious games of beer pong, the pub crawls of Prague are for you. If not, steer clear. Having not really had a night sleep so far on our trip, the next day – which involved taking two walking tours and visiting the Museum of Communism – was a bit of a struggle..
Onto Budapest:
Our first night train was terrifying. Exhausted and dehydrated, all we wanted was to collapse into some bed or other. Each carriage on a night train houses six tiny beds – three on each side, one stacked on top of the other, each about 50cm wide. This we could deal with, we were determined to sleep soundly. Unfortunately, the conductor had other plans for us: he took it upon himself to visit us and to warn us in fractured English, of the gypsies who may board the train in the night and come into our carriage to steal our things as we sleep. ‘Will you keep watch for the gypsies sir?’ we asked, as the train creeked out of the station. ‘Yes.’ he replied, ‘But the big strong gypsie, he will watch me, so I can’t help you. These people are professionals’.
Least to say, we did not sleep well that night.
Astoundingly, and yet completely unsurprisingly, we lived to tell the tale and by 8am the next morning we were in Budapest.
Budapest was, for want of a better word, HOT.
Life in the fast lane I can usually deal with. This is because the fast lane tends to have a breeze. In Hungary the temperatures were pushing forty degrees celsius and a cooling wind had never been heard of. It was dead heat and we found ourselves constantly soaked in very un-ladylike sweat. I spent an awful lot of my time in Budapest asleep. I slept in my gloriously air conditioned hostel bed, I slept in the serene, blissful, tranquil, unearthly haven that was the public baths of Budapest (well worth a visit) and I even snuck a quickie nap half way up a large hill to the Royal city of Buda.
One great point about Budapest, though, was the exchange rate. We lived like Kings for the two nights we spent there. Our hostel came in at 7euro per night and was sumptiously luxurious. We dined one evening in a floating restaurant called ‘Spoon’, where a man played a grand piano as we sipped cocktails and ordered such delicacies as chocolate-glazed duck for something like ten euro.
Splash out in Hungary. And drink plenty of water.
Splashing out we had no problem with.
When it came to GETTING out of Budapest, we encountered several issues.
There are two main train stations servicing international routes in and out of the city. These two train stations don’t seem to partake in any communication with each other, and the staff at each station’s information desk seem to enjoy sending pale, haggard looking Irish girls running over and back between the two stations, desperately searching for some form of train to Slovenia. Basically a day of frantically running up and down steps of metro stations, bulldozing through crowded platforms in vain, having our money stolen, buying new suitcases, and weeping as we fed some pigeons, cumulated in the following exchange:
Laura (hysterically): ‘When is the next train out of here?’
Station official: ‘To where?’
Laura: ‘ANYWHERE’
We ended up in Vienna.
This was a large deviation from the plan. We were supposed to be going to Lake Bled, Slovenia, for some watersports and canyoning. Our frius.
But life in the fast lane h,as. However, Becci, our English roommate from Berlin, was currently in Vienna. Traversing countries to meet a girl we only knew for two days may seem a little stalkerish, but we loved Becci, and were desperate for a familiar face. We got to Vienna, we met Becci. We booked into the same hostel as her. We drank absynth and sang a round of ‘soft kitty, warm kitty’. Unfortunately we only had one evening so we walked around the beautiful city center and Rachel somehow managed to sneak into an Opera in Vienna’s world famous opera house
However, Vienna was merely a stopover on the road to Italy, so the next day we motored on. We made our way by bus to Venice only to discover that Italy, it turned out, was experiencing a train strike.
We were stranded in a train station in the City of Love, with Italian tempers running high around us, no food or water, nowhere to stay, and nobody to bring us on a gondola and sing us songs about amoré. Somehow we found a train that did eventually move, but left us with the prospect of arriving into Verona at nearly midnight and trying to find a place to stay. This seemed like a bit of a dodgy plan to us, so I did something I am not proud of: I rang my mummy. Mummy found a hostel in Venice for me and reserved three beds for us. Thanks mummy! Bed for the night obtained, feeling of independence destroyed.
Early the next morning we woke up in a time gone by. Our hostel was an exceptionally beautiful, old Italian house, that must once have belonged to a family of great wealth.Throwing open the casements of my window, I gazed upon the winding cobbled streets of Verona, half expecting to find Romeo gazing back up at me. He was not, but that’s ok, we had a bus to catch anyway…
About three hours later we had reached our penultimate destination; a town called Riva del Garda at the very North of Italy’s Lake Garda. At this point in our journey, we had well and truly worn ourselves out. Hence our first glimpse of people sunning themselves by the lake, excited us enough to revive our weary spirits. Exhaustion had momentarily driven any thoughts of windsurfing, canyoning, cycling and rock climbing from even my overactive mind. Thus, when Laura declared that ‘I’m going to lie by the lake in the sun, and when it gets too hot, I’m going to roll into the lake, and once I’ve cooled down, I’m going to roll back out’, we all accepted this idea as inspired genius.
For our final train journey, we began with the 6AM bus to Verona and thus commenced a day of ferocious traveling. After 15 hours of travel time, (The only saving grace of that journey was when we witnessed the arrest by undercover police of a seemingly dangerous criminal whom we had just shared a carriage with for four hours.) we finally reached la Ciotat, the tourist resort in the South of France where we were to meet up with our friend Deirdre and spent the last few days of our Interrailing adventure eating baguettes and cheese, swimming in the pool at our campsite, or wandering down to the beach with a can of ice tea bought with our last few cents, beneath the sun of the Cote d’Azure.
Interrailing for me meant a change of perspective. Seeing so many countries in so little time was an experience in itself, but what really made me feel like my mind had been opened, was the experience of being a traveler. Arriving in a new city in a new country and not knowing where you are going to sleep that night is liberating. Not being sure where the train you are on will take you to makes you realise that you don’t always have to be going in a fixed direction. You usually end up roughly where you want to be eventually.
Lesson for life learned.
