When I read Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” series (Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber and Voyager)*, I thought to myself, “I really want to go to those places and see those things.” I often wish it was easier to find stuff in Scotland but there’s so many things in Scotland that it can be hard to know where to look for anything specific! Anyway, that was before they made a TV show out of it, and now there’s even more Outlander locations in Scotland!
*Book 1 was retitled Cross-Stitch in the UK for some stupid reason, and they wonder why it was initially less popular over here; it’s still the same love story between Jamie and Claire.
The first guide, Outlandish Scotland Journey part 1, covers the Outlander sites between Edinburgh and Inverness, while the second, Outlandish Scotland Journey part 2, covers Inverness and a whole plethora of sites around the city. In both cases, the sites are marked on a map so you can see the route that goes between them all.
If that’s not enough, there are also very clear directions explaining how to get to each location, and the guides are very clear about what you will find in each place, with lots of details to help you make the most of your holiday. One thing I especially liked was the thistle icons that rated each location, and showed whether a location was worth visiting or not, so I could see at-a-glance how many sites to spend time visiting (nearly all of them… now I just need a reliable vehicle to travel in).
Another thing I liked was the author has found pictures of what the places look like, and put them alongside what the places looked like in the TV series, so you get an idea about how similar the places are in real life (for example, some buildings in Culross were painted for filming so in real life they’re a different colour).
One more thing that I liked about these guides is that they give you the disabled access information, so if you are traveling as a disabled person or if you’re taking someone who is disabled, you have a good sense of whether you can get into any specific place. I’ve talked before about why that’s important to include in travel guides as it can make or break some people’s trips.
It was also useful to know how much time to schedule for each aspect of the trip; for example, it tells you how much time each itinerary will take, depending on whether you want to do it faster or slower, so you have a good idea of how much time to budget.
Other things that you will find in these guide books include: Where to park, for sites where parking isn’t immediately obvious; whether any individual attraction is worth a visit or not (and an explanation and references showing why not, if it’s bad, so you can make an informed choice); how much they cost; and there are even lots of extras, such as places of interest that weren’t in the books/TV series but are still worth a visit while you’re in each area.
These Outlandish Scotland Journey ebook guides also really make use of being in an electronic format, by linking to additional useful information, which basically means it’s like someone went out and painstakingly researched your holiday for you, so all you have to do is follow the route and have a great time! Or, if, like me, you’re the sort of person who likes to go out and discover things, these guides have a lot of mileage in them as well; I would choose the most interesting locations, and see what turned up in the space between them while I was traveling (because Scotland has a LOT of space).
If you live in Scotland, you could do some of these locations as a series of day-trips at the weekend, rather than a long holiday, and it would certainly be a great way to spend your days off! If I still lived in Edinburgh, I would definitely do that.
These guides are useful for a wide range of readers, both locals and further afield, and my overall conclusion is that they are well worth a buy if you are going anywhere in Scotland this year or researching a future trip.
This post gets quite gloomy. After a short break from this series (because I lost my notebook with all my notes in it) I am going to continue with my solo Interrail journey. The previous installment can be found here.
I awoke in the Novotel Hotel Rossi in fair Verona (of “Romeo and Juliet” fame) and it was raining. So apparently that happens in Italy from time to time, despite their best intentions. I was quite surprised because I’d never expected it to rain south of the Alps for some reason despite the fact that I know how ecosystems and desertification work. I guess I was having a blonde moment, which was odd because I was auburn at the time and I tend to be blonde when my hair is blonde.
So the day hadn’t started well, but I didn’t want to stay indoors because I wanted to get a better impression of Verona, given that at the time all I had seen was a) copious discarded syringes around my hotel, b) everywhere (except that one Japanese place) seemed to be closed on a Saturday night.
After deliberating about whether to go out over fresh coffee surprisingly tasty cheap wine in juice boxes that would fit in a child’s lunchbox (seriously), I wandered out into Verona. I was glad I did.
The Roman Arena in the town centre (amphitheatre) was stunning – smaller, but more complete than the one in Rome, much more manageable to walk around and a really nice thing to find in the city centre.
After that, I went to the thing I’d wanted to see the most in all of Verona – the Casa Di Giulietta. It’s in a little square and the house is a museum to Romeo and Juliet. After making my way through the exhibition (which was really professional despite being in a small-ish 16th century house), I got to the piece de resistance – Juliet’s balcony. Now I will be the first to say (as they do say at the Casa Di Giulietta) that it is highly unlikely that this is the actual house that Juliet lived in. For starters, as far as anyone knows she was a fictional character in a play made by a man who lived 800 miles away. Regardless of that, it was nice, just for a little moment, to forget the reality and just imagine that it *was* real, that Romeo somehow scaled the sheer walls and got up to this balcony… after all, isn’t the whole point of fictional and theatrical narrative that we get to imagine realities other than the one we occupy??
Afterwards, I found coffee at McDonalds because it was lunchtime and all the restaurants wanted meal-buying customers not coffee drinkers. The girl behind the counter who served me was so skinny that she looked consumptive. She will always haunt me. I have never seen anyone that thin before for their skeleton size (if you see what I mean). I still have nightmares about her. There was literally no muscle mass on her arms just an unnatural and mesmerizing consumptiveness. I wanted to know why. Did she have an illness such as AIDS or TB that she was fighting through? Was she not making enough money to afford to buy food? I have obviously seen underweight people before, myself being one of them (chronically) but I have never seen anyone as malnourished as this woman. She looked like she was in her mid twenties, and at death’s door with her gaunt, grey face and her neck silhouetting the rings of her windpipe and the hollows either side of it. If I’m a size US 2-4, she was like a size -2, and she was taller than me and I’m 5’6. When I returned the next day, she was on the counter again.
I think about her from time to time, even all these years later, and I always wondered what became of her, whether she got the medical treatment she so obviously needed or if she faded away. Healthcare is not free in Italy – and it shows in so many places.
She was extremely rude to me, but I just got my coffee and moved on, resisting the urge to wrap her up in a blanket, bring her home and feed her soup until she looked alive again.
It made me feel morose – then I got mad at myself because there I was, on an incredible once in a lifetime trip to Verona on Interrail, and I still wasn’t happy. And I realized it went deeper than my day-to-day mood, there was a cavernous, all-encompassing melancholy that had ensconced my soul so thickly that I had no idea what would make me happy. I should have been reveling in how wonderful everything was. Instead I felt like there was something missing, and I didn’t know what it was.
I think this was the first time I asked the question (to myself, in bed where nobody could hear me); ‘am I depressed?’ I quickly stifled it with a boatload of excuses.
The gloom gave way to a cracking migraine, so instead of going onwards to Venice as I’d planned, I extended my stay in Verona to 2 more nights and I went back to the hotel, where I sat in the dark wearing earplugs and downed a few co-codamol (Vicodin) with some wine to try and get the pain to stop.
I passed out, and when I awoke it was a bright new day.
I’m going to pick up where I left off last time, after I had just made it back to Zurich station and was now feeling like I was back in civilization having just spent the morning lost in the alps. I sat down over a coffee and wrote postcards to my Grandma and Aunt. This was 2008, a year after the EU smoking ban, which Switzerland was exempt from, so smoking indoors was a bit of a novelty and I did make the most of it (I don’t smoke now so I think I would hate to return to any country without an indoor ban on smoking). I asked two nice backbackers to take my photo with one of my disposable cameras.
Me in a coffee shop in Zurich Station, Switzerland holding a postcard of Switzerland, having just had a mini adventure in the Alps. My backpack is on the left and my handbag is on the right. In front of me were a well-earned coffee and a book by Anne Mustoe, as well as another postcard. I remember strategically moving the ashtray out of the shot because I didn’t want to get into trouble for smoking.
From my travel journal:
“Next, I went to the station newsagent and negotiated stamps in German (all credit went to the pan-European phrasebook I’d packed). Next I searched for a post-box. “Excuse me?” I flagged down a passing man. “Hey there!” The friendly American accent warmed my soul. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen the nearest post box, have you?” “Sure! It’s just out there, on the left. It’s yellow.” He said. “Thank you very VERY much.” I replied. “No problem.” He said. I followed the directions and found the post box just outside the station, then posted my post cards and hoped that was actually a post box (that, or I’d just put them in a used ticket disposal box, but I hoped not because they were nice postcards).
Then I got the 9:00am train to Milan, which terminated at Venice. Depending on what time it gets in, I may just stay on the train rather than aiming for Verona. However, I would prefer to stay in Verona as from there it would be easier to get back to Calais. What followed was a wonderful train ride through the Swiss alps.
The Swiss Alps, taken through the window of a train at high speed, using a disposable camera. Under the circumstances I’m pleased with how these pics came out.The Swiss Alps, taken through the window of a train at high speed, using a disposable camera. Under the circumstances I’m pleased with how these pics came out.A giant lake in the Swiss Alps, taken through the window of a train at high speed, using a disposable camera. Under the circumstances I’m pleased with how these pics came out.
The scenery is beautiful, especially around Zug station – if I ever get a chance to go to Switzerland again, Zug is the place to go! Unfortunately, it also means I have already began using up my 3rd disposable camera – I’ll have to get another couple in Italy. The scenery of grassy fells, snowy mountains and powder-sprinkled pine trees is absolutely breathtaking. It’s much nicer to see the Alps from the ground than in an aeroplane! I’m glad not to have tried travelling onwards in the dark otherwise I would have missed this, which would have been unforgivable.
…I think I’ve just done my bit to ensure the continental opinion of English eccentricity; I took a photo of my compartment (because I’ve never been on a train with compartments before, this is like being on the Hogwarts Goddamn Express), but I waited until the other occupants had moved because it’s perhaps a bit over-zealous even for a tourist.
(a little bit later) As we emerge from the Alps, the architectural style has become markedly Italian, with the arched windows and straight-pitched, less high roofs. We are still in Switzerland, but signs for “ristorante touristes” are at the side of the road which runs parallel with the train track. There is also significantly less snow, but the sky is still that clear, brilliant blue, and the sun feels warm now. I feel less close to the sky again – being on the German side of Switzerland was like standing on a very high plateau, and it’s nice, but I’m glad to be at my normal altitude again. Hopefully it will be sunny in Verona and even more I hope that the tourist office is open so I can find accommodation between now and Tuesday (the Easter weekend is now upon us).”
Changing trains in Milan, I was profoundly disappointed. It was standard tall buildings type of architecture, nothing particularly chic or attractive about the place, it could have been absolutely anywhere. I decided to continue onwards. The next train was, now that I was in Italy, run by Trenitalia. It had dents all over the outside of the carriages and inside, there was no air conditioning, people were just crammed on top of each other. Opposite me, a woman sat down with a chicken in a cage. An actual chicken. It was squawking up a fuss and flapping its feathers everywhere, and she insisted, on this full-to-bursting train, that the chicken needed its own seat, even when a man tried to sit down. This tiny old woman clung to the chicken cage with a death grip and started shouting at him until he left the carriage. I was too timid to get a photo of the ridiculous chicken.
Later that evening, I disembarked at Verona train station and booked 3 nights in a hotel (Novo Hotel Rossi) in Verona, where I decided to remain for the rest of the Easter weekend. Annoyingly, despite it being the Easter Saturday, when everything is usually business as usual in the UK, in Verona, literally everything (apart from one Sushi restaurant) was closed and since I didn’t speak Italian (I do now, this trip is what prompted me to learn when I got back), I couldn’t understand the signs in the shop doors.
I found the aforementioned Sushi restaurant, only to discover that the staff didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Italian, so I ended up trying to order in Japanese. Turns out, only the elderly grandmother could actually speak Japanese but she invited me to share a pot of tea with her after I’d eaten, apparently she’d never met a gaijin who could speak Japanese before. I guess you wouldn’t, living in Verona. I don’t speak very much though (and I sure as hell can’t read it), so she probably found my conversation lacklustre. I’d like to learn more at some point so I can navigate Japanese cosmetics but that’s a bit off topic for a travel post!
Anyway, that was my first day in Verona, and I’d used up over half of my Interrail pass (any 5 days of travel valid for 10 days of travel and non travel), but I decided not to worry about that.
I will continue with my Solo Interrail journey here.
As a side-note, if you are wondering why my posts/response times are erratic, it’s because I’m back to work, now teaching at a facility for children who have been expelled from school, mostly young offenders, which is a very intense job, as well as being quite a drive from my house, and I’m a bit exhausted, but I am interested in everything people have to say still!!
From my travel journal during my solo Interrail journey. New to this series? Start here. Missed last week? It’s here.
“Where do I begin? It’s 9:00 and I’ve already managed to do rather a lot today. Whilst I sit in the comfy compartment of the train to Milan, let me recount the goings-on of this morning.”
I got up amazingly early at 5:25am and had checked out of the hotel in Zurich by 6:00. At 6:20am I had found the Strassenbahn station, and I reckoned it would be a simple matter to get to the main station. I was very wrong! I got the S6, after asking directions, and was told I was one stop away, so I got off at the next stop. No sooner than I had alighted the double decker train than I realized this clearly wasn’t the right station. I got on the next train facing the same direction but it must have been the wrong direction to begin with. Whilst I was on the wrong train, I tried to ask directions, at which point I noticed an interesting cultural aspect of Switzerland of which I hadn’t been aware. Around Zurich, white people predominantly speak German, with French being the predominant language of multiculturalism. Not only that, but the white German speaking people (I asked several of them across two floors and 2 carriages) were quite rude to me, and I was surprised about that because in Das Capital everyone I’d spoken to so far had been so nice! I finally found a friendly couple from Senegal who were on their way to work. I asked them if this was the right train to get to Zurich Central station, and they said it definitely wasn’t.
“Hey, sorry to bother you, do you speak French please?” I asked.
“We sure do!” The lady said. She wore one of those striped fabric pinafore-bib type things that are the uniform of carers and cleaners the world over, and a beautiful short red (marron red) wig that meant her hair was elegantly coiffed.
“Um… is this the right train to get to Zurich Central station?” I asked.
“No, this is the train to St Gallen. Don’t worry, just get off at the next stop, cross the rails and get the next train back to Zurich.” She explained.
“Thank-you.” I said.
“You want some coffee?” The man asked. He was decked out in a blue shirt under a black suit, and very shiny black shoes. He clearly took very good care of his appearance. He held out a flask cup.
I had a sip. It was good coffee.
“Thank-you, I have been walking around this train and nobody would help me. How come the German-Swiss are so rude?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s because they don’t really like French speakers. They think we’re all stealing their jobs and what not.” She explained in a lowered voice, although this floor of the carriage was empty, and we were speaking in French in a predominantly German area.
“Stealing… their jobs??” I was flabbergasted.
“I know, it makes no sense, right?” The man laughed.
“Where are you from?” The woman asked.
“England. You?” I asked.
“We’re from Senegal.” The woman replied. “But now we’re from Zurich.” She winked.
“And you’re going to work in St Gallen?” I asked incredulously. It’s a hell of a commute for minimum wage.
“We do what we need to.” The man said, as if it was nothing special.
The conversation turned to other strange things the French-Swiss said the German-Swiss believed about French speakers, then the train began to slow, I said a hasty goodbye and descended the steps to the door. There was an announcement saying the train was about to stop, then I alighted into the most silent place in the world.
As the train moved away from the platform, I stood in 6 inches of snow and wondered whether I should have stayed on the train until St Gallen and turned around there, where at least if there were no more trains for the day, there’d be a nice cup of hot chocolate at a ski lodge somewhere (or something. I’m not really sure what’s there).
No, I was stranded at a train platform that was buried under snow halfway up a mountain, with one building next to the station, that looked like one of those water inspection buildings. Beyond that, there was nothing but snow and curvy trees in every direction.
There wasn’t a train timetable anywhere in sight. It was probably buried under snow. And there wasn’t anywhere to sit. That was probably buried under snow as well. In fact, there was no visible roads or any route to leave this train station and get to anywhere else. For all I knew, this could be the train station at the end of the world, it’s sole purpose seemed to be as a turning around point for lost passengers such as myself. There was, however, a station map, which claimed I’d somehow managed to get 30 miles away from Zurich on an alpine route. Oops.
I was alone. The temperature was very cold. Of course, on a journey like this, I knew I was going to be exposed to a range of temperatures, so I’d tried to pack light and dress appropriately, but then, I hadn’t expected to be stranded in the Alps. I was wearing a pair of tights (pantyhose), a dress that finished two inches above the knee (I still have this dress), with a short sleeved shirt underneath, and a wooly cardigan over the top, and my coat. My shoes were some of those Skechers hybrid trainers/ballet flats.
The only building for miles. And the strange, curvy-tipped trees. That wire overhead belongs to the train line.This was the downhill side of the station, lost in the Alps.
My hands were starting to go numb. I could see my own breath and there was an icy patina growing on my coat. I started mentally cycling though the things Ray Mears says to do if you’re lost in the mountains, and cursed the fact that I didn’t bring a tarp.
After over two hours, the train finally arrived. It almost certainly was punctual, but the frequency of trains up here meant that this was the first train that had passed in all that time.
When it finally drew up to the platform, I wondered if it was a snow-mirage, brought on by the cold, and made sure I touched the train before stepping onto it, just to make sure I wasn’t stepping off the platform into thin air. You hear some horrible stories about things that happen to people who get stuck on the train tracks at the wrong time.
Thankfully it was real enough and it was a cross-country one, so it took me straight to the Zurich central station with none of the messing around with small, local stations. When I got off, I sat in one of the station’s coffee shops and tried to thaw out.
I will continue recounting the rest of this travel day here because there’s a lot more that happened today, and otherwise this post will be very long.
Travelling on Interrail south through Germany from Belgium (read about Belgium here), the trains never ceased to amaze me. German trains are a marvel of engineering precision, and comparing them to English trains would be like comparing a BMW to a pony trap. Yes, the pony trap is an important part of our heritage, and it will (usually) get you to where you’re going eventually, but the BMW is the more comfortable ride and, let’s face it, more appropriate for cross-country travel. The BMW doesn’t have to throw everyone onto a bus at Sheffield so it can go to sleep for the night.
Let me tell you about German trains.
The internal doors are made of sliding glass panels; there are small compartments containing conference rooms for business executives; the dining car has seats and tables so you don’t have to walk the length of the train with your food; the seats are reasonably sized and oh so very comfortable; but none of this is the best bit. The suspension likes to fool you into believing you must be travelling very slowly, to feel so few bumps and corners, but then you look out the window and realize you’re going at over eighty. But that’s not the best part either. The best part is, in front of you, wherever you sit, there is a piece of printed paper with the heading “reiseplan.”
And that piece of paper tells you when you will arrive at each of the stations between where you are and the train’s terminus. Not only that, but it tells you what trains are departing from those stations in the next hour or so after your arrival. On a longer journey, the stewards will bring more than one Reiseplan to you so that you know exactly what is going on at all times.
Is this the most boring postcard in the world?? But pretty representative of my experience of Frankfurt.A more interesting postcard of Frankfurt, I saw none of the things in this postcard.
The train passed through several stations, I had a short stopover in Frankfurt (where I ate a Frankenfurter – aka hot dog) and I made a couple of changes onto other, equally well-endowed German trains, and thanks to the Reiseplans on the German trains, I was able to very efficiently plan a route all the way down to Zurich in Switzerland. I’d expected (when I awoke that morning in Brussels) that I might get as far as Stuttgart by the end of the day. Arriving at Zurich was a total coup and a sign that the trip was improving. Now, again, I had a shot at getting to Venice.
The scenery across Germany could be described as cloudy on top with fields underneath, punctuated with the occasional town or city. As we got closer to Switzerland, the clouds seemed to press together, accumulating, a crowd of clouds awaiting entry to some great event, perhaps a thunderstorm concert, on the other side of the Alps. This was a place which held onto the clouds with the first of the Alpine mountains, keeping them safe so the Mediterranean could enjoy sunshine.
I looked up accommodation in Zurich using the directory of hotels that I’d acquired in Paris, and I phoned them on the final leg of the train journey, making a reservation for a room in the Zurich Etap. I conducted the entire conversation in French, and from the train I took a taxi to the hotel, then went to the desk that had a picture of a French flag and started checking in. Out of the corner of my ear, I heard a conversation in English then realized the hotel also had an English-speaking check in desk. D’oh.
Being stubborn, I decided to finish check-in in French, handed over my passport so they could take a copy, then got my key and went to the room. It wasn’t fantastic, but there was an ashtray and a couple of beds, as well as a tiny plastic en-suite bathroom which had probably looked cutting edge in 1998. I had a shower, a smoke and a snack then went to bed. There was nothing to do in the hotel and I wanted to be up early because Zurich was just a hitching post on my journey into Italy.
The next morning, I intended to go straight to the central station. Somehow, this didn’t happen. That’s a story for next time.
Oh WOW this photo challenge was hard! I decided to do a photo story called The White Rabbit. I hope you like the story and theme. It’s only 250 words long (because the photos really tell the story) and it’s told with photos and in the captions. The photo challenge was Snapshots.
She opened the gate, waiting for me, luring me into her trap, my White Rabbit.Was she seeking something, or trying to show me? I was helpless but to follow.Off the path I strayed; I lost her, lost my way, lost myself. Chasing an image.I arrived at a wall, a boundary, a junction. This was a place between worlds, between realities. I wondered for a moment why I had given chase.There! The White Rabbit; was she leading me? Teasing me? Luring me? I pursued her through the ruined doorway, and everything changed.Nothing made sense here; games were being played. Now I was hopelessly lost in her maze, wondering whether she knew where to find herself.Deeply embroiled, I searched for an exit from this surreal game.I emerged into the land of portals, unsure which would return me to where I belonged. Could I ever truly belong, now I’d seen what lay on the periphery of my precarious existence?The white rabbit watched me leave, mocking my departure. I wondered if it was lonely to only exist through the looking glass, between worlds, with no reality to call her own.As I escaped, running down the rabbit hole, she appeared again before me. Had I ever left her domain? With a sense of growing horror, I knew in the pit of my stomach that I was hers now. I had belonged to her from the moment I’d seen her. She never stopped running away. Not even in death could I ever escape from the eternal, endless, surreal maze of the White Rabbit.
Note on the story:
The theme of this story is Alice Through the Looking Glass, but only with the chasing a white rabbit motif. I wanted the White Rabbit to be a girl, with ambiguity as to whether she’s chasing herself or whether the narrator is chasing her, like in the beginning stages of a relationship. I wanted to combine a narrative of Alice with the bizarre surrealism of a Kafkaesque landscape that I found on a walk when I went to the Scottish Borders last year. It is Border Country in a lot of different ways, the interchange between England and Scotland. I wanted this to be ambiguous and open ended, to give it a sense of mystery and open interpretation.
I would appreciate any feedback as I don’t usually share my creative writing on here, although the words were really just to tie the pictures together to explain why I arranged them like this.
PS The pictures are of myself but for the purposes of the story, the person in the pictures is not the narrator telling the story.
Seconds after writing this and publishing it, I found out that Brussels airport and metro have been attacked in the last couple of hours by terrorists and it’s still unfolding. I am completely shocked and disgusted that this has happened. Nobody deserves this but Brussels is such a lovely place, nothing bad should ever happen there. I hope everyone can get to safety and that they catch the monsters responsible. Terrorists are so utterly evil, but how could even they do this? What has Brussels ever done to offend anyone? I am crying right now because this is so shocking. My heart goes out to everyone in Brussels and all of Belgium right now, and everyone affected by this in any way.
Okay so I may have gotten one tiny detail wrong last week. I didn’t get straight on a train with the intent of going to Belgium from Paris. The Parisian Lecher was basically trying to get me to stay in Paris with him and I told him that if there were no trains to Venice then I would just go back home, and I bought a reservation to Calais. After making myself feel less disgusting in the train bathroom I pored over my maps of Europe and tried to work out a route over the Alps to Italy. I wasn’t going to let one bad experience ruin the whole trip.
I jumped off the train at Lille (France) and continued to Mons (Belgium), which was the interchange to Brussels. As soon as you get into Belgium it’s really obvious that you’re not in France any more, because the Belgians are really big on their art-deco style, and you can see it everywhere. It’s so classy and 1920s, and it’s very easy to see why this is the land of Hercule Poirot. I was relieved I didn’t have to go all the way back to Calais, and after the stress of Paris, Belgium was just delightful. From the moment I stepped off the train in Brussels and saw signposts in English, I knew I was somewhere friendly.
From my travel journal:
“…They have an open tourist information centre, which is in the train station (which has a shopping-centre-like layout map) and it can reserve hotel rooms and give you area maps. It’s dead good. So I’ve had a long, thorough shower, changed my clothes and am sitting on an actual bed in an actual hotel room. And there’s a delicious box of Belgian chocolate truffles in reaching distance.
This evening I plan to have a meal out then plan my next move – likely to Luxembourg or Stuttgart,maybe Cologne. I won’t continue to wax lyrical about Brussells. All I will say is firstly, Belgium deserves its reputation for food and chocolate (they even make the vegetables taste amazing)* I ate a boiled chicken and seasonal vegetables meal with a creme brulee dessert. Secondly, the architecture of Brussells is way underrated. The city’s up there with the big tourist centres as a really beautiful place – only Brussells is totally friendly. I am staying at the Argus Hotel near Metro Louise, amongst the high-end shopping area (Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Sonia Rykiel etc), and it’s tariff says E110 on the door but I paid significantly less.
Later still: I have looked over my map and decided to go to Stuttgart tomorrow from Bruxelles (via Frankfurt) aiming to be on the 11:59 (lmao) train from Bruxelles Midi Station (just in case I forget tomorrow). This will give me plenty of extra time to buy a necklace and also to postcard-shop and take some photos, although if I keep snapping I’ll run out of disposable cameras!”
*At the time, I wasn’t the biggest fan of specific vegetables. Looking back, I genuinely have no idea what I was eating. Fast forward 6 months and vegetables were all I ate, because I went vegan!!
The Art Deco dining room in Bruxelles’ Argus Hotel, showcasing the main drawback of old fashioned film-cameras – you had to wait until the picture was developed before you could see how (or if) it had come out.Somewhere in Belgium – Belgium was full of rather delightful architecture.This was a stunning light and water display in a shopping centre in Brussels. Once again the disposable camera didn’t quite capture the moment.
What I learned in Belgium:
One of the things that really surprised me at the time was how lovely Belgium is, and it’s completely underrated among the under 30’s. Having seen more of the whole country now, I think it’s a delightful destination and well worth a visit if you like a classy travel experience (rather than a non-stop party). If that sounds duller than a dry white wine, Brussels (or Belgium for that matter) probably isn’t the place for you. I did actually go back to Brussels in 2014, when my husband and I just dropped into Brussels for dinner (we were hungry, and I’ll link the story here when I get to it), and I still think it’s an incredibly sophisticated destination with unparallelled food. In terms of ambience, it’s probably how Paris was forty or fifty years ago and it makes for a good romantic getaway because it’s not packed with tourists but it’s still very ambient.
The main thing I learned though was that there’s a reason people don’t use disposable cameras any more. At the time, I thought it was the amount of space they take up. Actually, I didn’t learn about the photo quality difference for several years – I have always believed that film-cameras are way better than digital, and I think I was right until the last couple of years, when digital cameras finally started having a good enough resolution (number of megapixels) to be able to produce better pictures, and we finally got a unified digital storage method (SD cards) with a reasonable amount of storage per card, at an affordable price. There was a long time when there were so many different types of memory cards for different cameras and devices, that it was pointless buying either cameras or cards because as soon as they stopped making the cards, the camera was useless, and as soon as the camera broke, you had to buy a new set of different cards for the new camera, it was all the most ridiculous situation because of compatibility (and that’s if we don’t get started on those stupid wires we had to use to upload stuff – how many different connectors does the world need? I’m so glad that 99% of everything uses a micro USB these days).
There’s a world of difference between a disposable camera and a regular camera, however, and one of the key differences is aperture. Disposable cameras (and those cheap non-disposable fixed focus 35mm cameras that everyone used to have) have a fixed aperture that’s optimized for daytime holiday shots in the sort of light you get in the Mediterranean. That’s why these tend to come out acceptably on them. But they’re really not useful at all in low-light settings such as evenings or indoors in certain places.
Nowadays, I use a DSLR camera and I have a bridge camera as my backup. Yes, a DSLR is heavier, and OH MY GOD it was so expensive, but it’s worth it to get stunning pictures first-time-every-time when I’m on a once in a lifetime trip or at a concert.
Read part 3 of my Interrail journey here
To see my articles on photography, click here.
It’s Wanderlust Wednesday… time for me to go look at a place I want to visit, then write about it.
Today, I’m going to talk Hawaii.
I’ve wanted to go to Hawaii since I was a kid. I had a Hawaii Barbie, and I remember being captivated by the little “background scene” they do on the box to show you what the doll might look like if you weren’t living in a shitty concrete jungle.
Or is it asphalt?
Asphalt, concrete, none of it is Hawaii.
I have a list of foods I’d like to eat if I ever go (mostly plants, Hawaii is home to loads of rare plants), and I have a huge list of activities I’d like to do when I get there too.
Here’s some pictures of Hawaii:
Picture courtesy of Qantas airlines.Picture courtesy of Go Hawaii.Picture courtesy of Flora 2000.Picture of Old Lahaina Luau, courtesy of Alternative Hawaii.
Isn’t Hawaii an exciting place?? Apparently it was annexed by the USA in 1898, before that it was an independent island nation with its own monarchy. Before it was called Hawaii, it used to be called the Sandwich Islands, because Cook wanted to brownnose to the Earl of Sandwich. I prefer the name Hawaii. I would love to visit the islands. Here’s my rundown of the 5 things I want to do most in Hawaii:
Climb Mauna Kea on The Big Island Hawai’i: Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain in the world from bottom to top – but most of it’s underwater, with only 4,205m (13,796 feet) of that is above sea level, so it doesn’t really rate for mountaineers. That wouldn’t stop me trekking up it – it’s higher than Ben Nevis (which I totes need to write about now I’ve climbed it… argh I have such a long to do list).
Grab a cocktail in O’ahu: It’s the third largest island, but it’s home to two thirds of the population of Hawaii, and I’d love to sip a cocktail (virgin or otherwise) from one of those beach bars (I don’t want Tom Cruise to mix it, though I actually hear he’s quit tending bar and works as an actor now??? So I’m probably safe).
Snorkeling in Maui: The second largest island is home to all sorts of fun sporting activities. I’ve always wanted to give snorkelling a go, and apparently Maui is a good place to do this.
Surfing in Maui: Of course, no trip to Hawaii would be complete for me unless it included some surf dudes with attitude… wait, that was California, wasn’t it? I still want to go surfing in Hawaii. And that song is still pretty chillin’ all these years later:
See some shell crafting in Niihau: This island has a population of only 170 – but apparently they’re the finest shell craftspeople in the world. I’d love to see them at work.
Have you ever been to Hawaii? What’s it like? Tell me all about it!
How to Cross The Bering Strait From Russia to Alaska, detailing everything from Vladivostok onwards for your convenience (last updated February 2016):
This article is going to explain the different options you have to get from the end of the Trans-Siberian Railway at Vladivostok, to Alaska (or vice versa), for those people who have looked at a map and thought, ‘gee, Alaska and Russia are real close, I bet I can go from one to the other.’ My friends, you are in luck, and I’ve done all of the hard work of research for you.
Background:
Why am I sharing this? Recently, I’ve been planning an ambitious if uber-budget (like, as cheap as it can get) round the world trip that will require me to get across the Pacific. My general preference is to fly the shortest distances at all times to the nearest land with an airport if it’s possible to go onwards, because let’s be fair, I could just fly on a plane around the world and it would be very, very boring.
It all started with a Trans-Siberian railway idea. You may already know that the Trans-Siberian railway ends either in Beijing or Vladivostok, depending which of the two you want to go to. Both take 6 days, I believe and they both cost about £450 for a one way trip in 2nd class (see Seat61 for more on train journeys across Russia).
That left me (on my proposed itinerary) stranded in Vladivostok with no onward travel. So I looked into whether it was possible to get from Russia to Alaska across the Bering Strait as one of several options (most of the others being to finish in Beijing and fly somewhere). In this article, I wanted to only talk about how to get from Russia to Alaska, since information on this appears to be very limited with loads of sites saying it can’t be done or being deliberately vague because they didn’t actually know. When I updated the article in February 2016, I have also included information about how to get from Alaska to Russia which is MUCH easier.
The Specific Details of getting from Russia to Alaska:
Can you get from Russia across the Bering Strait to Alaska? Yes, you can, although the amount of effort or money involved may leave you changing trains and going to Beijing International Airport instead, for a flight to somewhere less undeveloped. The last thousand miles or so of Russia are still remarkably untouched, like a corner of the world that’s still how it was before agriculture caught on, punctuated with the occasional Soviet-era city or town, and many traditional settlements.
Here’s your options, assuming you are starting at Vladivostok, which is fairly accessible having both roads and rails going to it:
1. Fly from Vladivostok (or Khabarovsk) to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, then get a flight from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Anchorage, Alaska, with Yakutia (www.yakutia.aero), a Russian airline. It’s about a 3 hour flight and goes every Saturday from 11th July to 29th August as it’s a seasonal flight. You can also travel from Vladivostok to Khabarovsk (or get off the train early) and fly from there to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. This certainly seems to be the most reliable way to get out of Russia towards North America without going to Beijing or Seoul. To get to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, you can use any of the following airlines from either Vladivostok or Khabarovsk: Aeroflot (operated by Aurora, use the Aurora site to plan this flight), S7 Airlines, then Ural Airlines only goes from Vladivostok and Yakutia Airlines only goes from Khabarovsk.
Why do you need to fly from Vladivostok (or Khabarovsk) to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky? There are no roads. Literally, the last 800 miles or so of Russia has no roads or railways, not even dirt tracks, literally no thoroughfares at all, connecting places with each other, there are just the occasional towns and villages (which do have roads). Some, like Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, are on the sea and sometimes get freighter traffic. Many other settlements in this area are inland and very isolated. These were the frontier towns during communism, and now, they lie abandoned, the new government seems disinterested in building roads to connect them to anywhere, and their concrete buildings are falling down. There aren’t even any maps aside from Google Earth – literally, this sheet map is the furthest east I could find a paper map for, and it pretty much ends with Vladivostok!
It has been suggested that freighters are another way to get from Vladivostok to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, but there are no regular sailings, I don’t speak more than two words of Russian, so I certainly can’t learn enough Russian to get a job or follow technical instructions by the time I travel, and anyway, I am female and therefore not being physically strong enough to do a lot of work on a freighter, even if the captain would allow me to try, which is unlikely, and freighters are unreliable as a mode of transport – your visa could run out while you waited for one to turn up, so I disregarded this option as impractical.
A note on Google: Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky confused it on some of the ‘maps’ searches, Petropavlovsk did not, Kamchatsky did, so the best search term for information on this place is Petropavlovsk. Some people call it Kamchatka but Google struggles with that too.
2. Travel from Vladivostok to Provideniya, the furthest airport towards the Bering Strait, from there, you can charter a plane from Bering Air, an Alaskan company. They fly Nome, Alaska to Provideniya, Russia and may be able to pick you up in Russia if all your visas etc are in order, and if you’ve arranged this with them. They will probably want you to pay the cost of a return flight because they fly out from Alaska for Alaskan tourists to have trips to this isolated part of Russia, but you don’t need to charter a whole plane; you can potentially do it as a “seat fare passenger” when a plane is bringing American tourists over. I would still expect it to cost some money, however. You need to book this at least three weeks in advance of when you wish to travel so they can arrange all the paperwork which needs time to get from Alaska to Moscow. Email them for further enquiries as they don’t have a scheduled service. This method has the advantage of the shortest flight from Russia to Alaska, but the disadvantage of being complicated and unreliable and potentially expensive.
Getting from Vladivostok to Provideniya:
This is a complicated multi-step trip requiring more than one short-hop flight due to the lack of roadage. Basically, from Vladivostok you need to go back upwards to Khabarovsk (or get off the train early, but then you’d miss out on Vladovostok, which may or may not matter to you), then you can fly from Khabarovsk to Anadyr (Ugolny airport, which is 11km east of Anadyr), then from this airport you can get a flight to Provideniya, from which you may be able to charter across to Nome or Anchorage using the information in the paragraph above.
3. You can walk across the Bering Strait when it is frozen solid, however, it’s about 53 miles of ice, after 800 miles of no roads and wilderness in Russia, and the US immigration office might frown upon your arrival in this manner (but at least they probably won’t arrest you if you have all the correct documentation such as a Visa, not sure where you’d get your exit stamp for Russia, though). There has been one known case of someone doing this in the opposite direction (they described the whole adventure as “brutal”) and they got into a lot of trouble with the Russian authorities because, due to lack of roads, it was impossible for them to register themselves at any police station in Russia within 24 hours of their arrival in the country. Oops. Other alternatives may include horseback or cycling if your off-road biking skills are outstanding, still not sure how you would cross the rivers, however.
Those are all the options I’ve found so far, as there are no direct flights from Vladivostok to anywhere in the U.S or Canada (but you can go on a 35 hour flight changing at Moscow going back all the way around the rest of the world to get to Anchorage or Seattle or anywhere else in North America if you’re set on using a plane and have loads of money). None of them come up on flight comparison services because they are not really comparable with anything. There is literally one option at every stage. Pricing information is also a bust so I don’t know how much any of this costs at the present, but I would guess at least a couple of hundred at each new flight. It’s also worth noting that the NAVTEX stations over that corner of the world don’t appear to be very well maintained so navigational information is often unavailable, which can lead to some scheduled flights being grounded.
Update: Alaska To Russia:
Since I wrote the original article, I have found a company offering charter flight services who may be able to take you from Anchorage to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky (or to Vladivostok or Provideniya) or (less likely) Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky (or Vladivostok or Provideniya) to Anchorage. This cuts out ALL of the uncertainty and means you will be able to go straight from Alaska to Russia or possibly vice versa with an reputable, accountable company organizing your independent journey by finding you a pilot and a plane. If you wish to book a chartered flight, you can find one here: Villiers Private Jet Charter. Villiers has lots of private pilots with planes around the world and is most likely to be able to meet your needs. Most charter flight services depend on where the individual pilots are based, but there are a lot of people in Alaska with planes so this is your absolute best option if you want to go from Alaska to Russia rather than the other way around, especially since you can book a flight for a date and time which suits you. There are some private charter jets offering the reverse journey (Russia to Alaska) but these are thin on the ground. To offset the cost, it would be well worth finding several other people willing to accompany you on this journey, and on a private charter flight you should be able to take items such as bicycles as well if you needed to.
Do you have any further information on how to cross the Bering Strait from Russia to Alaska, or in reverse? You can email me at invokedelight@gmail.com if you have managed to do this or if you have found any other ways of getting across, or know of a ship that travels this route and takes passengers (not freighters, as explained above), please do let me know I would love to hear how you have done this journey and can add your perspective to this article. If you have a first-hand account of the journey that you’d like to share with the world, I’d love to put you up as a separate article as a guest post (your name to your article, you keep copyright etc) if you email me. I am particularly interested if you’re female as all the articles I’ve read so far seem to be young men in their 20’s and 30’s who have even considered doing this journey. NOTE: I am not a travel agent, please don’t email me asking for detailed travel advice!
Helpful Map
This map shows an overview of the ways you can get from Russia to Alaska by air. Click to enlarge. Base map: Google maps. Additional layers: Invoke Delight.
Resources: Bering Air website. Travel Article on crossing the last part of Russia and the Bering Strait Please note this information is all very old and was last updated in February 2006, after which the author appears to have lost interest in further research into this topic. Yakutia airport website flights from Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky to Anchorage, Alaska, this is the flight schedule, they only fly on Saturdays in July/August and not at all the rest of the year. Off the unbeaten track Travel information for Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky. The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East by Sharon Hudgins: This is the only book written about extended travel in far Eastern Russia although I don’t think she offers much helpful advice for making the journey between the Bering Strait and Alaska, there is a lot of information in this book which gives some eye-opening insights into life in this part of Russia. Villiers Private Jet Charter the website for the private charter jet services.
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Something nobody ever talks about is buying a map. For city-hoppers, who fly from Phnom Penh to Beijing via Ho Chi Min and Tokyo, there’s probably little need for the various types of maps I’m going to talk about here. If you’re driving from A to B, however, you need a good map (even if you have an awesome sat nav) so you don’t end up at the wrong sea.
The two types of maps you need:
1. A big road atlas.
2. Smaller destination maps – this might be an A-Z city map book or a few Ordnance Survey sheets for the wilderness.
This article is going to talk about how to choose a road atlas. Stay tuned for next Travel Tuesday when I’ll talk about how to choose smaller destination maps.
1. A big road atlas. This has largely been superseded by GPS navigation, aka Sat Navs, but it totally depends on where you want to go. If you are travelling somewhere with poor mobile phone/GPS coverage, or you don’t have the right countries in your sat nav (or even if you do) it’s well worth taking a paper map as a back up. At the very worst, you can use it to do big-picture route planning and see where you are compared to your overall travel goal. I bought a Philip’s European Road Atlas last year for driving from York UK to Rome, Italy via Salzburg, Austria and Stuttgart, Germany. I didn’t pay a huge amount of attention to which one I bought – I thought I’d spent plenty of time choosing one with the most countries covered and the best scale of detail. At 2am, somewhere in central Germany on our first travel day, lost in a hell of redirecting ring roads and traffic cones, with nothing on the (ample) signposts matching ANYTHING on our map, however, I wished I’d spent that little bit more time (and money) and selected my map a bit more wisely. The AA one looked a lot better when I flicked through it in a shop – so I’m going to get this one. I’m also considering a separate, broader scale atlas just for France and Germany.
Things to look for in a big road atlas:
1. Scale. Does it cover ALL of the countries listed at the scale advertised on the front? We bought the Philip’s European Road Atlas because we wanted to go to Romania, and it was one of very few that covered it. We did not end up going. When the Philips Road Atlas arrived, it transpired that it only did Eastern Europe in 1:4,000,000 scale (which would be fine if they didn’t have roads, junctions, towns, etc etc that weren’t remotely marked on the map) in the route planner pages at the front, and only did Western Europe in the advertised scale of 1:800,000, which wasn’t the best scale for the densely populated countries such as Germany and Belgium that we passed through on our journey, and it did struggle in Italy as well.
2. Coverage. Does it cover the countries between your starting point and your destination in enough detail to enable you to actually get there? For example, if we had gotten a map which only covered Western Europe but that covered it in a better scale, we could have saved about one full travel day not being lost (we lost on average 2 hours a day from accidentally taking the wrong road or not having any of the options on the signposts match up with anything on the map), which would have meant more time and energy for sightseeing. Because our original trip focus was Eastern Europe, I didn’t pay attention to how good the mapping of the Western European countries was, which ultimately made our trip less awesome than it could have been. Because there are more people per square kilometre in Western Europe, there is more infrastructure and there are also more settlements. This means you need a map with the same level of detail as you would need to drive around the south of England, not the north of Scotland.
3. Symbols. WTF do those symbols mean??!! If you don’t know, this might not be your best map. Usually there’s a symbol guide at the front (along with the scale, and approximate times and distances), but if you’re struggling or if it’s all in a funny font or all in a foreign language that you don’t speak, try a different one.
4. Font size. Some maps have a font size that is far too small for driving. I don’t recommend reading maps whilst the vehicle is in motion, but even when you’ve stopped, you need to find where you are as quickly as possible. If you can’t read the words because they’re too small, you WILL struggle, because remember they’ll all be unfamiliar words anyway. Make it as easy as possible for future you to get the job done.
5. Price. Most people buy the cheapest map they see. STOP! Don’t do it. I spent a couple of hours choosing my map, and it still wasn’t a good fit. Buying the cheapest one you see will cost you money in the long run in the form of all that petrol you’ll waste when you’re driving around and being lost.
Final advice on your road map:
1. Never see it as a “just in case” for if your sat nav breaks, even if that’s the intended use. Scrutinize that map so you know whether it will actually get you to where you need to go when it matters most. When you lose sat nav signal (I did once we left Dover, and never got it back all through Europe), you will be stressed, usually in a hurry to make a decision or not in a sensible place to stop, and you will need that map to work fast. My map was a back up, but it wasn’t good enough. There’s no shame in buying a second one after the first one arrives if you bought it online and its crap.
2. Change the page on your map every day of your journey, so you can just pick it up and find where you are when the sat-nav loses signal.
3. Familiarize yourself with what your route looks like on the map, so your brain can speed up your response using it’s pattern-recognition abilities. The human brain is an incredible tool if you use it right – I always do this when I’m road tripping so I can find where my car is on a page as fast as possible.
4. Draw with a marker pen where you’re going (if you’re cool with writing on your map). I wish I’d done this at every rest stop. Or at all.
5. If you have a passenger navigator, get them to follow the route with their finger or regularly update themselves on where you are in relation to the map in some other way. Pins, post it notes, or a pen would also work but a finger leaves no trace so the map is still readable.
Stay tuned for next Travel Tuesday when I will talk about smaller scale sheet maps, and feel free to ask me any of your questions about maps in the comments or via Twitter.
is the furthest east I could find a paper map for, and it pretty much ends with Vladivostok!
by Sharon Hudgins: This is the only book written about extended travel in far Eastern Russia although I don’t think she offers much helpful advice for making the journey between the Bering Strait and Alaska, there is a lot of information in this book which gives some eye-opening insights into life in this part of Russia.
