Interrail: Preparation

Having decided our transportation, we had to choose wisely our pass and planned our trip. Since we would be leaving during the Christmas season (peak period where everyone would use the train ), we thought of reserving our hostels earlier.

Normally, there are two ways for you to travel with the Interrail pass. The first one is a little bit challenging but interesting. Few of my friends left few months earlier to do the same trip with Interrail pass. However, what they did was a little bit different from me. They just hopped on the train, went to their destination, without any preparation or any hostel’s reservation. If they felt like sleeping in the hostel, they searched for the hostel in the city when they arrived there. By using this way, their trip was more flexible as they didn’t have to follow a proper schedule (train, hostel check in). This way would be suitable especially when you travelled on summer or off peak season.

Since we travelled during the winter holiday, we were afraid that the cheap and valuable hostel would be full, due to the Christmas holiday. Travelling on a small budget, we did not afford arriving in a city, and having to check in an expensive hotel. (we define more than 20 euro per person as expensive). If you travel during summer, you can just sleep at the train station or camping on the site but in winter, the temperature in some (most of the ) cities can reach below zero. Reserving your hostel in advance can be very handy. In our case we have a very nice and cheap apartment, complete with kitchen, laundry services,  in the center of  Budapest for less than 50 euro per night (for 5 persons).

A little bit of early research might make your trip an interesting one. My three favourite hostel’s booking website are:

HostelsClub

This is my favourite hostels comparison website. By paying a membership card (10€ paid once ) you can avoid the reservation fees every time you do the reservation. This website differentiate a private room and a shared room and the price stated in the website for a private room, is the price per room. This is important because some hostel allow you to have 1 or 2 extra persons in a room without extra charge. I have the impression that the price stated in this website is the cheapest of all the three.

Hostelworld or Hostelbookers

I think that in term of choice, hostelworld has a larger number of hostels than hostelsclub. But as I stated above, in hostelworld and hostelbookers, you have to pay a certain reservation fees. Imagine if you reserve 10 hostels, you have to pay 10 times the reservation fees.

Before reserving your hostel, it is important for you to plan the route of your trip, from the train that you are going to take, the departure time and the arrival time. Some hostels insist that you indicate the time of arrival in the hostel upon reservation. I strongly recommended that you reserve the hostel with a 24 hours reservation in case that there would be problem with your train and you arrive a little bit late in the city.

In order to plan your visit, the only reliable website  is the website of Bahn.de. Apparently, Deutch Bahn controlled the whole rail system in Europe so they can look for train’s connection departing from any city in Europe to any other city in Europe. (Try and search a train departing from Porto, Portugal to Ankara, Turkey!!).

If you plan your trip earlier, you can reserve some trains that require reservation (especially the night train with couchette), if you passed by Germany . As I stated earlier, Deutch Bahn is in control of most of the trains in Europe and only they can reserve the train from distance)  Reserving a train will assure you a seat during travel. However, if you want to cancel your reservation at the last minute, you can only do that in German.

You can however go  directly to the train or do the reservation on the departure’s country, but you risk of not having a place in the train (during our trip, most of the couchettes are empty) or you might pay more than the actual price (it happened to us on our train from Zagreb-Sarajevo).

Also in Deutch Bahn website, you would be able to know all the cities that your train would pass or stop. Please beware that you might not be able to enter all of the countries in Europe (We need to have visa to enter Serbia, luckily with this website, we didn’ take the Sarajevo-Budapest’s train passing by Beograd). You have to check with your ministry of foreign affair website to know your visa’s requirement or one of my favourite site, ProjectVisa (I cannot reassure the reliability).

Having prepared all your trip, you will just have to buy your Interrail pass which is available via the Interrail website, at the nearest train station or at any travel agent. In our case, we bought it at our train station so we could avoid the postal charge!!

Interrailing : Prologue

I’ve always wanted to go to Eastern Europe since 2007. Some of my friends who visited Prague before kept boasting its architecture which is totally different from the one that you could see in the western side of Europe (in France, Germany, Holland or Belgium). Unlike in the western part of Europe, where ones could easily find the typical Gothic types of building everywhere, I expected the eastern part of Europe would be filled with a mixture of Gothics, soviets,Ottomans and modern buildings, due to its history and that’s another reason why eastern Europe intrigues me so much.

Depending on people, I am the type of traveller who prefer to do multiple cities hopping rather than spending the whole vacation on 1 or 2 cities in a country. With this type of travelling I could visited more cities in less time and in a long term plan, it would cost me less (it’s cheaper to visit Czech,Austria and Slovakia in one trip than doing three separate trips for these countries). However by doing so, it’s going to be a hell tiring trip, I would only have few times (less than 24 hours) in one city, and it would cost me more in short term plan. But I prefer the latter since sometimes I feel cheated when I spent too much time in a city but in the end I had nothing to do.

This happened to me once in Athens where I dedicated 3 full days in Athens, knowing the fact that there are lots of interesting places to visit (the Pantheon, Olympic Stadium, the temple of Zeus) besides all the shopping districts and complexes there. Surprisingly, everything in Athens is just a walking distance from each other and I ended up visiting all those monuments in less than one day. So I ended the next two days doing nothing in Athens although I could go somewhere else like Santorini or Hydra. (Luckily I finally ended up taking a bus to Cape Sounio, 3 hours bus ride from Athens).

Cape Sounion, Greece 2008

Knowing that I’m going to inter-city-hopping in eastern Europe, I had to choose my medium of transportation and that I had three choices: by train, by bus or by car. Reading some of the traveller’s forum website, I learnt that it is strongly discouraged to drive in Eastern Europe even to the limit that some of the rental’s car company has certains limitation in eastern europe (You need a special paper/insurance for a rental car from Austria to enter the eastern part of the country’s border). Apart from that, it would definitely be tiring to drive across half of the continents during two weeks, alone (in case I didn’t find a co-driver).

So it left me with the train’s pass or bus’s pass. In the beginning, I considered travelling using the Eurolines passes. It’s a little bit cheaper than th rail pass (if you are not travelling during peak season). However, it gives me less freedom to plan my trip as Eurolines has its own routes and I have to plan my trip according to its routes. For example there is no way that you can go to Salzburg (Austria) by Eurolines, but it had always been in my dream since I was little to go  there and to be able to sing do re mi while dancing aroung the mirabelle fountain. Another reason that made me abandon Eurolines was because I had the impression that the pass had some of these complexes conditions that would be a burden for its user. To name a few, it is not possible to use the Pass for more than 2 journeys between the same city, there might be some  extras fees for luggage charges and we have to reserve our ticket and a reservation can only be made in the city of arrival.

That left me with only one  last choice and that’s by travelling on train . Luckily,  the european railway company  offers a pass which allows the EU citizen to travel freely around Europe during a period of time of our choice, and it is called the Interrail Pass!! (For the non EU citizen, you can use the EUrail pass which has almost the same function, but one of the differences is that it is not applicable in all of the cities in Europe).  And during our winter break, we’ve been interrailing around eastern Eastern Europe only by using this pass (passport and RESIDENCE PASS too of course)!!