Transport here and there

I promised at least one update!

The trip was fundamentally train based. However, the data shows that we took 180 total journeys from July 6 to October 5. Taxi rides actually had the highest tally, beating out train and metro for the top spot. Runners-up included buses and hired cars that didn't belong to a taxi service. Out of the 180 legs of the journey, fully 150 were taken by both of us at the same time. I took slightly more solo journeys than Auberon did, and he does claim to have done more walking than me.

So what was the transit like in all those corners of the world? Here's a quick breakdown by country and region:

Vietnam: Sleeper trains are affordable and very comfortable. We read enough horror stories about nightmarish long-haul bus rides to put us off from any long bus trips there. Taxi prices varied quite a bit in the cities, and the motorbike drivers charged a similar range of prices.

China: Sleeper trains are not great, as the beds are open to the corridor. The tickets also sell out fast. But life in a hard seat carriage can be an adventure on its own, with incredibly sociable people all around. Just don't expect any personal space. City metros vary in quality but are up-and-coming in many cities, and the one in Chengdu was particularly easy to navigate.
Taxis are very cheap and easy to come by, especially in larger cities. Very few drivers speak any English. Most Chinese people use a ride sharing app called Didi, so you might be able to save some money and frustration by having someone order a car for you. Buses are also very cheap, though maybe the least user-friendly. Even with some Chinese knowledge, the schedules are convoluted and hard to understand. The city buses are also usually quite crowded.

Mongolia: We took very few taxi rides in Ulanbaatar. There is an informal ride-sharing economy there, and many drivers are willing to take you to your destination for a fee. The train infrastructure is not very expansive in Mongolia, so to get to the national parks a hired car is an expensive yet comfortable option.

Russia: The intercity trains on the Trans-Siberian Railway were excellent. I've written before about the wonderful train experience to be found in Russia. In the cities we visited, taxis and metros covered all that we needed. The Moscow Metro doesn't have the polish of newer metro systems, but it takes you to every part of the city.

Eastern and Central Europe (Latvia, Lithuania, Poland): Latvia's train infrastructure is sublime. It's all very new, it all runs on time, and it's all very cheap. Because of the places we visited, we actually didn't board a single train in Lithuania. The intercity buses in that area of Europe are all cheap, but the booking websites lure you with outrageous deals and then never deliver. In general, booking at the bus station itself is the best strategy if possible. Train stations in smaller Polish cities have been made redundant by machines operated by the conductor, so don't despair if you arrive in a city by bus and find the station boarded up.

Western Europe (Germany, Denmark): Transit in general in these countries is far more expensive than anywhere else we visited.  The German train network is extremely dense and it is possible to get to almost any large town by train. Special thanks to the Berlin metro map as a masterpiece of metro maps. The smaller town where we stayed near Hamburg did require a bus, but the bus was comfortable and the schedule easy to follow.
In Copenhagen the metro was also painless to use and went way out to the outskirts where our hostel was located. In my solo travel around Denmark I took a few intercity trains and found them to be just as nice as the ones in Germany: fast, quiet, and comfortable.

We purchased the Germany/Poland Eurail pass, and that decision involved a great deal of calculating and estimating to make sure we were getting a good deal. German trains are very expensive compared to other places, so if you're planning a German trip with a lot of stops then you may wish to check out a rail pass. But for a comparatively short trip like we had, the savings were fairly small - maybe 50-100 euros in total. I first used a Eurail pass in 2012, and on that trip the conductors were pretty lax about checking the pass for validity. That had completely changed by this trip - there was no possibility of sneaking an extra day on the schedule.

For those travelers who prefer to speak English when traveling instead of dedicating months and months to learning the local language, you will find transit in big cities doable and transit in small cities a little frustrating. The workers at the Vietnamese and Mongolian train stations all spoke English, while in China and Russia there was usually a single line for English assistance. Poland was the only other country after that without ubiquitous English, and even then it was readily available. Even in China, the most monolingual country on the trip, there was still English signage in the train stations.

I hope this information can be useful for anyone considering an overland trip, wherever in Eurasia it may be!

End of an Era

On this trip we had been keeping track of the various modes of transportation that we used. Every few days, or when we remembered, we'd think of all the metros, cabs, trains, and so on that we had ridden recently and put it all on a list in Auberon's notebook. We were, however, initially at a loss as to how we should record the journey to Denmark - as the train itself chugged onto a massive ferry and we were thus brought to Copenhagen by two methods of transportation at once. (It ended up in the logbook as three entries, train-ferry-train, due to the technicality that we were not allowed to remain on the train once it was off dry land.)

In Copenhagen we learned that our accommodations were Poland-style: far away. It was a long but pretty march to the fairly sterile business area where our hostel was located, across marshes and flatlands dotted with modern Nordic Design concrete ponds and benches. It was late when we arrived and the prospect of going all the way to the city and back for dinner wasn't great, so we ended up eating at an Indian place. I had fortunately not internalized the conversion rate for krøner to dollars, which consequently resulted in our most expensive dinner all trip.

Such is life in Denmark. We saw very high prices absolutely everywhere, the unfortunate opposite of the under-budget first weeks of the trip. But, we reasoned, we would still come in well under our estimates thanks to the Workaways and general miserliness throughout.

The next day we had a few boxes to tick. Auberon had seen the outline of a star fort on the map, which was conveniently next to my own goal of seeing the Little Mermaid statue in the harbor. The fort reminded us both strongly of colonial American architecture, though it dates to the late seventeenth century. We were unable to go into any of the buildings but it was very pleasant to walk around the grounds and along the ramparts. The weather was gorgeous. The suffocating heat of the first several weeks stayed with us in memory, so we didn't mind the chilly winds as much. And despite the grim warnings of a man on the train that we came at a bad time, the sun shone and the sky was clear.

On the way to the statue Auberon happened to glance into the harbor and notice that there were hundreds and hundreds of tiny jellyfish present among the boats. We sat and watched for a long time, picking out subtle color differences and particularly large ones, wondering aloud about the life of a jellyfish and how it perceives the world. Then to the statue, which we saw only briefly as dozens of other tourists were clamoring for their turn. I can only imagine the scene in the high season. As much as I talk about the wandering we do, I still have a soft spot for famous destinations like the mermaid statue, the terracotta warriors, and Red Square.

We next found the Design Museum, which impressed us first with its lenient admission rates (free) and then with its collections. There was a fantastic section on Japanese art and Danish artists who had been inspired by it, and I was enchanted with some of the Japanese paintings - a school of art I'd never given much thought to. A lot more of the museum was devoted to examples of Scandinavian design in furniture, architecture, and so on. It was a great museum, one of the best on the trip. The only problem was that I kept wanting to sit on the chairs.

That evening we saw the pedestrian street Strøget, a very long shopping plaza that, while pretty, didn't offer us anything we hadn't seen in other countries' versions. We had a Chinese buffet for dinner (far from the culinary high-water mark of Chengdu), a bowl of what claimed to be Sichuan noodles at another shop (ditto) and then headed for the metro home. At the station we noticed a family of tourists rush to get on and then leave two members of the party behind. This they fortunately found hilarious, and as they spoke together about it I was glad to hear Vietnamese again for the first time in months. It happened that they were on the wrong train line anyway, and we were able to set them straight. More bookends: we had started the trip quite confused in Vietnam, now in Denmark we were able to help some Vietnamese people on their own trip. I was hoping to hear them say something about their plans for traveling overland, from Denmark to Vietnam via Russia...

The day of departure soon arrived. Auberon had refused to pay Scandinavian prices for a meal on the plane, so we stocked him up with muffins and fruit at a grocery store. Then with plenty of time to spare we got to the airport. One last selfie, some parting words, and then Auberon was off.

As for me, I stayed in Denmark for a few more days, traveling around to some more very nice cities and setting fire to my remaining money. I'm writing this from Germany now, where I have another week planned. Then I'm off to China, where I'll return to my friends in Chengdu and do some more teaching, eventually getting to California in early December.

This blog is really about the trip before that: Auberon and Alex went Around the World. So I won't turn it into a personal diary, but I won't abandon it either. We collected a lot of information as we traveled, and some of it is useful but all of it should be relatively interesting. Data like steps walked per day, number of taxis taken, total trip mileage - these might interest a few readers, especially if you know us well or are my dad. There are thousands of photos on my camera that I fully intend to edit and share with the world, and those will make it on here some time after I get back to California. And I also collected a lot of knowledge that might be useful to tourists of the ten countries and 30+ cities we visited, like what transportation is like and how not to get scammed at ticket offices. All these things and more will appear, so stay tuned.

Until then, dear reader - thanks for coming along!

Retreat to Paradise

We realized fairly quickly that the new Workaway we had signed up for was squarely in the boonies. But that was part of the charm - it was billed as a meditation retreat and seminar center. Our work was simple. Auberon was to repair and expand the booking website, and I was to shoot and edit a series of short promotional videos.

The house was enormous. Auberon and I both tried and failed to name houses of friends or family that even approached it in size, plus it had a backyard orchard. When we arrived there was one long-term guest (a German medical student), one solo volunteer (a Lithuanian wanderer), and one volunteering couple (German/Bulgarian off-grid hippies).
After a few days we realized that we had actually had plenty of relaxation recently, and the tiny town seemed closed-in. So we took advantage of the ample free time offered us to go to Hamburg and Lübeck on separate day trips, plus regular long walks around the countryside. I use the word "countryside" because our host did, but in reality the little towns were all close together in car terms, and simply a longer walk by foot. There were great bike paths thanks to the dismantling of local train service half a century ago (a dilemma for me - train or bike?) and they led through wonderful tall forests.

Each day we cooked something, either with the other guests or alone. Our meals when living together in college were often somewhat bachelor chic, that is to say, unimaginative. Here, I did my best to stay vegetarian (all bets were off outside the home) and experimented with cooking all kinds of rice and vegetable dishes from scratch. It turns out rice is a lot easier and more versatile than I ever gave it credit for in college.

In Hamburg we saw the huge park and made fun of the street art for a while. It reminded me of both Frankfurt and Berlin, which isn't saying much as that's the rest of my big city Germany experience. Several of the attractions we walked by were closed, and the cutting wind made us walk past things faster. At night I sought out the Reeperbahn, years after reading a description of it by Bill Bryson. It was going downhill in his day, and from what I could gather the same was happening 26 years later. The red light district lure isn't enough to keep businesses running, and many of them are becoming ordinary bars or dance clubs to attract young people.

Lübeck was entirely different - a very old town that had the architecture history advantage of not being blown up in the war. For the first hour or so we walked in entirely the opposite direction from the central old town, seeing only suburbs and wondering what all the fuss was about. Once back on track, the majesty of the old town was wonderful and it was beautiful to see the ancient buildings and streets as the sun set. In the Yugoslavian restaurant where we stopped for dinner, we ordered an enormous and delicious plate of assorted meats and potatoes, which arrived on fire and inspired its order by at least two other tables.

Somewhat surprised by the closeness of the date to Auberon's departure, we finished up our work at the retreat and took the last train of the journey - to Copenhagen.

Pictured: one of my culinary creations, view of Germany from the ferry, and a scene that I found hilarious but that sadly doesn't come through in the photo: the foreground and background signs say you're entering and leaving the same town on a single empty stretch of road.

Poor but sexy

The first time I went to Berlin, last year, I was admonished on the train for planning to spend only one day there. But that's what we did, thanks to lodging prices that were mysteriously three or four times higher than I had expected. So we planned to spend two nights in Berlin and then a week in a Workaway near Hamburg, giving me (I minored in German in college) lots of time in Germany at a fraction of the usual cost.

Our train arrived late in the day. The rail passes gave us unlimited travel on the wonderful Berlin transit system, so after dropping off our bags we went directly to Alexanderplatz, home of the TV tower. From there we walked haphazardly toward the Brandenburg Gate, illuminated at night and obscured somewhat by some odd fences. I love that in big touristy cities you can find the famous sights in a matter of minutes, all practically right next to one another.

In the morning we went off in a new direction and found a bakery for breakfast. For a reason I cannot understand, in several German bakeries I've been to there are wasps crawling over the pastries. Nobody seems to mind and in fact I question sometimes if I'm the only one who can see them. Then they fly around you as you eat and try to fall into your drink. This trip, so late in the year, we saw them only in Germany. I should have studied French instead.

In a little while we began to get some answers to the mysteries described earlier. Police erected more barricades in an intersection as we watched, and crews used rubber strips to cover up the tram rails. A crowd began to form, and almost immediately applause began as some men in Lycra roller-bladed toward us at high speed. We had arrived in time for the world-famous Berlin Marathon - which apparently has a skating component the day before. First dozens, then hundreds of skaters went by, ranging from individual to team with custom jerseys. I'd never seen anything like it.

I was very excited to show Auberon the fact that there are some streets and neighborhoods in Berlin where you can walk for an hour and see a constant stream of shops on either side of the road. The same distance in other big cities we visited might have put us into suburbs or outside the city entirely. I got to see new parts of the city I'd never been to, and although the weather was a bit warm we had fine energy all day. We spent a while at the Berlin wall memorials, something I hadn't seen as much of before. They're huge and sobering, and I was able to draw for once on my history knowledge rather than my linguistic knowledge in conversation.

A single day only lasts so long, and we had split it about 60-40 between simply walking and goal-oriented sightseeing. At night we visited the Holocaust memorial - even more powerful and haunting in the dark - and turned in late to the hostel. Then it was back to the train station the next morning, to our destination of Hoisdorf in the countryside outside Hamburg.

Pictured: Blurry skaters, my new business venture, and a total of one remaining bike.

Big city Poland

In Krakow we were immediately taken with our biggest city since Moscow. As we left the train station buses and trams whizzed by and advertisements flashed over the heads of the shoppers in the crowd. It was very much like those montages of people from the countryside coming to the big city for the first time ever.

We had rented a room in an apartment, and the landlady came to meet us with her young son. I played peekaboo with him as she filled out our rental forms (by hand in duplicate using the same information I provided on the booking website) and told us not to have too much fun. Then we got the keys and went off into the night.

We had become accustomed to seeing the cities we visited close up shops and restaurants around 8 PM. Thus we practically stopped in our tracks when the quiet and looming apartment buildings gave way suddenly to a wide square that was lit up beautifully and filled with people. In the center was a market hall selling furs and jewels, and surrounding it were fancy restaurants with outdoor seating, flaming heaters fighting the September cold. We walked down one of the side streets and soon saw the old city wall, which unlike Xi'an was closed to tourists at that time.

The next day we planned to see what the city could show us. We went back to the main square a few times as well as toward the outer areas, breaking in Auberon's shoes some more and working our way to the big commercial shopping centers.

I had left my sweater in Augustow and so had to layer three or four shirts to keep out the chilly autumn winds. Auberon, too, lacked a good fall layer. We went through a few stores with typical indecisiveness and stinginess, but eventually picked up a pretty heavy sweater for me and a thinner turtleneck for Auberon, with some made-in-Poland socks thrown in at the end.

Auberon wanted dearly to take the bus to the town of Zakopane, about an hour and a half south toward the Slovak border and famous for its mountain hiking. The next morning I accompanied him (he used the words "grumpy" and "dour" but I simply felt I had seen quite a few rocks and trees already) to a small diner in Zakopane where we waited out the rain and discovered that our hiking map was uselessly out of scale. We picked a mountainous direction and forged ahead, crossing little streams and seeing the town quickly disappear into forest. A gate and entrance fee indicated that we were on the right track. The rain had stopped completely and we surged ahead at the initial climb, finding ourselves in half an hour or so above a very picturesque valley. Here I learned that Auberon likes to see nature at speed, so we continued on for a good deal longer on another trail.

We had the park almost wholly to ourselves, and on the one occasion that some rain appeared we happened to be near a shelter anyway. We filled the time with academic discussions, talking about the machine learning and artificial intelligence work that Auberon is interested in as an engineer. In an hour or so we ended up underneath some impressive switchbacks, and once these were crested we found ourselves at an even better summit than before. On the one side, the red roofs of towns and cities on the plains. On the other, hills becoming craggy rocks stretching into the clouds. As the clouds shifted we saw a glimpse of snow on the highest peak - so far had we come from the hot days in Vietnam.

But a sun low in the sky told us that we'd better turn back, and we began to retrace our steps. The whole way back was almost more beautiful than before, as the golden sunset pierced the clouds and shone through patches of rain. We reached the bottom just as darkness fell, and put off dinner in favor of getting the first bus back to Krakow.

Two full days behind us, we arrived at the station early next morning for our train to Berlin.

Pictured: the Krakow main square and the mountains of Zakopane.

Small town Poland

We arrived after two hours or so in Augustow, a lakeside town I had booked way at the beginning of the trip. I didn't realize that the place we were actually staying (a guest house/cabin/resort sort of thing) was well removed from the town, shopping, transit, restaurants, and everything else. We had a quick dinner downtown near the bus station and called a cab to bring us to our lodgings.

The next day we walked for an hour or so to get into town and find something to eat, and resolved to buy groceries in the evening. We got some food at a place selling pierogi, then headed to a shoe store where Auberon sorrowfully parted with his beloved yet disintegrating sneakers in exchange for more substantial trail shoes.

Augustow is a very small place that is mostly suburb. A park and square forms the center near the bus station, and then a little further north is the lake and many places that will sell you boat tours in the high season. There were certainly people around, perhaps it was even one of the most bustling tiny cities we'd seen. But soon we'd seen what we needed to and took a cab back to the hotel.

There we set out for the woods, and quite some woods they were. We hiked through trails and paths all around the general area, meeting as I expected nobody else. The trails were clearly marked and I imagine that in the high season it's common to see other hikers enjoying the thick birch groves.

The next day saw an incredibly slow start as we stayed in the room well past noon. The initial goal was to buy some train tickets at the station, but once we got ourselves over there it was clear that the station itself had been closed for years, and passengers were expected to buy the tickets on the train. Later in Poland we saw more boarded-up stations, replaced entirely by mobile ticket machines carried by the conductors. We walked around the other side of the outskirts, soon chancing upon an abandoned factory.

I've seen a lot of great pictures from abandoned Soviet industry, and last time I was in Poland I saw some enticing buildings from a distance. It wasn't until one of the last buildings we went into that we discovered a huge forge and crane-like apparatus, which was extremely interesting to look at and climb around in. It looked like it had been partially disassembled a while ago, as there were strange holes in the floor and inaccessible catwalks near the ceiling. Nobody came in or disturbed us for the duration of our visit.

The partying Lithuanians next door did their best to prevent it, but we did in fact get some sleep before our very early train. A few hours and a few transfers later, and we found ourselves in Krakow.

Pictured: the Augustow lake and one of the buildings at the factory.

Klaipeda and Kaunas

At this point in the trip we were playing fast and loose with plans. We knew that we wanted to spend time in Latvia and Lithuania, but since we could hardly tell them apart before visiting there wasn't much that we were looking for specifically. After much debate and checking of transit routes we settled on going to the coastal town of Klaipeda in western Lithuania (eastern coastline being fairly hard to come by).

We had initially scheduled just two days, but soon realized that it was worth much more. Our guesthouse was relatively near the old town, but we covered it in an afternoon. For tight-pursed backpackers, old towns filled with jewelry or amber shops don't offer much excitement. If you're into amber, though, Klaipeda is the place to go. Apparently they find it on the beaches in huge chunks and then make elaborate ornaments out of it.

Instead we took the ferry to the Curonian Spit, a long and thin landmass that goes from Poland through Kaliningrad and up to the ferry terminal at Smiltyne where we got off. Sightly disappointed that it was more than a day's journey to get to the Russian border (not that our visas were valid anyway) we contented ourselves with the spit itself.

Auberon loved the beach and decided to spend much of his time there, while I walked through the forests. I was quickly and completely bewitched by their incredible beauty. The air was perfectly crisp, the grass was astonishingly green, and when I stopped walking I could just hear trees and wind. The main path branched off into smaller paths, and I saw dozens of huge orb weavers in their webs, evidence that the larger part of the tourists had stopped tramping about for the season. I saw very few people except when near the beaches, and surely only a fraction of those who come at the height of summer.

The next day we planned to go out again. Auberon would continue to enjoy the beach with a picnic lunch, and I would rent a bike and see the forests at a higher speed. Alas, I discovered that the bike rental shops were closed in the off season, and I only found this out after an hour or so of walking around town. But I had a map, and I was already on the north end of town, and so I decided to keep going north.

I found forests soon enough, as well as a huge and sprawling adventure park which looked far too fun to ever be constructed in the United States. There were ziplines, balance beams, tightropes, swings, and more dangerous playthings all suspended twenty feet or more off the ground. There was a ticket office with ropes and helmets but I knew that if I was a student at the nearby university, that park is the first place to go after a night of drinking in the dorms.

I reached a tiny beach suburb after an hour or so of walking around the port and railway depot. There was not much to see besides some strange and old concrete bunkers half-buried in the sand and clearly still used by enthusiastic drinkers and urinators. I popped into the tiny town library and had a halting Russian conversation with the kindly librarian, explaining that I had worked in a library and that I liked to see what libraries around the world looked like during my travels (many people speak Russian in Latvia and Lithuania, and the guesthouse owner was the only person to tell me I should have learned some Lithuanian).

Returning to home, Auberon and I had a pizza dinner and planned for the next day's trip to Kaunas.

Auberon had been told that Kaunas was worth three hours at most, but like Moscow we found it a very agreeable place. We stayed right in the old town, in a hostel connected to a church. Our room came with a crucifix and a shrink-wrapped picture of a saint plus literature inviting us to retrace the pilgrimage of John Paul II around Lithuania.

Apart from a small fort near the church, there was a long pedestrian street that formed the main attraction of the city, starting in the old town and leading far further into a wider shopping area. I walked a good distance by myself the first night owing to Auberon's now-tattered shoes making it uncomfortable to keep up the hard miles. I saw some people square dancing in a park to a drummer and accordionist, forming a beautiful and wholesome scene.

The next day we walked more in a different direction and wound up at a large art museum, where we were some of the only patrons present. It had a large selection of more classical European art in the upper floors, with seascapes and wildlife sketches next to fine silverware and furniture. Auberon noticed a couple of pictures by the same artist who had taken a few liberties with proportions, such that when you looked closely Mary's eyes were the size of teacups and her legs were folded in knots around the Christ child.

From Kaunas we found an evening bus to Augustow, and the rolling plains out the window soon gave way to the forests of Poland.

Pictured: The fairy tale forests of Klaipeda, concrete on the beach, and the Kaunas old town.