Author: Kenn Nesbitt

Quite a few people have written to me commenting on how much fun I seem to be having. I suppose by condensing every two weeks of traveling into just a few pages, I have focused on the highlights; the fun and fascinating moments that punctuate this trip. In other words, this Cliff Notes version may make it look like all pleasure and no pain. Trust me though: sometimes traveling is damned tiring!

From the time we left Athens, until we arrived in Scotland, we were traveling non-stop. Staying in youth hostels and bottom-rung hotels, never getting enough sleep, driving hundreds of kilometers a day, trying to communicate in foreign languages, changing countries more often than underwear, these things can wear on you after a while, make you long for a home. By the time we got to Scotland, what we wanted more than anything was to stay in one place for two nights in a row.

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

Friday, November 4, 1994. Last night we got ripped off by a taxi driver. We had to be at the airport at 5:00am, so we decided to stay close by. The taxi driver took us to what he said was one of the only open hotels in the area — the rest being closed for the season. Our noisy, crappy little room was 17,000 drachma (about US$60). We found out later that we could have had a nicer room at a hotel across the street for 11,000 drachma. What the taxi driver had done was to take us to a hotel that would give him a kickback. There was so much traffic noise that we only slept about four hours.

Our flight from Greece to Germany was a discount flight on Czechoslovakian Airlines, changing planes in Prague. This was about US$100 less than a direct flight on Lufthansa. Unfortunately the plane to Prague arrived late and our luggage missed the connection to Munich. So, instead of being able to leave Munich immediately, we had to wait 8 hours for our packs to arrive on the next flight. By the time they arrived at 7:00 in the evening, we were too exhausted to go anywhere, having been awake since 3:00am. We picked up the car in Mauern and checked into a nearby hotel.

Saturday, November 5, 1994. The first day of our drive to Britain, we decided to head to France and see how far we could make it. Our first stop was a small town called Ulm, which is in Southern Germany, near Stuttgart. Ulm is famous for two things: it is the birthplace of Albert Einstein and it is home to the tallest cathedral in the world, the Ulm Munster. Munster is the German word for cathedral but, yes, as the name implies, this particular cathedral is monsterous. It took over 400 years to complete, from the 14th to 18th centuries, and it’s intricately carved steeple is over 530 feet high. As you look at it, you can’t help but wonder about the awe it must have inspired in the farmers and peasants who came to see it in centuries past. This building is one of the world’s most powerful testaments to the glory of God. Of course, it is also a powerful testament to the wealth and power of the church. For 2 DM, you can climb the 50-story screw staircase to the top of the steeple for a view of the town and surrounding countryside, but we were eager to push on. We stayed just long enough to walk around the town and to admire the Munster from the ground.

Paint It Black

Just past Ulm is the famous Black Forest, which covers the most of southwestern Germany. Unfortunately, we only saw it from the Autobahn on our way to France, so all I can tell you is this: Most of the trees have unusually dark trunks, hence the name. The forest is especially black at this time of year when the leaves have fallen from the trees and there is not yet snow on the ground. Away from the Autobahn, on the smaller roads leading into the forest, there are many small villages that cater to tourists and hikers. I hope we will see some of these villages on our next trip to Germany.

Sunday, November 6,1994. Last night we made it as far as Reims, which is about 100 km northwest of Paris, and stopped for the night. The youth hostel in Reims is described in Let’s Go as being “as close to heaven as a hostel gets.” Although the hostel is quite clean and completely adequate, it seems the author of that statement must not have seen the hostels in Scotland. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

One thing we particularly enjoyed about this hostel was the showers, an efficient invention called “Presto Douche”. I know, I’m amused by the simplest things, but this is really something we ought to have in the States. Pressing a button gives you a huge blast of warm water that lasts for about ten seconds; just the right temperature and just long enough to get thoroughly wet. Then you soap up and shampoo, and press the button again for another ten second blast of water; just long enough to rinse off completely. These showers are so efficient, yet with no sacrifice of water pressure, that I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of them.

It’s a Small World

Today we spent the day at Euro Disney, just outside of Paris. I had never heard anything about Euro Disney, except that it was a financial disaster, with high operating costs and poor attendance. My conception was that Euro Disney would be something like Florida’s Walt Disney World; a larger complex than California’s Disneyland. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Although Euro Disney is situated on an enormous plot of land, the park itself is smaller than Disneyland. Moreover, the park has very few attractions and only two rollercoasters are operational (a third, similar to Space Mountain, is scheduled for completion next year). Some of the attractions — such as Star Tours, Captain Eo, and the Haunted Mansion — are identical to the ones in Disneyland. And some — such as the Pirates of the Caribbean — are better (Disney’s animatronics have improved significantly since the original was built).

All in all, we enjoyed the day at Euro Disney. The dearth of attractions was offset by fewer people and shorter lines. Also, the park has a decidedly French flavor. One good example was the Pirates of the Caribbean singing “Yo Ho, Yo Ho, a pirate’s life for me” in French. One thing we found irritating was spending US$3.00 on a popcorn, only to find it sweet instead of salty. We have since discovered that all of the movie theaters in the UK serve popcorn either sugared or salted, your choice.

After EuroDisney, we bypassed Paris, and tonight we are staying in a skid-row hotel in Lille. Lille is near the English Channel and tomorrow we’ll take a ferry to England. Lille is actually a very pleasant city, but the hotel is a real dump and we are both getting pretty stressed out about moving so quickly. I think we are ready to stop for a while when we get to the UK.

Comin’ Into London From Over the Border

Every border is different. Since most of the EC countries have no border checks anymore — as I witnessed between Germany and Belgium, and again between Germany and France — I was expecting our entrance toEngland to be a snap. Au contraire. England is very picky about who they let into their country. After disembarking from the ferry, we drove to the border guard’s booth and played twenty questions. Ann had no problem, since she already had completed paperwork for a work visa, and she is coming to the UK as part of a student work exchange program. But, with me, the border guard was adamant about seeing some proof of my solvency: How much money did I have on me? Did I have bank statements showing my balances? Where was I employed? How long did I plan to be in the UK? What would I do for money while I was here? Could I prove that I could remain solvent during my stay here? I didn’t realize I was being a smart-ass when I told him I had 10 pounds on me. Trust me on this one: being a smart-ass with border guards only makes things worse. He finally seemed satisfied with the fact that I had several gold credit cards and a couple of magazines with articles I had recently written.

Now that was pretty stressful, but it was just an appetizer for the real stress: driving on the left side of the road! It was white-knuckle driving from the minute we left the border station until we parked the car at the hostel in London. When we finally arrived, I was in a genuinely foul mood. If you’ve never driven on the left before, take my advice: don’t do what I did. Don’t drive straight into central London your first time out. London streets are unbelievably confusing. When you add to this the fact that everyone is on the wrong side of the street and all those stupid roundabouts go clockwise instead of counter-clockwise, you’d have to be insane to try it without a few days practice in smaller cities. Unfortunately, I didn’t know any better. I’m just thankful that Ann was with me to read the map so I could concentrate on staying to the left.

We spent two days in London (in two different hostels) while Ann attended orientation at her work exchange program, and now we’re on the road again, heading north for Scotland. Although her original plan was to work in London, I talked her out of it. Every large city we have been in has been more expensive less interesting than the smaller towns. We need to find someplace that is large enough for her to find work, but small enough to be less expensive and less congested.

I Just Want to Stop

As I mentioned earlier, the hostels in Scotland are truly amazing. Our first stop was in Melrose, about 40 miles south of Edinburgh. We stayed there for two days — only because we had not spent two days in the same place since we left Greece — and then pushed on to Edinburgh. In both cities, the hostels were large, clean, and inexpensive. The kitchens are spacious, with lots of dishes and cooking equipment. By cooking your own meals, you can live on less than L10 (about US$16) a day.

A popular way for budget travelers to see Scotland is with Haggis Tours, a tour company that runs buses from hostel to hostel in a circuit around most of the country. For L50, you can see all of Scotland, getting on or off the bus as often as you like. Haggis, by the way, is Scotland’s national dish, a concoction of sheep offal (lungs, heart, liver, fat, etc.) and oats, all wrapped in the sheep’s paunch (that’s stomach to you and me). Haggis and black pudding (a sausage made mostly of blood) are immensely popular here. We’ve tried haggis, and it’s better than I expected, but the black pudding just isn’t calling my name.

We’ve decided to stay in Edinburgh for the winter. Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland, so it’s large enough for Ann to find plenty of work, but it’s still not the urban sprawl of London. Ann will be working here, and I will focus on my other writing and programming. We didn’t make it to Turkey this year, so it remains on the top of our list of places to see beginning in the spring. And that’s it for this installment. In fact, this will be the last travel diary I will write until we start traveling again in a few months. In the meantime, feel free to email me here. Before I go, I’d just like to say that I’ve enjoyed having you follow me on this trip. I committed myself to writing these periodic updates not only as a way to keep my family and friends informed of my adventures and mishaps, but also to give myself a clearer memory of this time when I look back. And it has also given me a group of virtual traveling companions; friends who are along for the ride, if only in spirit. Thank you all

Copyright © 1994, Kenn Nesbitt

Tuesday, October 18, 1994. The train ride from Cinque Terre to Rome took most of the day. During the last hour of the trip, a lively young Italian man named Tonino (that’s “Little Tony” to you and me) struck up a conversation with us. Soon, all three of the Italians in our compartment were happily jabbering in broken English. I love that singa-songa accacenta that Italians have, pronouncing every syllable as though it ends with a vowel. Tonino’s English was the best of the three, as he had spent six months studying in England.

Roam if You Want To

On arriving in Rome, Tonino showed us where we could pay to store our packs for a while, where to buy tickets for the trip to Brindisi later in the evening, and then he took us on the bus to the center of the city. Although he lives in a small town in northern Italy, he is very enthusiastic about Rome. I have to say, Tonino was so friendly, so unlike most of the Italians we have met, that I was on my guard, expecting him to turn into a con-artist at any moment. Fortunately, he was just what he seemed to be: a genuinely nice guy who wanted to be helpful and show off his country.

We have five hours between trains, so Tonino has pointed us to a few of Rome’s major sites: the Colosseum, the Unknown Soldier’s monument, Benito Mussolini’s former residence, and the Piazza Navona, an enormous baroque plaza with marvelous statues. We are not staying long enough to see Vatican City and the Sistine Chapel, which is okay, because I’m already thinking that five hours in Rome is too much. For all of it’s amazing monuments and ancient ruins, Rome is still noisy, crowded and dirty. Even crossing the street is frightening, navigating through flurries of scooters and lunatic drivers.

Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz, Oh What a Relief It Is

As a traveler, one of the inconveniences you learn to deal with is the state of public restrooms. Rule number one when traveling in Europe — especially southern and eastern Europe — is carry your own toilet paper. As you travel south or east, the conveniences begin to disappear. The first thing to go is the cleanliness; European restrooms can be nauseatingly filthy. Next goes the toilet paper. By the time you get to Italy and Greece, you’ll find that most public toilets do not have toilet seats. And, by the time you get to Turkey, there is no toilet at all; just a hole in the floor and a place to put your feet as you squat.

Rome is so filthy that we are unwilling to use most of the public restrooms. This is where McDonald’s comes in handy. Although many travelers consider McDonald’s to be a cultural cancer metastasizing in the previously healthy cities of the world, a global homogenizer destroying cultural and scenic uniqueness with the artistry of a bulldozer, the restaurant equivalent of the Borg, McDonald’s can nevertheless be counted on to have more-or-less clean restrooms with toilet seats and toilet paper.

If you’re wondering, the entire reason for this discourse on McDonald’s and the state of European toilets is just to tell you about an ingenious invention we discovered in the restroom at McDonald’s of Rome. It is called McWash. The best inventions are the ones that are so obvious, you wonder why no one thought of them sooner, and McWash is just that. To wash your hands, you put them into an opening in the wall labeled “McWash”, which sprays them first with soapy water, then with rinse water, and finally dries them off with hot air. Maybe we’re just easily amused, but both Ann and I came out of our respective restrooms saying “Wow! What a cool sink!”

Stealing the Night Away

Wednesday, October 19, 1994. There are thieves on the night trains in Italy. Ann and I are on an overnight train from Rome to Brindisi, again trying to sleep in one of the six-seat compartments in which the seats pull out to form a makeshift bed. These compartments are not very deep; short enough that my foot touches the sliding door. Twice during the night, someone opened the door — waking me up — and then left. At first, I thought nothing of it; just a passenger looking for an empty compartment, and in too much of a hurry to actually look in the window to see the sleeping people. But at about 4:00 am we both woke to find a man standing on our “bed”, reaching for Ann’s pack. As we sat up, he grinned sheepishly and said something like “skyoozie” as he backed out of the compartment.

When you wake from a dead sleep into a confusing situation, your mind shuffles the possibilities and spits them out like a blackjack dealer on speed. At the end of the deck, only one possibility is laying face-up: that man was a thief! He was after our stuff! Nevermind that Ann’s pack weighs about 30 kilos and he never could have gotten it down without waking us. Nevermind that, even if he had gotten her pack, there was nothing of substantial value in it. But it pisses me off that there are people making a living stealing luggage from sleeping train passengers in Italy. When I was traveling with Michael and Bronwen, Michael mentioned that he had lost his Eurail pass to a pickpocket in the Rome train station. Just be forewarned: always be extremely cautious with your belongings when you travel; there are lots of scumbags eagerly waiting for a chance to take them from you.

I’m So Tired, I Haven’t Slept a Wink

Our travel guide recommends one of the hotels in Brindisi, Italy on the off chance that you are forced to spend the night and suicide is not an option. This is only a slight exaggeration. Brindisi is a miserable little town. If not for the ferry port, Brindisi would be a miserable little town with no reason to exist.

What made Brindisi even worse is that we had had a whopping 2 hours of sleep on the train and an 11 hour layover before our ferry left for Greece. The ferry ride was long enough for another 6 hours of sleep, but the sea was rough and we did not sleep well. Corfu — the one of the largest Ionian islands, on the northwest coast of Greece — greeted us with buckets of rain. Needless to say, we were less than cheerful by the time we arrived.

The only thing we had been told by previous visitors was “Don’t go to the ‘Pink Palace’.” The Pink Palace is apparently a drinking fest cleverly disguised as a hotel. At the Corfu ferry landing there were representatives of several different hotels, including the Pink Palace, vying for guests. We and several other passengers went with a man named Spiros to the hotel “Vrachos” on Pelekas Beach. As soon as we checked in, we went to our room and slept for the rest of the morning.

Pelekas Beach is on the west side of Corfu, the opposite side from the ferry landing, so we would never have found it on our own. I’m glad we went with Spiros, though, because both Pelekas Beach and Vrachos were an excellent choice. At US$6.50 per night, the rooms are not luxurious, but Pelekas is one of Corfu’s finest beaches, and Vrachos has everything you need, including a restaurant and bar, a small shop, cheap scooter and snorkel rentals, etc. You would have to work hard to spend more than US$20 a day. Although we originally intended to stay only two nights, we ended up staying nine; it’s easy to get stuck on Corfu. After a couple initial days of rain, we spent a week sunbathing, bodysurfing, snorkeling, riding scooters around the island, watching the sunsets and hanging out with other guests.

Two Tickets to Paradise

Saturday, October 29, 1994. After three false starts, we finally escaped from Corfu. Our plan was to take a ferry to Igoumenitsa on the mainland and then catch a bus to Athens. The ferry part worked out alright, but we just missed the 11:00am bus. The next bus wasn’t until 6:30pm, which would have put us into Athens at 3:00am. Instead we opted to take a bus to the nearby town of Parga — a nicer town than Igoumenitsa, according to our guidebook — to spend the night.

Jackpot! If you are looking for an idyllic Greek seaside resort in which to spend a month or two, you couldn’t go wrong by choosing Parga. Parga is entirely a tourist destination; there are only 2,000 residents but, during the summer months, the population swells to 45,000. This means that 90% of the housing in Parga is hotels and private rooms for rent. Double rooms rent for 4000 – 7000 drachma (US$18 – US$31), allowing for a very affordable vacation.

More importantly, Parga is one of the most scenic vacation spots we have seen. It is a small Greek village of narrow, winding flagstone streets, built on the slopes of a hill that falls away into a clear, waveless sea. On the hill overlooking the town is a minimally restored thousand-year-old Norman fortress and, a hundred meters out in the water is a small white chapel on a tiny island. Both the island and the fort are well lighted after dark, ensuring that Parga is as beautiful at night as it is in the day. On Sundays, the town is transported to another world by the wailing songs of the Greek Orthodox priest, broadcast all morning over loudspeakers and echoing off the hillside.

We are told that, in the summer months, Parga is standing-room only but, because it was late in the year, there was hardly anyone there; we felt like we were the only visitors in town. And, even though it was nearly November, the weather was perfect. We intended to stay only a single night, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave in less than three. This place is like a drug. Sunbathing on warm, pebble beaches, swimming in the crystal blue Mediterranean, dining on fresh fish and red Greek wine in quiet waterfront restaurants; I’m jonesing just thinking about it.

Don’t Drink the Water and Don’t Breathe the Air

Athens sucks. The air is so polluted you might as well take up chain-smoking. The traffic congestion and noise pollution are so bad, and the city is so unrelentingly ugly that we can’t wait to leave. Admittedly, as ancient ruins go, Athens has the best in the world. Aside from the pyramids of Egypt, the Athenian ruins are among the only “seven wonders of the ancient world” still standing. In the three days that we’ve been here, we’ve seen the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Acropolis, and several other ancient ruins, plus the marble Stadium where the first modern Olympics were held in 1896, a re-creation of an ancient Greek stadium. We’ve also visited Athens’ famous flea-market, Greece’s National Garden, and generally tried to see much of what Athens has to offer. Our conclusion? Athens is a dump of world-class proportions. We give it a big thumbs-down. Sure, use the Athens airport as a stepping stone to the Greek islands or coastal resorts, but don’t plan on spending any time here.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Friday, November 4, 1994. Ann and I are on a plane from Athens to Munich right now. In Munich we will pick up my car and drive to England and Scotland. We got so heavily side-tracked in Greece that we have decided to postpone our Turkey trip for a while.

Until next time, I’d like to leave you with this parting thought. Although I don’t think I’ve said it explicitly, you’ve probably noticed something from these travelogues that I’ve been noticing all along: smaller towns and villages are consistently more pleasant and interesting than large cities. Since, for example, we’ve all heard of Rome and Venice and Florence, it’s convenient, when planning a vacation trip to Italy, to think in terms of spending it in those cities. My advice is this: read your travel guide carefully with an eye toward the smaller places. They are usually cleaner, cheaper and friendlier. Taking the time to search out interesting little villages is almost certain to be more rewarding than heading for the big cities.

Copyright © 1994, Kenn Nesbitt