Taking the Train

I just got home from a vacation in and around the beautiful city of Montreal and a family reunion in upper New York State. While I was out there I met a girl who mentioned that one of the easiest/best ways to travel in Europe for an extended amount of time is by purchasing an Interail Pass which allows you to hop on the train in just about any European country. Now I’ve heard rumblings about this pass from some of my friends who have traveled abroad, but no one has really been able to tell me the details or really figure out what it’s called.

It turns out that there are two different passes that are available for purchase. The first one I’ve mentioned is the Interail which I mentioned about and is only available to those lucky enough to live in Europe already.

The second is the Eurail Pass which is available for tourists and can be purchased starting around 500 bones (a continuous 3 month pass comes out to $1395 CAN). The pass looks like a great deal considering how much ground I’m going to need to cover while I’m out there, but unfortunately it doesn’t work in some of the Eastern European countries that I’m keen to see (Slovenia, Albania, Croatia etc.). The pass itself can be bought a number of ways, all of which are confusing. For example you can buy a 22 day pass, or you can buy a pass for 15 days within 22 days. The idea (I guess) is to allow people who aim to stay in one place for 3 or 4 days at a time while traveling to get a better bang for their buck. Because I have no idea how long I expect to be traveling from place to place, choosing which one to get is pretty daunting. Fortunately that can wait until later while I procrastinate even more important things (like visas).

Another thing I plan to do before my trip is to attempt to learn a couple of languages that might help me out across the globe. At the very least it should help me to avoid the “deer in the headlights” panic when I find myself face to face with my first language barrier. I’m already somewhat fluent in English and I can understand French quite well which should give me a little bit of a leg up in understanding some Latin-based languages. In the grand scheme of things I plan to run across Oriental and Slavic Languages, so I’m going to try and pick up both Russian and Chinese in the next 10 months. Yes, this does sound as crazy to me as it does to you. I’m aiming to pick up several copies of books I’ve read (oddly Harry Potter jumps to mind) in the different languages so I can speed up the process of absorbing a new language, and I plan to do the same thing with movies. To top that off I want to grab a copy of the Rosetta Stone language program and spend (at the very least) the required 3 hours a week per language to learn them in time for my trip. My schedule just got busy.

The big list of things that I want/need to do to pull this trip just keeps growing, but I’m super stoked to start the planning this early and I can’t wait to really get into it.

The Via Ferrata

In my last post I mentioned the Via Ferrata as an idea for the European portion of my trip, and I was going to leave it at that for now. But... The reality is that these things sound just too cool to pass up, so I decided to put a little more effort into researching them and post some of what I found here.

A quick search through wikipedia shows that these things actually exist in quite a number of countries including right here at home in Canada. The first ones were built in Italy though and those are the ones that I'm really interested in.

It does look like a lot of the trips are guided, and therefore expensive (prices I've found range from 70 to 100 Euros per day trip), but I did manage to find one book that looks like it caters to those that want to get out there on their own. Via Ferratas of the Italian Dolomites: North, Central and East Dolomites v. 1 (Cicerone Guides) has an excellent introductory section that is available online at amazon.ca and can be ordered there for $17.55 CDN. I also found a cool site with a map of several Vie Ferrate in Italy (http://alavigne.net/Outdoors/FeatureReports/ViaFerrata/index.jsp). The cool part about this is that by looking at the map, I'm able to try and pick out a couple locations where I may be able to pull a couple of the routes together in a week or so. The early leaders are an area around Lago Di Molveno and another near Cortina D'Ampezzo.

Cortina D'Ampezzo

Lago Di Molveno

 






 
Over the past couple of days, I've been looking through my Year of Adventures book and I'm finding that a lot of the hiking type activities look really appealing to me including Climbing Munros In Scotland, Hiking Mount Olympus, and Hill-Tribe Trekking in Thailand. Its a good thing I work at atmosphere and have access to some very nice equipment, because knowing myself (I like to go stupid things for no reason) I'll probably end up in some sort of trouble at some point.

Still no luck putting together a plan to get visas... I'm scared to look at how much its going to cost.

What do I Think I'm Doing?

So the current plan is to go on an amazing trip around the world.Lets be pretty clear on this: I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. I'll be coming out of university next year with what looks like very little money and I'm planning to take that and go for broke on a 6 month trip from here in Canada to Europe to Asia and finally to Australia. Being a poor-ish university student working two jobs to pull through on rent and my next years tuition; I figure the next year and a half of my life should be very interesting and maybe even blog-worthy.

Step 1: Go read a book

I know I should be probably looking at visas or finding employment for when I finally get to Australia, but I figure I dont know the first thing about either of those daunting tasks so I'd start with something simpler. My friend turned me on to a book by Lonely Planet called "A Year of Adventures" which he picked up a couple of weeks back. It's a beautiful book for the around 23 dollars I shilled out to get it and shows popular locations and activities all around the world for each week of the year. I'm going to go through it over the next couple of weeks to find awesome things to do along the way (an early favorite is the Via Ferrata pictured below).

Check.

Step 2: Start a blog

I figure since I have no idea what I'm doing, maybe other people can somehow learn from my mistakes. Blogging is popular with all the travel-folk that I know and I'm not exactly one to run out and start a twitter account.

Check.

Traversing on Via Ferrata Della Trincee, courtesy of
http://www.colletts.co.uk/vf.html

Step 3: ???

To be entirely honest, I haven't exactly gotten this far. I've searched around the web to find all the logistics for the trip which I happened to open simultaneously in order to crash my web browser... Fail. Taking things one at a time I suppose my next step is to find visas, though I might use my upcoming visit home to convince my parents to help me out with part of the trip as a sort of graduation present (I know my dad has always wanted to go visit scotland).

I plan to use this blog to post things that I come across as Im planning my trip and to blog about what I do once I actually get my feet wet. If you're interested in following along as this poor, energy drink addled, ADD student struggles to make this amazing adventure happen, please do. Though if no one ever does read this, I suppose it might be less embarrassing.