Europe Travel Tips from Neville Millen, II
Neville Millen, back in Australia after two months in Europe, with a long letter on knowing where you are going, packing, and getting about. This is the most useful thing anybody ever sent this blog, so it is reproduced at length, with notes where something has changed since.
Know how to get from the station to your bed
"Prepare each city stop with detail of how to get to your sleeping digs from the train station as smoothly as possible. I cannot stress the vital need for this too much for a successful trip. Many people, young and old, leave a lot to instinct and luck. They are playing with fire in the long term, for out of your comfort zone the pressure of travel leads to stress in a big way."
If you take one thing off this page, take that. It is a ten-minute job on the train, sitting down, with a signal. It is a miserable one at eleven at night outside a station you have never seen.
Download the offline map before you go rather than when you land, and screenshot the address and the booking. Both survive a dead signal and a dying battery, which is exactly the state you will be in.
Book within four hundred metres of the station
"I find digs close to the rail or metro stations as a guarantee of success and as a guide to further easy travel while in the city. A short 400 metre walk is nothing but no more with a full pack. I rarely use taxis as a minimum trip in Europe is $15 US. It is quite easy to download metro guides but failing this seek out a guide while in the train station and always seek out the tourist-info office."
Four hundred metres is a very good rule and I have never seen it put better. Distance on a map is not distance with fifteen kilos on your back at the end of a day. His taxi figure is still roughly right, and ride apps have not changed it as much as you would expect.
Long hauler by night, city explorer by day
"If you do travel long hauls and are not too interested in the scenery, travel at night, get into a station early in the morning before or after rush hour, and then train out to accommodation and book in, leaving bags at reception. You can then get out and see the surrounding area, scouring for a cheap food outlet such as a mini mart or supermarket, a local bar with some character, and any other comfort zone close to the hostel.
If you do want scenery, and it is pretty spectacular along the Mediterranean or through the Alps, then choose a morning train, say about 10am onwards, and enjoy it like a coffee creme liqueur going down off the rocks."
A night train is a travel day and a night's accommodation at once, and it puts you in a new city with the whole day ahead. Night trains came back after a long decline: Nightjet runs across Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, and European Sleeper added routes north. A berth always needs a reservation, even with a pass and even in first class.
Big stations have left luggage, so if you arrive before check-in you can drop the bag and start walking rather than dragging it round for five hours.
Keep the clothes light, and wash them
"Don't commit the sin of taking the bloody kitchen sink with you. We have had to help several people get their 10 bags of gear on and off trains while we have one backpack each, half full of wash and wear underwear, slacks, shorts.
Don't forget the small elastic clothes line, some pegs and washing liquid. Clothes like this dry in summer in Europe in your room in less than 2 hours, especially under a moving ceiling fan or hang it out the window or on a ledge or in the bathroom.
Keep it light: one warm windcheater unlined or a thin sweater to cut the wind, mostly wash and wear stuff, micro fibre is tops. Good light boots, but especially one pair of top sandals with tread, the type you can wash in the sink every week and dry out. Make sure you have a hat or cap with air holes and use a non-oily sun screen that will not grease up all your gear and maps."
The whole of that stands. The washing-liquid part is the one people skip, and it is what makes four pairs of socks enough instead of ten. Merino has largely replaced the microfibre he is describing for anything worn next to the skin, because it dries just as fast and does not start to smell.
The non-oily sunscreen note is the sort of thing only someone who has ruined a map with a greasy hand thinks to write down.
The key to good packing is repacking
"Every push you have on to a new place, spend the night before balancing the pack and saving room. Put out gear you need the next day. Socks go inside shoes, roll long-side every shirt and pants and pack across the pack, not down flat into it, for this then allows the weight to hang down in lines like hung meat rather than across your back. Pack all batteries and hard objects in bags or wrap in clothes.
Take a plastic poncho big enough to cover you and a pack, a small fold-up umbrella, a toiletry bag that folds up and hangs vertical."
This is the best paragraph in the letter and I have never seen the technique described anywhere else. Rolling long-side and stacking the rolls vertically, so the weight hangs in lines down your spine rather than sitting across your shoulders, is a real difference you can feel within a kilometre.
"The key to good packing is repacking" is worth writing on the lid. A pack you have not rebalanced since the last city is a pack that hurts.
And a poncho big enough to cover the pack as well as you remains the correct answer to European rain. A rain jacket keeps you dry and lets your bag get soaked.
Narrow bags, because the aisles are narrow
"If you buy too many souvenirs or books, buy a small tow-on suitcase for about 20 euro in a market that will get down a train aisle. The aisles in European trains are small, as small as a plane, so the narrower a backpack and case the better the travel you will have, especially getting on and off in a crush at a station the train only stops at for a few minutes at most.
Don't carry anything you can't lift to an overhead rack."
Nobody thinks about the width of their bag until they are wedged in a doorway with ninety seconds before the train leaves. Both halves of that are right, and the second one is also a good general test of whether your bag is too heavy: if you cannot lift it over your head, it is.
Just because you are a traveller does not mean you should not be paranoid
"If you must use end of carriage lockers or open racks, sit looking towards it or chain it. This sounds over cautious but you see crying people in train stations who have had gear pinched from such places. Watch for guys, mostly, browsing from carriage to carriage, looking from side to side. They are not looking for a newspaper or a better seat, rather unattended bags. On the trains in Italy especially we were more wary on local trains."
That description of what a thief looks like on a train, someone walking the carriages scanning left and right rather than looking for a seat, is the most practically useful sentence in the whole letter. It has not changed at all.
Sit where you can see your bag. If it has to go at the end of the carriage, take the aisle seat facing it, and put a small cable lock through the strap and the rack. And keep your passport and cards on your body rather than in the pack, always.
Keep the conductors happy
"Always clip your rail pass, and your ticket must be authenticated before you alight. Keep the train conductors happy. Most are, but it is a stressful job and they have to deal with some desperate people trying on all sorts of cons."
Half of this has gone digital. The pass lives in the Rail Planner app and you activate a travel day there, so there is nothing to clip and nothing to argue about. Separate point-to-point tickets in Italy and some other countries still need validating before you board if they are paper, and the fine for not doing it is real.
The second half is timeless and costs nothing.
The rest of the kit
"If you buy water buy a large bottle and then transfer to two smaller bottles. Water is fine in most Euro cities and I drank it, but watch that you don't get ripped off. Water is charged at 2 euro a medium bottle in shops cold. Get to a supermarket and buy it for less than a euro and chill it in the room.
If you wear glasses take a spare pair as my wife did. She lost a pair but had the backup packed. If you take a towel get a micro fibre one that dries in 20 minutes, the biggest size, but we also have a smaller towel to wipe off perspiration. If you need a small torch get one that fits on your head, great in bed if the light is not too bright and for writing at night."
All of it holds. Better still, carry a refillable bottle and use the tap; water is safe in essentially every European city and refill points are common now, which removes the problem rather than negotiating it.
The spare glasses tip is one people only take seriously once.
He also carried a metal cup and a small immersion element for boiling water, which I would leave at home, partly because most hostels ban them and partly because his own alternative is better: a coffee and a pastry standing at the bar in Italy or Spain is still one of the cheapest good things in Europe.
And use the tourist office
He tells you to seek out the tourist information office, most of them at or beside the station. That reads quaint now and it is still right, particularly for the things the internet is bad at: which night bus actually runs, where the left luggage is, and whether the thing you came to see is shut for restoration.
"Hope this all helps you and fellow travellers again." It did, Neville.
Posted 02 July 2003 by Ant in BootsnAll Travel Community, Eurail Planning · updated by Chris