Europe a la Carte Blog

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Italy has a number of mysteries and historical secrets; Rome itself is full of them, especially the papal secrecy surrounding Vatican City.  But one of my favourite Roman mysteries is much more accessible and a lot more fun.  The best part – it’s free.

The perfect time for this adventure is on a sunny afternoon – be sure to head out a couple of hours before sunset.  Depart the Metro at the Circo Massimo stop, near the Circus Maximus.  You can easily walk here from the Roman Forum or the Colosseum.  Behind the Circus you’ll see a large hill – this is the Palatine Hill, one of Rome’s seven hills.  Head up (this is a bit of exercise, but feel free to take your time, there is no hurry) the main road, which winds around a number of quiet neighbourhoods.  You’ll probably not see many tourists, even in the height of summer. 

After a bit, you will reach a point where vistas of the city open up to your right.  Take time to explore these beautiful orange groves and church courtyards, where the gorgeous trees bathe in the afternoon light.  Photo opportunity after photo opportunity will avail themselves to you.  

Keep pressing forward until you come to somewhat of a ‘courtyard’ – normally you will find a couple of ‘carabinieri’ (police) will be hanging out, as they do here in Italy.  In the middle of the courtyard on the right, you’ll find the Priory of the Knights of Malta, with a large green wooden door.  Take a look through the open keyhole and this is what you’ll find:

          Copyright by Andrew Hayes

Amazing, isn’t it?  It is hard to capture on film the amazing view – the perfectly manicured hedges culminating in a picture postcard perfect framing of Saint Peter’s basilica.  The authenticity of the view has been doubted, but one thing is sure:  you’ll never know unless you go and check it out yourself.

In my ongoing quest to conquer and make sense of the web’s online content, I landed my browser (currently Google Chrome, for those of you interested) on Eurocheapo. Their tagline, ‘we’ve been there’, inspires confidence, and for good reason. The site has city guides on various European destinations, large and small, and these guides are – to put it succinctly – excellent.

Lisbon - A EuroCheapo Destination - Copyright by Andrew Hayes

City guide features include:

- General City Information: A standard guide includes Getting Into, Getting Around, Expect To Spend, Budget Tips, Car Rentals, Day Trips, Links, and Reading List. That’s a lot of great information. You might be lucky in some locations to get some extra-secret info in the ‘EuroCheapo Insider’ feature.

- Hotel Reviews: In addition to the ‘standard’ information on offer (hotel address, class, location, rates), editors have included reviews of numerous hotels in the target destination.

- Blog News: On the right side of the city homepage is a listing of all the blog post related to the destination. This is quite useful as you don’t have to search through the blog. Posts are timely and useful, such as tips on free attractions, news, and interesting tips.

- Neighbourhood Guides: Cities have a listing of neighbourhoods along with hotels that can be found in each neighbourhood. This can help you get your bearings before travel, especially in large towns like Paris or London.

While EuroCheapo is very hotel-orientated, there are countless amounts of additional tidbits and information. There is a useful cheap flights page but this is not linked in with the city guides so be sure to have a look. There is also a railpass information page, but readers should note that these rail passes are not valid for residents of the European Union, the Russian Federation or Turkey.

I really like this site, although I can’t help but sometimes get lost in all the information available. The site requires a lot of scrolling – but do scroll down as the ‘in the spotlight’ section contains some must-read details.

EuroCheapo currently has 26 city guides (although one of them – New York – is decidedly not a EuroZone country, although I am not complaining) and I would highly recommend it for travel advice. Rumour has it more city guides are on the way.

You can read the Europe a la Carte guest interview with Tom Meyers, founder and editor-in-chief of Eurocheapo. Of course, don’t forget us here at Europe A La Carte for our own unique budget options and travel tips.

British Flags in London - Copyright by Andrew Hayes

I just spent a week down in London with my mum. It was per her request as she’s never spent time there, and I was not actually looking forward to it as I never found London to be one of my favourite places. However, I am happy to report we had a good time and I was thoroughly impressed with some of the places we went, no matter how touristy. London is a sprawling and expensive place though, even for those of us earning in pounds sterling. I did find a couple of tips that helped us survive and have a few spare notes left for souvenirs at the end of the day:

- Get an Oyster card. Without a doubt, the Underground is an essential travel tool. Zone 1 one way tickets cost £4. With an Oyster card (which costs £3), each Zone 1 one way ticket is £1.50. You need to use it twice and you’ve recouped your investment. Makes sense to me. Just look for the blue box in any tube station or ask the attendant for assistance. You will need to pre-fill the card before using it but can put as little or as much as you want – although do not put too much in case it is lost or stolen. Keep fit and shorten your travel times with this previous tube tip.

- The pub is still king. Pubs often serve up some of the best traditional food at very reasonable prices. And what better place to get a touch of old world charm, free of charge? One of the pubs I found was lovely was The Swan (66 Bayswater Road) – they have a delicious carvery for only £8.95.

- Don’t forget the markets too. Borough Market is one of my favourites for delicious grilled cheese and chips, and it is very cheap!

- The grass is green in London. Yes, that’s because it rains a lot, but it does not rain as much as you might think. If you happen to find yourself blessed with some decent weather, why not spend some time in some of London’s popular parks. I personally love the expansive Hyde Park, where you can stroll about the gardens around Kensington Palace or reflect at the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.

We have had plenty of other tips here at Europe A La Carte in the past, including free walking tours, the free Thames River Path (one of my favourites without a doubt!), and hiring bikes.

Today, if you don’t mind, I would like to start a discussion. Actually, what I’m doing is trying to pick the collective mind of Europe a la Carte readers, but don’t want to look so needy. So here’s your topic: Guidebooks, or, how I learned to stop worrying and love tourist traps.

Oh yes, a controversial topic and one which I’ve already loaded. I am, as I’ve already mentioned a lot, a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kinda traveller. I don’t like being organised, I revel in the freedom of not having any idea what today brings. Itineraries are useful bits of paper when I’m getting someone’s address and plans are things used to build skyscrapers. But when you move around in this fashion it really is vital to have a quick, encompassing source of reference to work out where, tonight, you’ll lay your head.

Home on the Road by tpuyol

Of course there is a big problem associated with this: you see only the things that your guidebook tells you are good, and you go to places that are filled only with other tourists clutching their copy of The Book in sweaty hands.

Now the web offers a lot of information, this blog is being one example, but the problem is how to distil it. It can take a lot of surfing around to gather the specifics you are after. If I’m in a small town outside Ljubljana internet access may not be a given - plus on the road I’d rather be experiencing the country than communing with Google.

Where Shall I Go? by The Wandering Angel

The behemoth of all guidebooks, Lonely Planet, is usually the first I go to because I’m familiar with it and can quickly get the addresses I need. Let’s Go and Rough Guide are also hugely popular, but I always had issues with the accuracy of the maps – although I haven’t bought one in a few years now so that may have improved. Regardless of which you pick though, you’ll still find yourself in a sea of other foreigners, not a local amongst them, all looking for an “authentic” experience. I have even switched to German guidebooks to try and avoid this trap, but that’s just resulted in being surrounded by German, Austrian and Swiss tourists and waiters speaking in the Teutonic tongue.

So I need your help. Where do you go for information? What are your favourite, or least favourite, guidebooks? Where are their failings and strengths? Who can help me work out where I should be sleeping tonight, in a small town outside Ljubljana?

Generally, I’m a very laid back traveler. When flying I’ll have the plane tickets booked in advance but often not much else. However right now I’m in the middle of planning a big trip - four people, two continents, three months. I’ll have people joining up and leaving again; planes, trains, cars and ferries to book; weddings and shows to get to; tourist sites to see and hopefully some time to chill as well.

So I’ve been looking for tools to help me get this all organised. The first I came across is TripIt.

Tava dentro da minha bolsa hoje! by Ana Cotta

My travel agent gave me my eticket details with a checkmytrip.com reservation number, so I logged into that website and called up the booking. I could email directly from there to plans@tripit.com, with my email address as the sender and all the details were automatically loaded into my trip for me with TripIts Itinerator. Pretty nice - it saved a lot of typing and playing around and it works with a large number of airlines and reservation agents.

TripIt also has a toolbar extension which allows you to clip websites and put directly into your trip plans. This isn’t as good as it could be - I’m spoiled by Google notebook which takes snapshots of the page and inputs the entire content rather than the link. Also TripIt inserts this information as unsorted notes - you have to go to your overall profile and put them manually into the specific trip and even then they remain unassociated with any specific journey or location.

Travel memorabilia by alex-s

The inbuilt travel guide is a work in progress. Currently it strips out Wikipedia entries on the destination, scours Flickr for photos and hooks up with Eventful to find out what’s happening when you’re there. This is a nice start and it will hopefully become more extensive in later versions.

Overall TripIt is a nifty web application for organising your journeys. The automatic creation of an itinerary just from forwarded emails is simple and quick and the ground work has been laid for a very extensive tool. It is still in it’s beta testing phase, so there will undoubtably be many more improvements made in later releases but already I’m quite happy with it.

Does anyone else use a different planning/organising tool? Let us know in the comments - I’m always after the “perfect” solution!

Cinque Terre Reflections - Copyright Andrew Hayes

As previously reported on Europe A La Carte, the picturesque fishing villages of the Cinque Terre are on the up.  However, things have gotten a little out of hand – with tourism in the area skyrocketing, things can feel distinctively crowded here in Cinque Terre.  You do not have to feel smothered, though – here are some suggestions for finding some breathing room:

• Instead of staying in one of the fishing villages themselves, try setting up base camp in Levanto.  Here you can find number of wonderful shops and restaurants (including more pesto that you could ever imagine) and there are plenty of B&Bs here.  Levanto also has costal walks in both directions which are a bit more rugged but nearly empty.
• Keep heading north to the wonderful towns of Portofino and Santa Margherita.  You can walk from the train station in Santa Margherita to the coast in Portofino via a well-marked trail.  Portofino is the best place to watch the sunset, and you will be guaranteed a good meal in Santa Margherita.

• Take the train to Corniglia but instead of climbing all those steps to the city centre, head down to the quiet, clothing optional beach.   As you exit the train platform, to the right look for a narrow flight of stairs and head down.  Keep going alongside a brick wall until you reach a metal gate with a bell on the left side. Walk through the tunnel and pay five euros for a little piece of paradise.

For more information, check out the region’s tourist bureau website.

We’ve all had those moments - standing in a foreign city, knees squeezed together as you try and work out if you have enough money to buy a coke so that you can use the toilets of the cafe across the street. Public toilets, as has been discussed here before, can be a bit of a hit and miss affair (my personal advice: do not, under any circumstances, consider using the airport’s toilets in Hurghada, Egypt) and simply finding some can be a challenge in itself.

Thankfully we can turn to some online databases to help us locate toilets.

Broken Toilet by borges,

The Bathroom Diaries
This has been online since 2000 and includes 12000 toilets from all over the world. Users can add their own toilet discoveries to it. Some entries haven’t been updated in a long time (they predate the introduction of the Euro), but it’s a great start and the Golden Plunger awards for the best bathrooms are worth checking out.

PublicToilets.org
A simple database which is user generated and covers a variety of countries across the world, but not as many toilets as the other sites. This also includes entries such as “My place, ring the doorbell marked Arnold” which, although amusing, I’d probably bypass.

Find a Toilet UK
The lack UK public toilets has been covered before, and now someone has decided to help us out of the dilema. Findatoilet has 3700 public toilets in the UK documented and is not reliant on user input for growth. Search the database by going to the mobile phone link - which of course also means you can search direct from your phone. Exactly what you need when you haven’t checked it out beforehand and find yourself hopping up and down on one leg.

Diaroogle
Now it isn’t Europe, in fact it’s only one city specific, but Diaroogle is a new database for public toilets in New York. The entries are practical and slightly more unusual than you find in the other databases including, for example, The Museum of Sex and the US Bankruptcy Court.

Take to the Skies - Copyright Andrew Hayes

Sometimes, I tend to over-analyse things. This is usually the case when I am searching for cheap airfare! I previously reported my thoughts on Dutch website cheaptickets.nl but I do have another trick up my sleeve. Kayak is a slick and easy-to-use website that allows endless amounts of manipulation to your search results to help you find endless possibilities of flight combinations. I have yet to figure out why they called it Kayak, though. Maybe because it glides easily through the airline reservation systems? Or because it is a tool that is simple, easy, and does exactly what you expect?

Good

- Multilingual service (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian)

- Easy to use controls allow you to select flights within certain timeframes or airline alliances

- Has ‘weekend’ getaway search option

- Flight Buzz section with up-to-the-minute deals

Bad

- Depending on which flight you choose, you might have to register at a new site to actually book (Kayak does not do any of the bookings, they are merely a screening tool.)

Rating out of 10: 9.5

You start but simply defining your search criteria, and then you will quickly be presented with a large amount of results. Then you can use the Filters on the left side of the screen to easily narrow down your choices by Number of Stops, Airline Alliance, Flight Times, Aircraft Type, Trip Duration, or Price Band. It may sound like a lot of choice but really it is easy! Each result has all the necessary details on-screen but by clicking the ‘details’ link, additional information is displayed. You can even click on a flight that you definitely want and it will reconfigure to show all the flights that will pair up with the one you chose. When you are done, click the airfare link and you will be taken to the corresponding website for booking.

Before you buy, be sure to check out our other air travel tips on Europe A La Carte.

This cozy, contained capital city will delight you to no end—as long as you can stay away from the tourist mobs. Prague attracts thousands of tourists round the year, and if you go in the summer, especially in August when the Czechs are mostly all on vacation, you might think that the beauty of the city is there just for the gaping tourists. But if you know the right spots, you can avoid the crazed crowds and see Prague in your own peaceful way. The guidebooks tell you to go Charles Bridge and eat some over-priced goulash, but don’t be like everyone else! See Prague in a unique, back alley way, see it like the locals see it. Hop on and off the trams (make sure you have a daily or weekly transportation pass first) and see where you end up, watch the people around you. The further you get outside the center, the more chance you will have to get a deeper insight into Czech culture and how the locals really live in this gorgeous city. If you see a shadowy little storefront marked with the word “Antikvariat” go inside. You will discover a wild array of antiques and used items, ranging from books to records to stamps to furniture to jewelry to kitchen gadgets from way back when.

One big tip—stay away from the major attractions like Prague Castle, Charles Bridge and the Clock Tower on Old Town Square. If you really want to see them, go at night or very early in the morning. Charles Bridge, and the view from it, is absolutely gorgeous at 4 a.m. in the summer, when the sun is just waking up, and no one is around except for maybe a few passionate photographers, setting up their tripods.

Petrin Hill, at the Ujezd tram stop, is a popular spot for tourists and locals alike, but the hill is large enough that you won’t keep running into others and can relax in shade of the abundant cherry, pear and apple trees. Halfway up the top, stop and sit for awhile at the Petrin Café that offers you one of the best views in town. An even better space for taking in the aroma of Prague is Letna Park, the largest park in the city complete with a stunning view of the Vltava River and the city beyond it…and don’t forget the beer garden either for a real glimpse of Czechs enjoying life–in nature, with friends at the table, a beer in hand and canine companion nearby.

As modern tourists we tend to travel fast. We fly in, grab a hotel room (or hostel bed), see all the tourist sights, try a local meal or two and zip back home again. We stay within cities, we are surrounded by other tourists and we do it all in a hurry before our days or cash run out. We don’t soak in ambience, we dive bomb into it and think that the few drops clinging to our hair are equivalent to the pruney-skin permeation of a long and leisurely exposure.

Personally I’m an exponent of slow travel, a term I thought was particularly nifty until I googled it when writing this article and discovered that I didn’t coin the phrase. My version of slow travel is camping. Travelling leisurely through the back country, off the highways and into smaller towns. Getting to meet the locals in an environment (the communal lifestyle of a campsite) which encourages interactions (unlike the private sterility of a hotel room).

Camping lets you soak in the atmosphere

Of course camping isn’t always feasible. If you go with your own car, caravan or mobile home you are limited by how far you can drive in the allotted holiday travel time. Driving three days across Europe only to have four days there and a three day return journey is not anyone’s idea of fun. Some ways around that are to look at carrying your car on the train – something which saves time, stress and petrol. You can also carry the minimum camping gear with you on a flight and locally hire a car or just rely on public transport to get you around. Or you can rent the entire get up once you arrive.

But the prices do start paying out, especially if you are travelling for a longer period. The average European campsite costs 15€-20€ per night, including electricity, with each person costing around 2€ extra. Showers may or may not be an additional cost (usually 0.50 – 1€). This is similar to a bed in a dorm room of an inner city hostel for one person, but in a group becomes extremely cheap and is far more appropriate for travelling with a family. Finding campsites is easy – decent maps of the country will have many marked and usually your home automobile club will have lists of international campsites, ones which they have even checked out and rated.

You aren’t necessarily limited to remote campsites on the outskirts of town either. If you are travelling in a self-contained motor home there are many sites which allow for short stops, overnight stays and replenishing water/emptying waste. The E6 on the coast of northern Norway is dotted with them, in Germany they are called Stellplätze, in France Aires De Service, and many are free of charge.

The varying sizes of mobile homes

I’m not really encouraging the use of the large mobile homes. These white ships are gas-guzzlers, can be dangerous on narrow roads (especially when driven by people unused to the size) and cannot be driven into European city centres because of their size. Smaller vans, such as VW camping buses, can be and tenting means you have a car available for local trips without having to pack up your campsite every time.

Of course camping doesn’t work for everyone, nor does it work for every situation. It requires a certain amount of preparation and investment in gear, the availability of a little more time and a roughing-it mentality. While northern France’s freezing autumn rains may send even myself into the shelter of a local chateau, as a budget summer travel option it is a relaxed, slow travel affair.