Very Brief Update

I have been off the boat from Norway for a few days, but really rushing around in an attempt to get East (and warm). Murmansk for an evening. 30 hour train to St. Petersburg. Rest evening then a day of running my ass off taking pictures (up soon) and seeing the sights. Wonderful town. Really recommend it. Then another overnight train to Moscow. Walked around a bit today, but it was raining and Moscow seems much less interesting than St. Pete (though pics of the Red Square and such will be up soon also).

Tonight a 72 hour train to Irkutsk. Funny thing about all Russian trains: the schedules are all printed on Moscow time. I'll actually be going over five time zones to the east, but my ticket said I arrived around 11:30 p.m. Whoops. That's actually 4:30 a.m. local time. Will be interesting to find a hostel at that time of the day, especially because Irkutsk is not a big tourist town with tons of options.

When there, I need to get my Mongolian visa. I hope that only takes a day or two. Then off to Mongolia for a few days. Quite excited. It is one of the countries I looked forward to. Then another long train to Bejing for a few days and then finally south. To warmth. Whew.

Obviously will be offline for a bit. If there is power on the train, I will be doing some writing and photo editing, so I can upload in Irkutsk. Sorry for my lack of posting lately.

Feel free to hit the share button down below all of my blog posts, if one suits your fancy to share with your Facebook or Twitter friends (or other places, I think). I'd certainly appreciate it.

Hmmmm -- that's a lot of miles

OK, I spent all of today (since I screwed up my train ticket and didn't buy it for the right night train -- rocket scientist I am), working out my general plan to get from here to Hanoi by my target date of October 24th. Upon further review, I really do want to make that date now, if for no other reason that to see if I can. The last five or six weeks has been too easy (and expensive -- I need to get to Southeast Asia fast).

I think I left Berlin on the 25th of September, on the day I got my passport back with my China and Russian visas. I took a train from there to Malmo, Sweden overnight. Spent the night with my first couchsurfer (www.couchsurfing.com -- really good travel resource I should have been using more). Took the bus the next day to Oslo. Then the train the next day to Trondheim, where I am right now.

I should have then taken the overnight train that left an hour later to Bodo, Norway, halfway up the length of this long country, but it turns out when I bought my train ticket out of the machine in Oslo, I punched the wrong date and actually had a ticket for the 29th, not the 28th, so they wouldn't let me on the train. So, I'm taking the "correct" train in a few hours.

From Bodo, I will hop on a boat for four days that cruises up the coast to Hammerfest, my destination, the northernmost city in the world. It then continues on over the top of Norway and I get dropped off on the Russian border, at Kirkenes. One of the bonuses of going this way (aside from the pictures I am assuming I will be snapping the whole way), is that it is a working ferry boat that stops at every little town along the way. There are some towns north of Hammerfest -- though they claim they are the northernmost 'city,' so whatever is the northernmost whatever. . . I'm hitting it.

http://www.hurtigruten.com/norway/Fleet/Hurtigrutens-fleet-/MS-Nordlys/

that is the link to the ship I will be on for three nights/four days.

From there I take a bus to Murmansk, Russia. Then a train to St. Petersburg. Short stop there to pay homage to Crime and Punishment, which diligent readers with recognize as one of the banes of my existence on this trip. Then train to Moscow. Then a long, long train to Ulaanbaatar, Monogolia, where I will get off for a look-see for a bit. Then another train to Bejing. Then probably a place or two in China, and finally Hanoi.

In less than a month. This might not seem as difficult to you, as you sit there, as it now does to me, that I have finally researched it. That procrastination thing just puts off the pain of doing or knowing something, it never really does make it go away, does it?

Pull out a map or globe or check out googlemaps online. This is a long way.

I was able to get a very rough idea of the mileage by pulling up a website that has distances between places as the crow/airplane flies. Obviously, my route is going to be a bit longer, seeing as I am more the tortoise than the crow, but it will give you a reasonable idea.

I calculate it at approximately 7,300 miles (or 13,000 kilometers). Some perspective. That is L.A. to New York City. Three times. For my European friends, it is London to Cape Town. . . then back up to Harare, Zimbabwe.

If I make it by October 24th, I am celebrating with a great dinner. Perhaps some good local food, with a very nice bottle of French wine, to celebrate one of the cultures that has permeated Vietnam. And 'cause I love wine.

I'm buying. Anyone up for some eats? There is time to book a ticket.

Old Blog -- train trip to Seattle -- Jan 1, 2007

It’s Jan 1, 2007, and I’m in the train station in Emeryville, California, outside Oakland, waiting for the 10:15 pm overnight train to Seattle. It’s a 20 hour train ride, my first overnight train trip anywhere. Apparently, the train is running late. And I’ve gotta say, from appearances of the train station, train travel is far less interesting here than it is in Europe. I’m kinda worried about someone lifting my computer or camera equipment or Ipod while I sleep on the train.

So I’m sitting here writing this and watching ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ on my computer. Strange, unique little flick. One of the characters in the film, the boy in the dysfunctional family, has taken a vow of silence until he gets into the Air Force Academy. He’s apparently gotten this idea from the readings of Fredrick Nietzsche, who he reads constantly. As I’ve never read any Nietzsche, and more shockingly given my book addiction don’t even own any, I have no idea whether this vow of silence idea is somehow grounded in one of his books or not.

And in one of the amusing sidelights of travel, across from me in the train station is a guy currently reading Nietzsche’s Good and Evil.’ I love travel. Shit like that never happens in your hometown. Then again maybe it does, but you are so oblivious to the world when you are humming along in your regular routine that you don’t bother to look up and see the things in front of your face. Travel has a unique way of just putting you off your usual rhythms enough to provide you with the opportunity to break out of normalcy and see with a different sight.

Spell-check is a wonderful and simultaneously annoying feature of our modern, computer driven world (I’m sorry, but my mind works like this – multiple thoughts at the same time – branching out and back – makes sense to me, but must frustrate the fuck out of my friends, because I cannot tell a story worth a shit in my scatterbrained fashion).

I can’t spell at all. My mother is a wonderful speller, or at least so she says. Its not often you get to verify that particular boast from a parent – not often I edit her writing and its pretty easy to spell most everything you are ever going to get in a greeting card. Nonetheless, I’ll give her credit for it (like her claim that she’s never gotten a speeding ticket) and move on. I’m not one to begrudge someone from a little occasional boasting.

I no doubt have disappointed her in a variety of ways, not providing her grandchildren yet being one that manages to come up with exasperating frequency, but I think the fact that I can’t spell at all is much higher up on her list than any other reasonable person would put it. She blames it on my kindergarten and first grade schooling in Milwaukee, where apparently I went to some new, cutting edge, public school where they were using different teaching methods and didn’t teach us to spell phonetically. How do I know this fault of mine, and the cause she attributes it to, is on her list of lifetime disappointments? Because I think I’ve heard the story of the non-phonetic teaching from her about twenty-five times or so in my life.

Ahhh, back to spell-check, a true love/hate relationship. Since I can’t spell, I have to say that spell-check is a godsend. Without it my disjointed prose would be both disjointed and not in the English language, thereby doubling the annoyance of anyone happening to read it. That’s the love part of my literary affair with spell-check, but as sometimes happens, true love also gives rise to a occasional spot of hatred, in this case my absolute dread of seeing the word-processing program underline a misspelled word.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve become so dependant on spell-check that I barely make an effort – often just typing in a very rough approximation of the word I am trying to use and just letting spell-check offer me suggestions on demand – and so, in fact, I actually encourage these underlined words. But I just can’t let them sit there, underlined, without immediately using spell-check to correct the spelling. Right then. Not when I’m done with the paragraph, or frankly even the sentence. If I get one of those underlined words as I’m typing, I have to stop – have to – and crank up the spell check to see how to spell it. And because of the ease of spell-check, I also have no incentive to actually learn how to spell these words that I routinely misspell.

I think it’s likely that I’ll go to the grave without ever spelling restaurant correctly.

Yea, I know. I might need some therapy.

And I’m wrong again. My impression of US train travel from seeing the station is going has been quickly disabused. The seats on this train are big. There is lots of room to stretch out and there are also nice footrests on these chairs. I think it’s going to be exceedingly easy to sleep. I’m also less concerned about my shit getting stolen than I was before I got on – now watch when I wake up, something will be gone. And I really do like the herky-jerky movement of a train and the feeling you get of actually chewing up miles when its moving, sort of why I like driving. Plane travel is necessary, but you lose a lot of the experience of getting places by just flying over them, instead of driving or training along on the surface.

Before I boarded the train, I had a familiar knot in my stomach. It happens at the beginning of every solo trip I take. When I was in the terminal in Atlanta or Chicago, or wherever I was, before I was to board my first solo flight to Europe, I felt the same way, but more pronounced. I’d never taken a solo trip and I was going to a place where I didn’t speak any of the native languages – 5 years of German study aside in high school and college. I had no plan, no itinerary. I had a plane ticket into Munich, back from Lyon, a reservation for a rental car, a hotel reservation for the first night in Munich, and a Lonely Planet guidebook for Western Europe.

Hard to describe the feeling. Not fear, per se. More a trepidation of the unknown. And I liked it.

I vividly remember saying to myself “ok, you booked it – let’s fucking do this” and striding forward as if I was some 17th century explorer about to seek an unknown continent. Makes me laugh a little bit looking back, and if you haven’t done any solo travel it might seem laughable, but there is a totally different feeling of exploration when you are embarking on a solo trip verses one with friends or family.

So, as I sat in the Emeryville train station and heard the announcement over the loudspeaker that the 10:15 train to Sacramento, Portland and finally ending up in Seattle was pulling up, I packed up my stuff and walked outside to the platform. As the train stopped, I got that feeling – that anticipation of the unknown in the pit of my stomach – and it was like an old friend reminding me of why I love to travel.

And as I sit on this train around midnight typing this, looking out the windows as the lights of houses and small towns very slowly move by in the window, and listening to my Ipod (the single most indispensable travel aid yet created), I have my usual follow-up to the anticipation feeling – the smile of contentment from a journey begun.

January 2, 2007

First impressions are not always lasting impressions. Indeed, I slept well on the train and woke up round dawn as the train crawled through the snowy, hilly terrain of Northern California. I am a fan of US train travel as much as the European version.

Grandfather and granddaughter across the aisle from me. He put the granddaughter in the inside chair, protecting her from whatever may come. Her first train trip also?

Klamath Falls, Oregon. The train stopped here for five minutes to board new passengers and allow those on the train to get off to stretch your legs or take a quick smoke break, since the entire train is no smoking. I hopped off the train to see if I could take any good pictures in this industrial looking spot. No great luck on the picture front, but as usual something unexpected on the road – the strong smell of someone getting high, so strong I knew it couldn’t be too far from where I stood. Sure enough, I turn to my right and among the scattering of smokers was a middle aged bearded man wearing a skullcap and his female companion taking deep drags off a joint. About 10 feet away stood the train conductor assigning seat numbers to those passengers newly embarking at the stop. Tolerance in the Northwest or merely total olfactory oblivion on that part of that conductor?

And the long, slow rhythm of the train as it chewed up the miles all the way up the coast. Cars driving on the roads next to us. The tracks cutting through evergreen forests with snowcapped trees. As I plow through a couple books, occasionally taking time out to write, look out the windows, and observe my fellow passengers.

One of my best friends on the planet, Ken Kendrick, picked me up at the train station in Seattle. As I walked up to say hello, he greeted me back with, “Good to see you Hod. Why the fuck did you take the train?”

“For so many good reasons.”

Train Travel

July 17, 2007 – Old School Training from Salzburg to Prague

50 Euro and 40 cents. I think that translates to about $70 or so. Train leaves Salzburg at 9:10 a.m and arrives in Prague at 4:40 p.m., with train changes in Linz, Summerau, and Ceske Budejovice. The trains between Linz and Summerau and then Summerau to Ceske Budejovice are both Regionalzugs – regional trains. You should find time to spend some time on an equivalent train somewhere.

Regional trains are old school travel. No air conditioning. Big windows you can open up and feel the air rush through the train. The first train had normal rows of benches facing each other, two seaters facing each other on each side of the aisle down the middle. The second train had all compartments on one side of the train with the passageway down the other side. You’ve seen them in Bond movies, Sean Connery Bond movies that is. Sliding door opens into each them from the narrow hallway. Two high backed bench-type seats facing each other. Room to lie down and sleep if you’ve got a whole bench to yourself.

On a very warm summer day like today, when the train is chugging along and the wind is blowing through the cabin, its quite comfortable. When it stops at a station or out in the middle of nowhere inexplicably, it gets mighty hot, mighty fast. These are the trains that locals are using to go two or three towns over and travelers are usually carrying backpacks, not nice luggage.

And they are great.

I sat and stood in front of the open window for the entire first regional train part of the trip and just looked out the window and saw life pass by. Five minutes on one side of the train, ten minutes on the other. Small little towns passing by, and most times the term town is being generous. These tracks cut through farmland and pastures. Neatly organized rectangles of wheat, corn and hay with patches of trees interspersed in there. Most every open patch is cultivated with something, more so in Austria than the Czech Republic. Colorful two story farmhouses with deeply pitched roofs and always a nicely mowed lawn all around. Massive, neatly stacked piles of wood, tops covered with tarps to keep them dry, usually on the edge of the trees, but sometimes closer to the house. An occasional dog running around or a farmer on top of a tractor. A woman in the garden. Rolls of hay out in the fields, ready to get picked up and stacked somewhere.

And about every 15 minutes or so, the train station stops in these towns and villages. Mostly locals getting off with their bag or two in hand. I assume they’d been to some nearby shop or store a town or two down the tracks or went to visit friends and brought back some local produce and cheese. And occasional younger backpacker hopping off, for reasons unknown, as it doesn’t appear there is anything of interest around here, though it does look peaceful. The rest of us staying on the train, until it eventually stops at one of the bigger stations, so we can transfer to the next train.

And the official station person always standing out front when the train arrives, usually right under the sign telling the train passengers what station we’ve stopped at. All wearing identical red caps with black brims, navy blue pants, black shoes, a lighter blue shirt, with a red tie, which for some reason was universally tied too short and only made it down to the widest point on their belly, well short of their belt. One station, two, five stations go by and they are all there, at their post, all roughly the same age and appearance and all with identical clothes, down to the same shirt and tie, every time. It was like they’d been cloned.



But only in Austria. In the Czech Republic the stations’ condition was more run down and more disheveled. No station masters out front. I wondered whether the stations’ condition was because there wasn’t a station master – no one was there to greet the train -- maybe they didn’t have someone in a uniform in charge of the place. Maybe they needed an officious little soul that took the station under his wing (as they were all men, of course) and get it all ship shape for the passengers coming through every day and who stood out front when the trains arrived with a look on his face like this was his place, his station. The best little station in Austria. The Czech Republic needed some of those types, it looked like.

I imagine walking up and saying hello in one of the Austrian stops.

“Welcome to Gaisbach-Wartberg. My town. If you need anything, I’m the person to come talk to.”

Almost John Wayne style. With a German accent.

O well. Probably better I didn’t.

Only so many days left in your life to just get out and let life wash over you a bit. Waste as few of them as possible in an office, at a desk, or behind a counter. Those days happen 300 times a year. How many days to you get to spend on a train rolling down the tracks with all the windows wide open to the world??

German trains

German Trains July 14th

I forget the exact saying, but something along the lines of “running on time like a German train.” Nothing could be closer to the truth.

Taking a train back from Vienna today to Amberg, Germany, to hook up with my friends Steve, Dave and Melynn to hit another beer festival. As a sidenote, swapped a couple good emails yesterday with Dave about the evening. The key one being, “still looking for another designated driver to drive back from the festival.” This festival isn’t in town and is apparently a 30-45 minute drive away. The important thing I took from the message was that he at least had one designated driver, most likely Melynn, which meant to me that the festival is a go. Crowded single car is fine by me; I’ll leave it up to him if he can find a second driver. It should go without saying that I did not volunteer.

So when I buy my train ticket in Vienna, the ticket agent was nice enough to print out the itinerary, since I’d neglected to write down the connection cities and times and such when I looked it up online earlier that day to see when I was leaving. Problem was that the printout was all muddled because she had some printer problem. Some of the letters and such were printed over each other. I had a pretty good idea of the two cities I needed to change trains in, but was a little unclear what time the trains arrived and departed. After the first train stop, I figured out that the numbers were juxtaposed. On the printout I had, the departure was listed as 12:03, when in fact the real departure was 12:30. The last two numbers were inverted.

That’s all well and good -- figured it out and such – the platform numbers appeared to be correct, but I look down and see the arrival time and the departure time for the first town I need to change trains in: Regensburg Hauptbanhof, arrival 16:72 on platform 5, departure on the train to Schwandorf at 16:13 from platform 1. Switch the numbers and you get arrival at 4:27 p.m. and departure at 4:31 p.m. A smooth 4 minutes to get from the first train to the next. Admittedly, the train stations aren’t that big and getting from platform 5 to platform 1 at these places, but any platform whose number isn’t immediately adjacent to yours (platform 5 and 6 or 5 and 4 share the same area, depending on the train station), means you have to go up or down a flight of stairs, down a hallway or tunnel and then up or down another set of stairs to get to your platform. A diagram would be handy, but I’m not computer literate enough to put one in here.

I’ve missed plane connections when they’ve scheduled an hour for the transfer AND the plane I was on landed on-time (long, long bus ride in the Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris – I think I’ve written about it). The four minute allotted time that was scheduled for this exchange did not fill me with confidence. If the first train was just a little late. . .

But German trains really don’t ever run late. It is amazing. When they say they are going to arrive at 4:27 p.m. and depart at 4:31 p.m., they mean exactly that. It’s not an estimate, it’s a guarantee. Off the train, up the stairs, over the walkway, down the stairs, on the next train – with at least 90 seconds to spare. Piece of cake. Only an hour and a half away from another beer fest. Frankly, I deserve it.

Of course, I say this and then the next train is actually late. Its not like I’ve taken a ton of trains over here, but this is the first one that was more than a couple minutes late. It was actually about five minutes late. It must be a reasonably unusual circumstance, because right around when the train was supposed to arrive, the Germans all started looking at their watches, and then each other. Got up off the benches, if they were seated. Slung their knapsacks or whatever over their shoulders. Walked right up to the painted white line that marked the area you were supposed to stay out of when the train was arriving and started looking up and down the tracks – back and forth – good God, where could that train be? An orderly little German life thrown a minor


copywrited, 2007, by
Michael S. Hodon