Below are some lessons I learned on my 6 week backpacking adventure through Eastern Europe.
Preparations:
1) Know your travel buddy. It is important that you have a similar travel style. If one likes to look at all the tourist sights and one likes to go exploring away from the tourists you are not going to have a very fun trip. Compromising is great but even that has limitations. Each of you will get frustrated and grouchy at least once on the trip anyway. If your travel styles don’t mesh, you will experience frustrations & grouchiness more often. Thankfully, Nicole & I travel very well together!
2) Agree on a budget. If you and your travel buddy are not on the same budget, there will be problems.
3) Make a budget. Even if it’s just a very loose budget, know how much money you have to spend in each city on food, tourist attractions & souvenirs for each stop & day. Knowing about how much you have to spend on food each day will help tremendously to make sure you have enough money for food by the end of the trip. Knowing how much money you need for each stop will help you avoid ATM & bank fees because you can get money out of the ATM once.
Packing:
1) Don’t pack more than you can carry. Backpacks are the way to go because suitcases can be very annoying when you have to walk half a mile or so to your hotel over broken or cobblesone roads. With backpacks, it’s not problem. And backpacks are easier to navigate on & off busses and local city transportation.
2) Don’t pack everything you think you need. Believe me. You don’t need that much stuff. Even if you do, it’s easier to learn to do without than to lug all that unnecessary weight around. Pack layers so you can make multiple outfits out of a couple pieces. You only need 2 maybe 3 pairs of shoes. I really could have gotten by with one pair – my chacos. It’s probably a good idea to take a good pair of tennishoes too. But anything after that is just extra weight and takes up space. (Make sure you have shoes you can wear in hostel showers or to the beach. My chacos worked for everything!) I travelled with my tennishoes & chacos.
3) Stay at places with washers. We made sure we had a washer every couple weeks so we could wash clothes. Then you don’t have to pack as many!
Touristing:
1) Watch out for Sundays. In Europe, most things are closed on Sunday or have shorter hours. This goes for a lot of tourist attractions and grocery stores too. Don’t plan to stay in a city for one day if it’s on a Sunday. You won’t be able to see much.
2) Look up national holidays. They can help or hurt you. We didn’t get to do anything in Zagreb because of a national holiday but we got to join in a citywide celebration in Budapest.
3) Splurge every once in a while. Don’t miss out on experiences because of your budget. Of course you won’t be able to splurge every time but if there is a day trip or an attraction you really want to see, go. At the end of your trip, if you are over by a couple hundred dollars are you really going to regret going on that one day trip or seeing that awesome attraction? Probably not.
4) Don’t buy lots of souvenirs. They will just add weight to your backpack to lug around. Instead, take pictures. Make memories. Have awesome stories to tell when you get back. If you must pick up souvenirs, makes sure it’s something small and light – like a postcard or a sticker.
5) If there’s a free walking tour, do it. The free walking tours are so informative and usually pretty entertaining because the guides are working for tips. You’ll learn most of the history of the city and when you go exploring on your own, you’ll see so much more. Plus they usually give free city maps.
6) Don’t always follow the tourists. Where there are large groups of people, there are large groups of people – which I hate! Try wandering the back streets or seeing what’s around the next corner. You’ll never get a real feel for a place if you are surrounded by masses of tourists all the time.
7) Avoid traveling during peak tourist season. I hate crowds of tourists! It is a pain to travel when they are around. August is the worst in Europe because everyone has the month off. It’s best to travel at the end of September or spring. Unfortunately, on this trip, our timing was decided for us and it was during the peak of tourist season. If you can help it, don’t travel during peak tourist season!
8) Get a map. In a couple cities, we never had maps and we ended up just roaming around the city not really knowing what all we were seeing or where we were going. I felt like we wasted a lot of time in those cities.
Travel:
1) Google it. With the internet to share stories, odds are, someone has been to where you are going and blogged about how they did it. So if you google it, you will probably find how to get from point A to point B.
2) Use airbnb. They are awesome and we used them quite a few times on our trip with no problems. In fact, they even came to the rescue once!
3) Read reviews. Whether it’s of places to stay, eat or see, read them. If there are a couple bad ones, you should probably stay away. If there are lots of bad ones, stay away. But people are usually pretty honest on there and you can get a good feel for a place. If you aren’t sure, don’t risk it. You don’t want to end up in a place with bedbugs!
4) Book things before. We booked our lodging before we left and as much of the transportation as we could. This paid off because we didn’t have to worry about finding a place to stay once we got to a city.
5) Don’t double back to bus stations. Many bus stations are out of the way from the cities we visited. Since we had to buy most of our travel tickets at bus/train stations, we tried to purchase our tickets to leave when we arrived. Even if we couldn’t, we could find out when the bus/train left. Otherwise you can waste at least a half day making the trek back out to the station just to figure out when you need to be there on your departure day.
6) Luggage fees. They sneak up on you. You never know when you have to pay to put a bag under the bus. Sometimes you have to pay and sometimes you don’t. It’s usually no more than a Euro but better keep some change around in the local currency in case you have to pay.
7) Trains don’t mean trains. If you buy a train ticket, ask the ticket person if you are taking a train the whole way. Unfortunately, we were naive enough to think if you bought a train ticket, you took a train. Turns out, more than once, we took a train partway then got onto a bus. Trains are cheaper but slower. If I have to take a train and a bus for a “train” ride, I’d rather pay more & get there faster and take a bus the whole way. So make sure you ask if you’ll be taking a train the whole way. People somehow forget to mention if a bus will be involved.
Next time:
Roadtrip! I think next time, I would like to rent a car. Public transportation limits you to where you can go – even when you are in a city because you are totally dependent on it. But if I had a car, I could stop at smaller towns and villages or make day trips without having to worry about train & bus schedules or needing to find a place to spend the night in out of the way places.
What travel lessons have you learned?