A New Piece over on Verge

I've been writing a series of articles for the Canadian travel magazine, Verge. This series of articles are basically focused on teaching English around the world while traveling (or vice versa depending on how you look at it!) They've introduced a new aspect to their website where you can read some of their pieces online, check my latest one out here.

The Long Ride Home

Bus trips returning home sometimes seem like the longest on earth. 37 hour South American odysseys pass by in the blink of an eye when you compare them with a milk run that turns your 300km return home journey  into a 5 hour trial.

There is something anticlimactic about coming home, the route is familiar and you can navigate the station at the end blindfolded...even the hopeful pickpockets are familiar to you.

Coming home from Madrid the other day I caught the last bus heading this way and unbeknownst to me (I didn't check the arrival times on the internet), the last bus was also the creamiest of milk runs, a bus that stopped at every fly-blown village that lay between the capital and home. At a certain point we even stopped in the middle of nowhere to let someone out, enough to drive you mad...

That is if you let it.

Was I in a hurry? No, not really...an hour here or there wasn't going to change the fact that I was going to get home too late to really 'do' anything anyways.

So I settled back and began to enjoy myself. I decided that even the rather large Nigerian woman sitting beside me (well to be honest, actually her girth was invading my seat) was somewhat interesting.

The ride is beautiful, especially at that time of day. The sun was setting, the central mountain chain turning bluer and bluer on the right. The burnt fields taking on a golden hue aquired as the fierce summer sun abates ever so slightly. Patterned olive groves and unlikely vineyards spread out from the motorway and soon the Holm Oak forests let me know we were closer to home.

A change in perspective, a reminder that, while no longer 'new' to me, the beauty was there to enjoy if I just remembered to look for it.

Careful with the Language!

A view of a Platskart wagon

While I'm a huge train fan, I am certainly no fan of the supposedly 'national' train company here in Spain, RENFE. I've always wondered why the prices for train travel here in Spain were so much more expensive than bus travel, but it was the Barcelona-Madrid High-Speed link that pushed me over the edge.

Under the pretext of greening travel here in Spain, the supposedly 'public' company promised to reduce the ludicrous and terribly polluting air travel between the county's two main cities by linking them with a high-speed train link. A link that would take people between the 2 cities in about the same time as flying. Sounded great, but when they linked the 2 cities, they also cut all regular travel, leaving only the very expensive AVE high-speed link or the carbon spewing highway.

Now it seems that they and other companies around Europe have taken their deception to a new level.

An article in the Guardian the other day warned travelers about the possibility of train fares being much more expensive when using the English Language versions of web pages to book tickets. Turns out that the native language version of some European train sites are up to 60% cheaper than the English versions. A local blogger tested it and indeed found that the prices were a lot more expensive, though he found a way around it, check the link for details.

Anyone heard of other situations like this around Europe?