Skip to main content

EuroTrip - What to know when planning your trip

Planning a Eurotrip can be daunting. First, that’s assuming that you have a Schengen visa, especially if you come from an African country. It is usually hard to get this visa, but the good thing is that once obtained, unless in unusual circumstances, a visa to one of the main European countries allows you to visit the rest - of course the UK is an exception.

Another good thing is that it is quite easy to travel across Europe. Again, once you cross into a Western Europe country, travel between the different countries is considered a local trip, meaning you do not need to have your passport stamped to cross from one country to another.

However, your passport may need to be presented for inspection at some crossings, and also on flights.


Milan’s retro and noisy trams await

More important, you need to carry your passport when crossing from one country to another and it is also highly advised to carry your passport when travelling from one city to another, even in the same country.

Within a city, you do not need to carry your passport and a photocopy may suffice, just in case. It is not common to have the police stop you and ask for your passport, unless in very unusual circumstances.

With your passport and visa in pocket, the next step tends to be the difficult one of picking what countries to visit and how to visit them.

Well, the most popular modes of transport in Europe are flights, buses and trains. With lots of low-cost airlines, flying around tends to be quite cheap - just ensure you carefully read the airline’s check-in and luggage requirements as this is where the catch tends to be.

In some countries, buses booked early are cheap and may be an option for journeys that are just a few hours long. Trains are also relatively cheap in other places like Italy and to some extent Germany and Austria. Trains in France are expensive. However, avoid train passes as these tend to offer poor value for money. It is cheaper to pay for each journey in full as a pass may still require you to book and partly pay for each trip.


More than 25 million visitors later, Catalonians are not pleased
Similarly, avoid travel agents such as Rail Europe as they tend to be expensive and also bear ticket delivery costs. If using a train agent, ensure that they are only billing for the ticket price and also check that the price is the lowest you can get. Alternatively, get one with a low and straightforward commission.

Your most trusted companion when it comes to travelling around Europe will be two apps. The first is Skyscanner, which allows you to compare flight options between different cities and also accommodation. It even allows you to filter accommodation based on how much you are willing to pay. Skyscanner is an aggregator app, meaning it picks the flight and hotel information from other websites, including the most popular ones such as booking.com. So, for most of the time, you will find that you are getting the best deals on Skyscanner.

GoEuro (now Omio) is the second best app after Skyscanner and is more useful in finding alternatives to flights - that is bus and train information. At some point, I had booked the wrong train on Rail Europe’s complex website, and as you can guess, there were no refunds. I was able to use GoEuro to find a bus on the same route for less than 10 Euros, which was even cheaper than FlixBus, which by itself tends to be pretty cheap. So you might want to compare times and costs on both Omio and SkyScanner. I prefer buses for short trips under 6 hours, while trains were generally good unless flights were significantly cheaper, such as in France and Spain.


Demo time at the Deutsches Museum
One more recommendation would be to get a local SIM card, or data plan, as this will be useful for navigating with Google Maps, or even searching for information. The good thing is that you only need to buy a mobile plan once within the European Union. Local mobile plans allow you to roam in other countries at the same rate as the country you originally bought the plan at - with some limitations.

I bought myself a Vodafone plan placing into consideration speed and reliability. This came with an app, which though in German, was somehow usable for what I needed - essentially checking how much data I still had left and knowing when to top-up my prepaid plan. It is important to note that plans cost differently in each country and hence you may find plans sold in one country offer more data than others. You will always pay the “home” price, even when roaming which means in some instances it may make sense to buy a plan in another cheaper country, depending on how long your travel is.

Enough about the planning, now onto my trip. I decided to stick to Western Europe due to budget constraints, foregoing the option of Greece. I also felt that the Spanish islands could make up for Greece. I could not find much to do in Eastern Europe and even so, the people I kept bumping into from that part of Europe assured me that being black, I may find the experience there quite racist and therefore not as enjoyable.


What about, breakfast somewhere in Italy?
Click here for another refreshing read on my experience in Munich, or skip the queue and get yourself my book on my entire trip in 9 cities for a limited deal of $1.99 only!


Reactions:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beers in Kenya: A sober opinion

I have had a short beer swigging stint in my life. It has however been long enough for me to share my opinions of Kenyan beer. Interestingly, over the course of sharing such opinions with other drunkards connoisseurs,  I have found that we all have different views as to what beer is the best, which one makes you too drunk, or which one gives a free,  extra hangover for every hangover you get from it.

For starters, like everyone else, I discovered that beer isn’t as sweet as it looks like in those adverts that show golden barley swaying in breezes,  happy men smiling and toasting chilled, foaming glasses of beer as a deep voice does some narration in the background.

Beer is bitter! Now, it turns out beer is intentionally made bitter. See,  beer shares the same ingredients as bread. The major difference is that bread isn't fermented. Bread is sweet, so why isn't beer sweet?
Post a Comment
Read more

The bitter story of the downfall of Mumias Sugar company

Have you heard the bitter story of Mumias Sugar?

Regarded by many as Kenya's most successful sugar miller, Mumias Sugar Company was a disaster waiting to happen.

Many pointed out how Mumias Sugar Company was a fortress in the wreck that is Kenya's sugar industry, only unaware that it was just a matter of time. As the old wise men said, "Ukiona cha mwenzako cha nyolewa, tia chako maji".

The proverb means that if you see your neighbour's head getting shaved, your head will soon be undergoing the same - you'd therefore better wet your head for a smoother shave, otherwise you will be forced to undergo a painful, dry, shave.

But what ails Kenya's sugar industry?

The Kenya sugar industry is under legal siege. The typical Kenyan issue of coming up with laws to tackle a problem is evident here.

Many of Kenya's sugar factories are owned by the government, and have slowly declined under mismanagement and corruption. The appointing of political cronies and trib…
Post a Comment
Read more

EuroTrip: Party in Mallorca

This post is the last in these series of my first EuroTrip. You can click here to read my previous post on my real experience in Madrid. https://blog.denniskioko.com/2020/01/eurotrip-madrid-in-2-days-it-has-its.html

I was headed to the airport, en route to my final destination - Mallorca pronounced as Majorca (with a Y in place of the J). The island of Mallorca had ended up in my itinerary by accident. When exploring cheap flights between Madrid and Munich - my starting point, it appeared that all flights went through Mallorca. It, therefore, made sense to have a stopover at the island.

Again, the Madrid airport is packed during summer and it would be a good idea not to have any check-in luggage for a European stop unless you love queueing in long and winding queues. The Air Norwegian flight between Madrid and Mallorca was hassle free and comes highly recommended.
Post a Comment
Read more

Kenyan products: The art of punishing your consumer

Peanut butter used to taste so good, but you could not afford it on the pocket money that you got back in school. A few years later, you have your first real job and your first "disposable" income. You buy your first real tub of peanut butter , probably the first in your life. You feel proud that Dominion peanut butter is manufactured in Ruiru, a town that you visited in your campus days to withdraw your pocket money , it was the nearest bank ATM to your campus. This was before Equity bank became a mainstream bank and decided to open an ATM in your campus, and before M-Pesa meant that you could withdraw your pocket money next to the kibanda  where you had your one meal of the day.

The peanut butter though is a far cry form the peanut butter you remember. It does not taste that good, and turns into some sort of stone barely before you are a third way through the jar. The stone is not a kind that you learned about in your Geography classes though.

Dejectedly, you decide not …
Post a Comment
Read more

Orange River Cellars Wines - Kenya's New Sweet and Dry Wines

There's a new panty remover wine brand in town.


It's from down in South Africa. In some of our geography classes, they taught of the Orange River down in South Africa. If you remember of such a lesson, it might have touched on the VanDerKloof dam on the river, or it's source from the Drakensberg mountains. I'm not sure though, whether they mentioned of the agriculture of the region, which apparently might contribute to your weekend activities.

There have been a host of South African wines, ranging from the boxed Namaquas (Namaqua is a place in South Africa, now you know) to the Mara's (yeah, it's a South African wine) to African's Five Chenin Blanc, which is among my favourite in Kenya.

Making its way into the market is the Orange River Cellars brand of wines. The group has a range of wines including boxed reds, boxed whites and probably the only boxed rose (pronounced rosay for wines) wine I have seen in this market.

Executives from the firm tell me that th…
Post a Comment
Read more