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[warpus]

Rent a car and drive?

Not an option and I do really like trains. Love going on train rides. I'm either flying or not going, and I'm probably not gonna go and stick to Portugal. Was a crazy idea anyway, but my brain likes to think outside of the thing

 

[Birdjaguar]

I undertand wanting to travel by train. I love it too.

 

[warpus]

I undertand wanting to travel by train. I love it too.

I am really looking forward to the Lisbon - Porto ride on the high speed train! Not quite as fast as what I rode in Japan, but I can't wait to sit back, feel the usual train sounds around me, and peek at the scenery. Out of all my trips I rode trains in Norway, New Zealand, Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand. Fun to experience rail infrastructure in different countries, even if in Thailand my knees were touching the Hungarian couples' knees sitting across from me cause the seats were so close together. But hey I paid $1.50 for my ticket and just sat sideways, and the knee touching was a good icebreaker for a conversation. But I digress. Trains rock

 

[Valka D'Ur]

If the trains and buses have large windows and the seats are comfortable, I'd do those. I assume there are periodic breaks to let everyone off to stretch their legs. And while I'm not familiar with the scenery in Germany, there must be something worth looking at.

Mind you, I prefer looking at mountains. Anything flatter than the beginning of foothills doesn't interest me because that's what we have here.

(even Red Deer to Calgary was worth looking at from the Greyhound, after I'd taken my physical geography course and knew where to look for the remains of what the glaciers left behind when they retreated; turns out there's some interesting stuff that most people never notice)

 

[Birdjaguar]

I am really looking forward to the Lisbon - Porto ride on the high speed train! Not quite as fast as what I rode in Japan, but I can't wait to sit back, feel the usual train sounds around me, and peek at the scenery. Out of all my trips I rode trains in Norway, New Zealand, Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand. Fun to experience rail infrastructure in different countries, even if in Thailand my knees were touching the Hungarian couples' knees sitting across from me cause the seats were so close together. But hey I paid $1.50 for my ticket and just sat sideways, and the knee touching was a good icebreaker for a conversation. But I digress. Trains rock

I road fast and slow trains all over China and just loved it. the fast ones were quiet and comfy with great seats and friendly people at ~300 kph. The slow trains were less comfy but everyone was very friendly.

 

[Synobun]

Okay so let's preface this with the fact that I'm a bit sleepy. And probably naive about Euro rail travel possibilities. On to the ranty questions:

I think I assumed that Europe was better connected with rail than it actually is.. or is it just that Portugal isn't really that well connected to the rest of western and central europe via rail?

It doesn't seem to be easy to figure out how to get from let's say Lisbon to Berlin or Dortmund via rail. It takes like 50 hours? That's like 45 km per hour. Is that right? I assumed I could ride through Spain and France rather quickly via the high speed trains.. and doesn't Germany have high speed trains? So what's going on? Each route I find has buses thrown in too. Is it that each country has its own rail system and they're not really that well connected? It also seems expensive and that it's way less hassle to just fly. But I love riding trains, that's why I was trying to see if this was even feasible.

Either way, it just seems like I was way too naive about this being an option. I figured I could get there in like 10 hours lol.. that'd be 140 km/h which seems reasonable. Is it that there's a lot of connections in between, and you gotta wait for connecting trains? and some cities aren't connected and that's why you gotta do a part of the journey via bus?

If there's a good website for European rail travel planning I'd love to see it. eurail.com seems to be useless, they just want to sell me overpriced passes.

Like I said this was probably naive, but I wanted to do like an 8 -14 hour long train ride to Germany one day, and see if I could grab a euro 2024 ticket. I'd pretty much have to fly, otherwise it's a 50+ hour train and bus ride?

There is no overall interconnected rail network across Europe. Your sense that you have to jump between networks is accurate, and a lot of the routes only run once or twice a day. Interrailing is a common vacation (within my Euro friend groups, anyway) and it's mostly realistic to do ~6 cities in 14 days. You can get a summer pass, which is what you saw from Eurail, and that pass is usable for the various rail services. You'd need to book a ticket independently with each country's train network. You would likely spend entire days in connecting cities while waiting for the next train.

You can use Rome2Rio and RailEurope for planning trips. RailEurope has bad context searching, though, so if you happen to pick an awkward route, it'll just tell you it's impossible. Rome2Rio works better for finding a realistic path from A -> Z, though even that is a little iffy. For example, if you input Portugal to Germany, it completely ignores the option of booking with CP (train service) in Portugal from Lisbon to Barcelona, and then taking a train from SNCF (another train service) to France. So it doesn't offer all the options available to you, but it gives you a general grasp on where you'll end up and what companies to book with.

Flying will be less of a hassle. It's the route I decided on. $250 and 3 hours on a single plane or $500 and 40+ hours on a half dozen trains. Tough choice!

 

[Birdjaguar]

@warpus Perhaps you could change your strategy and not try to go from Lisbon to Berlin. Instead, make it about traveling by train. Go from Lisbon to Madrid, stay a day or two; them head on to Barcelona for a few days and catch a train Lyon, etc. Keep it relaxed and flexible.Get to Germany in the end but focus on all the intermediate stops and connecting those stops with short hops where tickets will be easier to get on short notice. It will take you longer to but will likely be more enjoyable.There will be lots of interesting places you can visit between Lisbon and your end point.

 

[Samson]

It doesn't seem to be easy to figure out how to get from let's say Lisbon to Berlin or Dortmund via rail. It takes like 50 hours? That's like 45 km per hour. Is that right?

This is including stops? It is not something I have done lots, and not at all recently, but this general speed sounds about right. It is far faster than anything I have managed for that sort of timescale, but I would never travel that far overland in one go.

My attitude, and it probably is how the european travel system is set up, is that if you need to travel that sort of distance you fly. It is SO cheap, if you are flexable about the time I would expect the flight to cost less that just the food on the train for 50 hours. If you are going overland it is about the journey, and between Lisbon and Berlin is most of Europe. I am not sure what I would do, but one thing I would look at is how I could do much of it in sleeper carriages between days sightseeing in cities.

Rent a car and drive?

It is very difficult to do 1 way rentals in europe, it will cost ~ten times the cost of a flight in fuel, and you will spend a lot of the time in traffic jams. I would expect to be able to average over 45 km/hour if I tried, but it would not be fun, you would need to pay me more to do that than to program.

 

[Snowygerry]

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Berlin is typically a destination for night trains..though perhaps not from Lisbon that sounds more like the Orient Express

 

[Birdjaguar]

South Australia is the size of Texas + New Mexico, or France + Germany, about 85% desert, and the one major river is about 60km away. The water quality used to be quite poor. Until about 30 years ago, Adelaide and Aden were the two major ports where ships did not take on water . All South Australians have blue eyes and we walk on tiptoes outside to avoid attracting gigantic sand worms.

Is the Coorong as nice a beach as it appears from a satelite?

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Is the Coorong as nice a beach as it appears from a satelite?

Yes, but it depends on how windy it is and which direction it's from.
The fresh water (actually brackish) side of the Coorong is calmer, safe for swimming and a paradise for bird watchers.

The nearest land due west of south Coorong is around Cape Town in South Africa; due south is Antarctica. That's a very, very long "fetch".

The narrow stretch of water between Kangaroo Island and the mainland is very rough and littered with dozens of ship wrecks.

On the ocean side, don't swim in an all black rubber wet suit with your grey whiskers poking out from under a face mask. Don't bark!
Official advice: "Stay away from schools of fish and seals, these attract sharks."
They mean really, really big white pointers.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I guess it is another case of "everything in Australia will try to kill you" syndrome.

 

[warpus]

There is no overall interconnected rail network across Europe. Your sense that you have to jump between networks is accurate, and a lot of the routes only run once or twice a day. Interrailing is a common vacation (within my Euro friend groups, anyway) and it's mostly realistic to do ~6 cities in 14 days. You can get a summer pass, which is what you saw from Eurail, and that pass is usable for the various rail services. You'd need to book a ticket independently with each country's train network. You would likely spend entire days in connecting cities while waiting for the next train.

I was surprised because I expected Europe's passenger rail situation to be closer to what I encountered in Japan and further away from what we have in North America. Judging by all the passenger rail maps I have seen over the years that compared coverage on various continents I didn't think that my guess would have been that far off, and to be clear I didn't expect it to be anywhere near what Japan has either... just not so far away from it (in terms of the frequency and how connected everything is)

Eurail is also crazy expensive.. I saw a 4-5 day pass that only worked in Portugal for $400 +? and you gotta pay on top of that, for each ticket? In which situations does this sort of pass make financial sense? In Japan at least you can spend $600 on a 2 week pass, it'll be good on 95% of all rail lines in the country, you won't have to pay anything extra ever, and the trains arrive every 15 minutes. I guess i got a bit spoiled when I was over there..

@warpus Perhaps you could change your strategy and not try to go from Lisbon to Berlin. Instead, make it about traveling by train. Go from Lisbon to Madrid, stay a day or two; them head on to Barcelona for a few days and catch a train Lyon, etc. Keep it relaxed and flexible.Get to Germany in the end but focus on all the intermediate stops and connecting those stops with short hops where tickets will be easier to get on short notice. It will take you longer to but will likely be more enjoyable.There will be lots of interesting places you can visit between Lisbon and your end point.

I could do that but I think I would be rushing it, tbh. My friend is renting an airbnb in Lisbon for 5-6 weeks, and I have sent him money to cover half of the rental for 2 of those weeks. So I have a prepaid Lisbon HQ for 2 weeks of my trip. The third week I will probably want to spend in Porto. I had a wild idea that I could try to take high speed trains across Europe to Germany, maybe one overnight or something.. then maybe catch a match, and get back to Portugal after 2-3 days. But that doesn't seem possible, so I'm probably just going to stick to Portugal. There's enough to see there. I just always wanted to attend a Euro match in person, so I thought I'd at least entertain the idea of this happening on this trip. Ah well, next time!

Even taking a train from Lisbon to Madrid takes 10+ hours for some reason. So I'll likely not be going there either. I mean, maybe it's a scenic train ride? But that sort of destroys 2 of my days, so it doesn't seem like a good option. I suspect getting to Barcelona won't be any easier, but I haven't checked that yet.

 

[Synobun]

You pay on top of the pass if the company charges a reservation fee or if you upgrade seats. AFAIK, if you walk into a train station with a pass, it's unlikely you'll have to pay anything.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

I guess it is another case of "everything in Australia will try to kill you" syndrome.

They are mostly stories we've made up to keep timid foreigners away and to attract thrill-seeking tourists.

Most cultures have scary stories for kids. Germans have one about a tailor who rushes into a house with a large pair of scissors and cuts off the thumbs of naughty children. The main difference here is that all South Australian stories for kids are true, and they all have amusing endings.

A popular one is about how Brits nuked South Australia 9 times starting in 1953, but were seen off the premises in 1957, and then had to come back and clean up the mess they made. (Not quite as popular with teenagers.)

Another old favourite starts:
"There is an old, abandoned building less than a mile from here. That's where Rupert Murdoch started his first newspaper."
Kids love hearing how the evil old man runs away to England, and then to America where, if he ever after he dies, he will haunt them forever.

(Tony Blair's parents brought him here when was a baby, but we chased him away too.)

 

[uppi]

Okay so let's preface this with the fact that I'm a bit sleepy. And probably naive about Euro rail travel possibilities. On to the ranty questions:

I think I assumed that Europe was better connected with rail than it actually is.. or is it just that Portugal isn't really that well connected to the rest of western and central europe via rail?

It doesn't seem to be easy to figure out how to get from let's say Lisbon to Berlin or Dortmund via rail. It takes like 50 hours? That's like 45 km per hour. Is that right? I assumed I could ride through Spain and France rather quickly via the high speed trains.. and doesn't Germany have high speed trains? So what's going on? Each route I find has buses thrown in too. Is it that each country has its own rail system and they're not really that well connected? It also seems expensive and that it's way less hassle to just fly. But I love riding trains, that's why I was trying to see if this was even feasible.

Either way, it just seems like I was way too naive about this being an option. I figured I could get there in like 10 hours lol.. that'd be 140 km/h which seems reasonable. Is it that there's a lot of connections in between, and you gotta wait for connecting trains? and some cities aren't connected and that's why you gotta do a part of the journey via bus?

If there's a good website for European rail travel planning I'd love to see it. eurail.com seems to be useless, they just want to sell me overpriced passes.

Like I said this was probably naive, but I wanted to do like an 8 -14 hour long train ride to Germany one day, and see if I could grab a euro 2024 ticket. I'd pretty much have to fly, otherwise it's a 50+ hour train and bus ride?

1. Your math is way off. By car, the distance from Lissabon to Berlin according to Google maps in 2800 km. That would be 280 km/h average speed if a train was supposed to do that in 10 hours. At an assumed 140 km/h average speed for a more or less direct train, that would be 20 hours.
2. This also means that a car trip would also take 2 whole days (assuming you can spend 15 hours driving a day)
3. The first problem is that Lisbon is not very well connected to the east. Basically, you spend one day getting to Madrid (from Madrid you can get to Berlin in 24 hours)
4. Second problem is Paris. The French high speed rail network gets you to and from Paris, but you cannot easily get from a French city to another that is not Paris. The trains do not even use the same station, so you would have to make a journey through Paris in slow local trains (to a lesser degree this is true in Madrid as well
5. Third problem: The journey is so long that it must include the nights and unfortunately night rail has been quite diminished in Europe. As a consequence the trip would include multiple hour layovers, because there is no train in the middle of the night
6. Yes, cross-border (and thus cross-system) train travel is somewhat of a problem, but it has gotten better in the last 20 years (One problem is that the trains are incompatible, so cross-border routes need to use special dual-system trains)
7. The website for Deutsche Bahn https://int.bahn.de/en gives me 46 hours without any buses (but it does involve unspecified local trains in Madrid and Paris)

 

[warpus]

1. Your math is way off. By car, the distance from Lissabon to Berlin according to Google maps in 2800 km. That would be 280 km/h average speed if a train was supposed to do that in 10 hours. At an assumed 140 km/h average speed for a more or less direct train, that would be 20 hours.
2. This also means that a car trip would also take 2 whole days (assuming you can spend 15 hours driving a day)
3. The first problem is that Lisbon is not very well connected to the east. Basically, you spend one day getting to Madrid (from Madrid you can get to Berlin in 24 hours)
4. Second problem is Paris. The French high speed rail network gets you to and from Paris, but you cannot easily get from a French city to another that is not Paris. The trains do not even use the same station, so you would have to make a journey through Paris in slow local trains (to a lesser degree this is true in Madrid as well
5. Third problem: The journey is so long that it must include the nights and unfortunately night rail has been quite diminished in Europe. As a consequence the trip would include multiple hour layovers, because there is no train in the middle of the night
6. Yes, cross-border (and thus cross-system) train travel is somewhat of a problem, but it has gotten better in the last 20 years (One problem is that the trains are incompatible, so cross-border routes need to use special dual-system trains)
7. The website for Deutsche Bahn https://int.bahn.de/en gives me 46 hours without any buses (but it does involve unspecified local trains in Madrid and Paris)

Damn, you are right, I must have been looking at the direct as-the-pelican-flies distance and not the distance via roads or rail. Or I looked at the rail distance in miles, which is 1450 miles or so (2320ish km). Either way, good call.

But yeah, I assumed that European rail was a lot better integrated than this, in between national borders. I already knew that getting from Lisbon to Madrid via a train takes at least 10 hours, although a part of me was thinking "... that can't be right. I'll have to look again in a bit more detail"

This part of the trip is not going to happen. But that's okay, it will give me more time to focus on Portugal itself, and I will watch some of these Euro Cup matches in bars. Just gotta make sure to not accidentally wear any of the colours of the teams Portugal is playing against... Although I will no doubt be cheering on Iceland and the other underdogs, as I'm an underdog cheering kind of guy. Just gotta be a bit undercover about that.

 

[The_J]

I'll be going to Rome for 4 days (plus arrival + departure). I think I managed to get the most important things now:
- First day: Ticket for the Vatican. I guess that should fill most of the day?
- Second day: Plan to walk through the city, Trevi Fountain, Spanish steps, etc. Got a ticket for the Pantheon
- Third day: Ticket for the Colosseum + Forum + Palatine hill. I could not get a ticket with the additional sights, and my ticket allows me access to the Colosseum, but not the arena floor. Can do that when I'm another time in Rome, I guess? Should also take the whole day
- Fourth day: Plan to see the aqueduct park. No other specific plans

Anything critical I am missing? Do I need to squeeze in the Castel Sant'Angelo and the Galleria/Villa Borghese? (I am going for Roman stuff, obviously, rest not so important)
Any recommendations what to do in the evening? Besides a walk through the area around the Colosseum is apparently a must.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The Catacombs?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Are your tickets "skip the line"?

Don't forget the Vatican Museum while there.