Starting out: London to Venice
Whilst waiting for my house to be rented out and the Eurostar getting more expensive by the day, I decided to book the FlixBus overnight bus from London Victoria on Friday 1st October 2021. Scheduled to depart at 10.30 pm, at 10.50pm there was no sign of it, I took to Twitter to ask, and lo and behold a bright green double decker bus appeared. We set off shortly before midnight, however as we had missed the 2am P&O ferry sailing, we had to wait at Dover for the half past four ferry. I had assumed that Flixbus would take the continual Eurotunnel shuttle. Onboard with the lorry drivers, the Routemaster canteen was the only restaurant serving food, so 4am I ate the most tasteless English vegetarian breakfast I have ever eaten, to the sounds of Europe's great unwashed truckers snoring in any available seat. I lay down on deck for a while, but couldn't sleep. We sped to Lille, but we had missed the connecting bus to Paris. I walked to Lille Gare Flanders, and for €52 picked up the TGV to Paris, bringing my spend on getting to Paris to €125. I won't be recommending Flixbus anytime soon other than those who are desperate or poor. Or both. Masks were poorly implemented on Flixbus, but SNCF left you in no doubt that the mask mandate was in force on their trains.
With the house rented, my travel budget is around £1000 per month including accommodation , food and travel.
I have long wanted to get my Yoga teacher license, and after this summer's actions with Extinction Rebellion in streets of London, the journey to India has to be overland. I am lucky that this winter, I have the time, and with no commitments in the UK, my son going to live with his dad's family, I am free to pursue my ambition.
I plan to travel across Italy, down the coast of Croatia in October, then across Greece & into Turkey by ferry. As my budget is about €11-12 per night, I'll be staying in hostels in Split & Dubrovnik. By the time I reach Turkey I hope to be able to afford Airbnb, or even a cheap hotel in Istanbul. From there to Ankara, to meet with an old University friend, and then to Lake Van, and then across the border into Iran. Iran is a vast country, and yet I applied for, and was "approved" for a 7day transit visa. So I'm going to have to race across Iran by train. I'm super excited to visit a country vilified and sanctioned by the West. It's very safe for female travellers once you're through border formalities. Not so Pakistan. Pakistan has not welcomed Western Transit tourists since 2019, because of triple wammy of Covid, the Taliban taking power to North in Afghanistan, and skirmishes between the Taliban and fleeing ISIL soldiers from Syria. What could possibly go wrong?
So back to my journey. What to do with just 4 hours in Paris? I walked down Rue de la Fayette towards Boulevard Haussmann and took obligatory photo in front of my old employer, Reuters (now Refinitiv) offices. I was headed for Le Marais (the marsh) area of Paris, near Les Halles, a kind of gentrified market hall area, where a huge orchestra were playing, and young artists were sketching the Eglise St Eustache with it flying buttresses. I walked to Centre George Pompidou, a weird modern event space which has its waste water, utilities, cooling and heating tubes on the outside. Love it or hate it, it is very ugly. At the bottom of it there is a restaurant called "Flunch" .
My French friends think that it is low quality, but I love it. To get in here , I had to show evidence of my "Pass sanitaire": Proof that you are Covid free. You pick up you tray, glass, water, wine or beer, a salad , du pain, a gorgeous dessert, and each day there are range of freshly cooked chicken, beef, burgers, or steak tartare (rare minced beef with seasonings) . The lovely fast order chef understood my French and I got a vegetable cotelet type thing, all vegan for Euro17. I could barely move afterwards, but had to navigate the Paris Metro to Gare du Lyon to catch the TGV direction Milan to my next stop, Turin. TGV stands for Train Grand Vitesse, literally train of great speed. An English tour group , masks under noses, were dragging their suitcases through the carriage, even though the beautifully designed carriages have a roomy luggage area, so that no luggage needs to enter the carriage. I Arrived tired in Turin at 8pm, tired and sweaty and jumped on a bus57 to the Hostel. I met a really nice guy, Giuseppe, who was only a NASA engineer (!!), who showed me to Combo Hostel and told me how cool it is. Wow! It's an old Italian building which has been totally renovated, to a very high standard, polished concrete bar, wooden furniture, a lovely courtyard for meeting people, great furniture, and they even left the graffiti on the walls from where it had been squatted. The dimensions are large, and in each of the modern rooms there are 4 beds, with lovely comfortable foam memory mattress, and clean high quality sheets. After a drink and Tapas in the bar area, I slept like a baby, and didn't want to get up, so went back to sleep on Sunday morning after the church bells rang. I shared my room with a lovely young student from Sardinia, who had come from Sardinia to Turin to study, and was staying in the hostel whilst looking for a house share. After 3 days of travelling, I am missing my Yoga asanas which I have been doing regularly every morning now for over a year. Even a twenty-minute practise helps me with the day ahead, and when things go wrong , it's usually because I haven't meditated and/or done my yoga. The breakfast was a different matter, a half an hour long queue with just one lady serving, so that they had run out of bread , which we Vegans are really partial too, I packed my luggage into a locker, and set off to explore Turin. I got a teeny, tiny espresso and a pastry in local café for a couple of Euros. Turin looks like Palermo in Sicily, and definitely feels southern European. It is built on a grid system, like New York, but unusual for more organic way in which most European Cities grew. I found a lovely fresh food market with huge wheels of bread, local honey, local salamis, and loads of cheese. Turin is the capital of Piedmont, the mountainous region of Italy famous for it cows, and of course cheeses. I came past the dramatic National Museum, which looks like the church in Florence , but with an art deco style windows, and a dramatic radio tower spire. There was a large queue of masked people waiting to get in , and get some culture I wandered down to the beautiful River Po, and across one of the bridges.
I picked up my rucksacks(!!) from locker at Combo, and walked across the Piazza del Republica to catch 57 bus to Porto de Suza railway station. I arrived with 3 minutes to the train to Venezia. I had my temperature checked at the station to get in. Freccia Rossa trains are comfortable and fast, we reached a top speed of around 220 km per hour! If only British trains were like this! However there were quite a few problems with seating in my carriage as many more people seem to have been allocated seats A1, 3D and 4D (my seat) in my carriage. The "Lady" guard was no lady, and took me outside to shout and point her finger at me. The other ladies in the carriage comforted me to say that in Italian they have a saying that she would "never talk to her mother like that", which made me think some. I arrived in Venice at sunset (7pm), and watched the sunset from the steps of Santa Lucia station. I bought a 3 day (72H) ticket for the Vaporetti for Euro40, which seems expensive, but is really good value when you consider a single Vaporetti ride costs Euro 7.50. I took my first vaporetti to my hostel : Ostello Venezia on an island of Venice called Guidecca. I am nearly sure I stayed in this hostel on my first solo trip to Italy, when I had just joined Reuters (aged 27) and used my 6 week holidays to travel around Italy for 2 weeks. Here is the view from the quay for breakfast:
I took the vaporetti to San Marco, and explored the back routes. There is so much to explore in Venice.
That night there was a dramatic thunderstorm, so from my bunk on the third floor I had the most dramatic view of lightening over Venice, if not the best night's sleep.
On my second full day after chatting (in French!!) to lovely young travellers from Belgium, I took the Vaporetti to Murano. Murano is another separate island from Venice. Murano is famous for its beautiful glass. Venice's fame and riches, other than the Doge and the Borgias, was built upon these artisans who invented the first glass in the 12th Centuary. In many of the beautiful ancient buildings you can still see the origional glass. Think about it: whilst people were still freezing in their castles or huts in Winter, the Venetians had invented away to keep out the wind, cold and rain from their homes, whilst still allowing light in! Venice was not only built on glass. Originally its occupants were refugees from Roman Catholic Italy, who built "islands" in the lagoon, which was outside the borders and laws of Italy. By building their City on waterways , they could easily transport goods to and from the Orient (the East).
With the advent of rail, roads and container transport Venice has lost its place as the hub of modern transport (probably to Shanghai nowadays) . Venice had become a tourist trap, a must-see destination for all American and Asian visitors, with huge, polluting cruise ships docking and throwing their garbage in the Port of Mestre. However, recently Venice has won, in my opinion a huge victory against the mass Tourism of Cruise travel by barring these floating Cities docking in Mestre. Guess what? People are going to have to travel slower, in less polluting ways if they want to see, and preserve the beauty that is Venice.
I am a climate activist. What does that mean? Protesting on the streets of London in 2021. Venice has been victim of destructive flooding in 2019, 2020, and again in 2021. If we love and want to preserve Cities like Venice, countries like Madagascar and low lying islands like Maldives, we humans need to reduce our addiction to fossil fuels; cars; aeroplanes; one-use plastic; fast, throw away fashion; air conditioning; and fossil fuelled heating in our homes. However, as an active member of XR, we don't believe in blaming individuals for their lifestyle choices, and we demand that our governments act now to find solutions to our gas boilers and fossil fuelled heating and transport systems. Lecture over. I love Venice, and want to preserve it for future generations to see. I am sad to leave Venice, can't stay here forever (it's way too expensive!), and tomorrow I'm travelling by train and bus to Pula in Croatia. My next blog will be from there.
Follow me on Instagram: @Mazza_66
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