Magical Mystery Tours
Three memorable summers Inter-Railing around continental Europe (and Morocco).
The caveat “if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” applies to travel as much as in any other walk of life; but not always. When I first picked up an
Inter-Rail leaflet, I was enthralled by what it promised - a month’s unlimited rail travel, in nineteen foreign countries, for anyone under 26, at a cost of £92. Even in 1981, that sounded too good to be true, but it was true.
But first, I had to persuade my boss to sanction my absence from work for an entire month of the summer, using up almost my complete annual leave allocation in the process. It was the Civil Service and I succeeded. Next, I had to convince my girlfriend that a mystery tour around the unknown continent on unfamiliar trains, never being sure where we would be sleeping at night, was preferable to a relaxing food and drink filled fortnight in a luxurious hotel with a beach on its doorstep. We were young and I succeeded. How we enjoyed replying to the question, “Where are you going on holiday this year?” with the single word “Europe.” Some were horrified by the idea, confidently predicting that it would all end in tears.
We set off with one tent, two rucksacks and an unfeasible multitude of nebulous and contradictory plans to aim for the South of France, then east, then north, then back west. On the
Côte D’Azur, the August campsites were full, so we took the night train to Rome. Following on restless nocturnal journeys from Scotland to London and Paris to Cannes, a third successive one wasn’t ideal, but it illustrated an invaluable aspect of
Inter-Rail. If there was no room at the inn, you could just sleep
en voyage.
There’s no place like Rome, as they say, and we spent a few fascinating days there, exploring its ancient ruins and incorporating a visit to the world’s smallest independent state, the Vatican City. We were refused entry to the church itself for being improperly dressed, and quite rightly so. No photographs from this episode survive, I’m afraid. Next stop was Venice, where we camped at
Lido do Jesolo and sailed over daily to this extraordinary city, which I won’t attempt to describe. If you’ve been there, you already know, and if you haven’t, go soon, before it sinks.
Moving on from Italy provided a perfect example of the magical world of
Inter- Railing. We arrived at
Venetzia Santa Lucia station in the morning with no clear idea as to where we were going. The departures board showed a train leaving for Zurich, ten minutes later, so we just climbed spontaneously aboard. The Alpine section of the journey, between Milan and Zurich, impressed me as the best rail trip I’d ever experienced, Scottish West Highland Line included. Day trips to Berne, Lucerne and to the summit of Mount Pilatus (also by train!) were covered by the ticket. Switzerland instantly became my favourite country and visits to many others afterwards have not altered my opinion.
More than half way through the ticket’s validity, the homing instinct began to assert itself and we sped north through West Germany to industrial but lively Hamburg. We incorporated a day trip to the first station over the Danish border, Padborg, just so we could say we’d been to Denmark. Next, we spent three days in Amsterdam, finally visiting the
Annefrankhuis which my schoolteachers had mysteriously neglected to include in a school trip there a decade beforehand. From there, it was a short journey to Ostend, in Belgium, and the Channel ferry.
I read somewhere that the average British person visits seven foreign countries during their lifetime. We’d just exceeded that within the space of a month in our early twenties. I surreptitiously started planning another mystery tour for the summer of 1982.
Our second low budget Grand Tour started where the first had finished, in Ostend, continuing inland to Luxembourg City, the picturesque capital of its rarely visited nation. Another spectacular journey through Germany, with vulture-like castles perching on the crags above the Rhine, took us to Munich, surely Germany’s most impressive major city. We turned south west into Austria and its elegant capital, Vienna, inelegantly washing our feet in the Danube there, after a long hot day walking around the city.
Then communist Hungary, and even more communist Romania, participated in the
Inter-Rail scheme, but they demanded £20 entry visas and associated form filling, which we were too youthfully busy to get around to. More liberally communist Yugoslavia eschewed such bureaucracy and, as a result, enjoyed a far greater level of tourism from the west. The moonlit journey from Vienna to Rijeka, on the Adriatic coast, was, however, interrupted at the border by guards who proceeded to search the luggage racks, litter bins, floor spaces below the seats and anywhere else they could think of. They looked uninterested and didn’t bother to search either passengers or luggage, which made the entire operation completely pointless, except that it assisted in providing full employment. At rural dawn halts, people struggled aboard carrying live hens, piglets and lambs, all seemingly exempt from paying their fares, destined for the markets of the coastal towns. Rijeka was much like other Mediterranean holiday resorts, except considerably cheaper and with beer that unaccountably tasted of cardboard. It was only Yugoslavia, but my first tentative venture into communism played its part in disabusing me of the notion that some countries were out of bounds.
Travelling clockwise this time, we returned via the South of France, successfully finding an empty space on a Riviera campsite. A day trip to impossibly expensive Monaco was all we could afford. After another brief foray into Switzerland, Geneva this time, we zoomed north to Paris on the
TGV, then the world’s fastest passenger train, but which the ticket permitted travel on at no extra cost.
Next year, we headed south-west through France into Spain and Portugal to reach the tip of Europe (by which I mean the southernmost point) at Algeciras. In addition to eighteen European countries,
Inter-Rail also covered Morocco and it was there that we had our first experience of the world beyond the cosy affluence of our own continent. In Tangier, the ferry was met by hordes of young men and boys offering their services as guides, taxi drivers, hotel owners, or sometimes all three, and trying to sell us everything from miniature ornamental camels to drugs. In our alleged hotel, we were woken up at daybreak by calls to prayer from the minarets. More significantly, our first few days in Africa provoked a hasty re-definition of the word poverty.
A premature wistful nostalgia haunted me on the day of my 26th birthday. The thought that I’d never be able to go
Inter-Railing again (this being before the over 26 version was introduced) made me feel, if not actually old, at least no longer young. I found myself misquoting Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad:
This is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain
The happy railways where I went
And cannot come again.
With so many places and so many faces crowded into those few short months, they’ve become so mixed up in a melting pot of memory that it can be easy to forget what happened where. But little things have become lodged forever in the nooks and crannies of my mind. The platform vendor shouting “Agua, bocadillo, I sell Coca Cola, Fanta,” at a Spanish junction stop and waking everyone up at three o’clock in the morning. The Italian guard herding us down the corridor yelling “Avanti, Avanti,” when we’d inadvertently bedded down in a first class compartment. A busker singing
Concrete and Clay on the Madrid metro. People we befriended briefly and would never meet again. The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations. And, as the sun went down on summer, we’d head homeward, back to reality and work in September, with rucksacks full of dirty clothes and memories too many to remember.
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