record my travel wisdom before it falls out of my brain

If you’re on a tight budget or if you’ve got just a few nighttime hours of layover, check out this site to see how well you’ll do for those zzzzz’s …

A fellow hitcher sent me this link: http://www.digihitch.com/ for hitchhiking info.

When I came to the UK from Iceland, my plane landed at London Stansted airport. I went to pass through immigration, as I have done many many times before (at other airports) and next thing I knew I was being asked to step this way and I was held for 6.5 hours until they had time to interview me, meanwhile they fingerprinted me, searched me, photographed me, and just generally treated me like a criminal.

Ok, I’m pretty good at letting things roll off my back. I sat back calmly and watched the whole thing happen. While I was watching and listening, here’s what I learned:

Many people fly through London on their way to somewhere else. London is a hub. But at Stansted airport, there is nowhere for folks to wait for their connecting fight so they have to pass through immigration as if they’re entering the country, and then pass out again. This, combined with for some reason hyper-scrutinizing immigration agents, results in many people being taken into custody unnecessarily. My situation is not uncommon, and would probably have been entirely avoided if I had flown into another airport.

But my situation was slightly different. I wasn’t flying through London; I was landing there. Even so, I got caught up in the overly sensitive immigration-control system at Stansted. But I was detained because I gave unsatisfactory answers to three questions: 1. Where will you be staying; 2. When will you be leaving; 3. How much money do you have with you???

1. I was going to meet up with my dad & his family, so I had an address for our first night but I didn’t have it with me. I should have written it down. But even if I didn’t have an address for my first evening – even if I was planning on traveling more spontaneously as I usually do, I could have written down the address of any old hotel and having an address written down would have been sufficient as an answer to their question.

2. I didn’t know when I was going to be leaving because I wanted to travel around freely a bit after my dad & his family went back home. Even so, if I had done as I did on my way in to Copenhagen (previous entry under this same goal) and bought a fully-refundably ticket and printed it out, I could have presented a more acceptable answer to their question. Then, of course, I could have refunded the ticket once I was inside the country.

3. Ridiculous as it sounds, I should have had a print-out of my bank statement to prove that I had money in order to satisfy this question. Simply answering, “Yes, I have money, plenty of it; it is in a bank,” is not satisfactory. They wouldn’t even let me go online to pull up my bank statement and show it to them. Then again, I think if my answers to questions 1 and 2 were less eyebrow-raising, question 3 would never have been asked.

The other thing I learned from this situation was, of course, to AVOID STANSTED AIRPORT IF AT ALL POSSIBLE!!

When I first got to Copenhagen I was seeking some kind of source of consolidated information about various things going on around the city. I couldn’t just pick up the local paper and see what’s up for the weekend because it’s all in friggen Danish. Finally I asked at the library, and they gave me several guides designed for people in my position: semi-tourists, folks semi-rooted in this place and seeking to interact meaningfully with it. Since then I know more about what’s happening around the city than the locals do. THANK YOU LIBRARY!!

For a large network of FREE places to stay, sign up with couchsurfing. There are other similar sites, such as hospitalityclub, but I have no experience with them. I’ve hosted three couchsurfers so far in Copenhagen, and I hope to be a couchsurfer in the northern rural part of Denmark this weekend. Good resource.

And speaking of sites to recommend even though I have no experience with them, I was told recently about airhitch. Basically, if you want to go from A to B, and if you have a very open and free schedule, tell these folks where B is and wait for them to get back to you with a super-amazing deal. So this one remains on my list of things to try out, but maybe it should be added to yours as well.

Often when you are entering a foreign country they will ask if you have an onward ticket. They want to make sure that some foreigner isn’t planning on setting up camp in their country. If you don’t have proof of an onward ticket then the immigration process is likely to take much longer and be less plesant than it would otherwise.

Personally, I like to travel without plans, and so purchasing my onward ticket kills a degree of spontaneity. Here’s the solution: purchase an onward ticket, but make sure it is a fully refndable fare. This means the price of the ticket will be considerably more than you’d ever dream of paying for a flight, but do it anyway. Then you have the document that immigration is interested in seeing when you enter the country. Then once you’re in, immediatly cancel the ticket and get your money back. Make your own plans from there. JUST BE SURE TO READ THE FINE PRINT BEFORE YOU BUY YOUR TICKET … WHAT A SHAME IF YOU FOUND OUT THAT IN FACT YOU CAN´T REFUND THE TICKET, OR THAT THERE’S A LARGE FEE INVOLVED IN DOING SO.

When walking in a city the rule is: always cross the street when the locals do.
Not when there’s a break in the traffic.
Not when the light indicates it’s your turn.
No.
When the locals do.

today I was thinking about a moment in Greece. since I was on my computer, I just opened the word document and started typing. It was like revisiting as I put the words down.

If you are traveling solo and if you don’t have a tight schedule, consider volunteering to be bumped from your flight. If the flight is overbooked, the company will be grateful for your cooperation and you will be rewarded – you’ll be put on the next flight, but you’ll also get vouchers for free travel for your inconvenience.

If you are booking a string of flights to hop from one location to another, be sure you allow plenty of time to make your connections, otherwise one delayed flight can ruin all the rest of your plans.