Photo of the Day (07.05.08)

by Anna Brones on

I wanted to pick a great 4th of July shot to feature today, but then came across this amazing composition by pirano. Taken in Milano Centrale station, this photo manages to capture the hurried rush of two people running to catch their trains. But at the same time, being taken in black and white, the photo miraculously makes the central station seem very calm and organized. Definitely a shot worthy of framing and hanging on the wall to remind you of great travel moments.

Have a great shot you want featured? Submit it to the Gadling flickr pool to be considered for Photo of the Day.

The Slowest Train in The World

by Tynan on

Cambodia has only one passenger train that still runs, and I’m on it right now.

Calling it a passenger train is a bit of a misnomer, though. Most of the few seats still attached to the floor are piled high with exotic fruits: durians, pineapples, and several others that I’ve eaten before but can’t name. I think one’s a jackfruit, and another might be a soursop.

Half of the back car is full of lumber which I helped load a few stops ago. I almost crushed my foot.

The train is slow, probably the slowest train in the world. The fastest I clocked it with my GPS was 17kph. That’s fast enough that if you want to take a jog you can just hop out the back and run along.

The journey from Battambang, a city reasonably close to the Thai border, to Phnom Penh takes four hours by air conditioned bus. I’ve been on the train for 17 hours now and there’s been no word on when we’ll finally arrive. The official timetable claimed it would be 5 hours ago.

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As I write I’m sitting in one of the wood benches, which puts me in the minority. Most people string up cloth hammocks in front of the open windows or ride on the roof.

I rode on the roof for a good part of the day. The local kids showed me how to jump from car to car as if I was part of an Indiana Jones movie.

When I arrived at the train station this morning there were a dozen other foreigners. Most of them stayed as long as Purset, the big stop 5 hours in which allows the rest of the journey to be completed by bus.

Four of us are left. My friend Todd, a lonely planet writer named Andrew, and Laila who has been traveling for 4 months and is expecting to travel for another 12. Her seat is a huge bag of charcoal that she claims is more comfortable than my bench. She’s probably right.

The train probably won’t run for much longer. Giant holes in the roof douse everyone and their cargo when it rains. No attempt is made at repairing the gaping holes in the rotting floor that expose the wheels and the track below us.

We once stopped unexpectedly because one of the four car’s bumpers had jumped onto another one’s.

You might be wondering why anyone would ever ride this train, and you might be surprised that I couldn’t possible recommend it any more. Why?

Because THIS is how to see Cambodia. Not all of it, of course, but it’s a whopping serving of authentic Cambodian life.

From the rusted roof of the train you get an unrestricted view of the beautiful rice paddies that cover the countryside. You watch as families work together to harvest the rice and direct their Oxen.

Children run up to the train and wave and yell out the few English phrases they know.

The train makes a few short stops, mainly to load or unload lumber and fruits, and vendors run up with trays of food, illuminated by kerosene lanterns.

I’ve been to a lot of countries, and I’m not sure I’ve met friendlier people.

When the monks saw that Laina had only bought one bag of steamed rice, they bought her another bag and some eggs. The woman sitting near us insisted on holding my flashlight while we ate.

When a pineapple vendor started cutting up one of her pineapples on the train, I hurried over to buy it. She gave it to me and then absolutely refused to take money.

Everyone smiles and tries to talk to us. They show us how to tie our hammocks and warn us when the train is about to leave after a stop.

Traveling can be more about the journey than the destination. I haven’t been to Phnom Penh yet, but I don’t know how it will be more memorable and enjoyable than the ride over.

If you’re in the area and you want a train ride of a lifetime, check out this page on seat61.com, which is an amazing resource for traveling by train, bus, or boat.

UPDATE: It took 24 hours total. A parting word of advice – buy a hammock in Battambang before you go. The locals will show you how to hang it.

Check out the pictures from the trip: %Gallery-26075%

Moscow’s main airport gets train service. Finally.

by Grant Martin on

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting Russia and flown into Moscow, you probably flew into Sheremetyevo* airport. For those of you that haven’t, I can try to sum it up for you in a couple of words here: It’s terrible.

The domestic and international terminals are separated in different buildings on different sides of the airport, so you have to take a shuttle way out and around to get there. The staff are pretty unfriendly and largely hostile to English speakers. And it’s wicked wicked far from the city. It’s a long, hard bus ride into the city to connect to the subway, that with traffic can take hours.

Luckily, at least that part is coming to an end. Just this week, Russia finally finished a rail link into Sheremetyevo airport, easing the horrible burden on traffic and congestion into the busy airport.

Rail service started Wednesday at the modest ticket price of $10.50/ticket. They could have made the ticket twice that and I would have paid it.

Now, onto the rest of the airport which direly needs the update. Russia started the upgrades to the international terminal last year and the domestic terminal remodeling is slated to start next year. And not a moment too soon.

* Firefox 3.0’s suggestions for the misspelling of “Sheremetyevo”: Usherette and Magnetosphere. Maybe that’s why it’s still in beta.

What I learned about the Prague-Berlin train

by Iva Skoch on

I just got back to Prague from Russia and went straight to Berlin. How is that for a grand tour of War War II history? Completely unintentional, mind you.

I took the train from Prague to Berlin yesterday. It’s a great way to travel between the two cities. The train follows the river Labe (Elbe] for much of the route and takes you through what Czechs call the “Czech Switzerland” area, a picturesque gorge area.

One thing to keep in mind if you want to take this train is that you should buy tickets at least three days in advance. I didn’t and it cost me twice as much. I paid roughly $150 for a roundtrip Prague-Berlin ticket. If you book in advance, you pay as little as $70, even less if you are a student or purchase a Czech rail pass. Schedules are here.

The train ride takes 4 and 1/2 hours and is clean and comfortable. They even have a few tables where you can plug in your laptop. It is a good idea to purchase an assigned seat for an extra $5 each way. I didn’t and was kicked out of my seat no less than three times. The train isn’t crowded on the Czech side of the trip, but once we crossed the border with Germany, literally the entire East German population over 60 years got on my train for some peculiar reason.

Arriving at the new Berlin Hauptbahnhof is pretty amazing, too. Finally, a train station that looks cool and smells good. Which, certainly, cannot be said about Prague’s main train station. What a dump that place is. They are, however, renovating it. Keep your fingers crossed.

More from Berlin later.

Bolshoi in Russia: Train to St. Petersburg and other excuses for obscene vodka-drinking

by Iva Skoch on

Greetings from Moscow! Bolshoi in Russia is my variation on Big in Japan. (Bolshoi means “Big” in Russian. Get it?) Stay tuned for my live dispatches from Russia.

There are two ways to travel between Moscow and St. Petersburg and they cost about the same. Either you fly–and you have to be prepared to fly Aeroflot or worse–or you take the train. They cost is about the same: $100 one-way. It was a no-brainer for me. I boarded the fast train to St. Petersburg this weekend hoping to catch a glimpse of rural Russia along the way. I don’t think we quite pulled out of the Leningradskaya train station when the first vodka came out.

Train experience

I had no complaints about this train. It is a pleasant, 5-and-a-half-hour ride through flat, yet picturesque countryside. You can still see signs from the communist times on abandoned buildings by the train station: “Power to the workers” and stuff like that. The farther away from Moscow you get, the nicer the landscape is. We were thankful we took the fast train. There is also a slower, overnight train, that takes about 8 hours, but I honestly can’t imagine doing vodka shots one minute longer than we did. The overnight train costs the same as the fast one. The advantage, I guess, is that it save you one night’s hotel. (Big savings in this expensive piece of the planet). There is also the new super-fast train that makes the trip in some 4 hours, but it’s still very new…hence totally overpriced.

The neither-super-fast-nor-totally-slow train we chose was new and comfortable. They even had waiters on the train and should you wish to order vodka right as you leave the station, you made do so. It costs about $30 for about 8 ounces of it (which is about 5 times as much as you would pay for it if you bought it in the store before boarding), but they do bring it to you in a flask, with crystal shot glasses. When was the last time New Jersey Transit did that for you, ah?

You get assigned seats and maybe you-like us-will be fortunate enough to sit next to a couple of drunk newlyweds. I am told this is not how the “typical” train ride from Moscow to St. Pete’s goes. Usually, this train ride is really sophisticated, packed with business commuters from the two cities. The three of us were lucky (or extremely unlucky, depending on your point of view) to get seated next to the newlyweds, who brought lots of homemade food and wine on board with them. Frankly, we were all about joining their wedding party. I even got to sing a Russian war song I first learned at school at the age of eight. I was proud I still knew the lyrics.

Train wedding and other excuses for daytime drinking

I have seen a lot of odd wedding parties in my life (including one in which the couple chose Kanye Wests’s “Gold Digger” as their wedding song). However, I can’t say that I had ever experienced a wedding celebration on a commuter train before. The newlyweds were a couple of kids-20, maybe 25 years old artistic types (see picture). They even brought their book of published poems, and played music they’d recorded. They were still in their wedding outfits because they literally just got married in Moscow and were traveling to spend their honeymoon in St. Petersburg.

Here is the thing about traveling in Russia. It is pretty hard to meet locals, unless you are willing to drink with them. Drinking is bonding. I mean, really, can you refuse to drink vodka (and eat sandwiches filled with God-knows-what) with newlyweds sitting next to you on a train of all places? You can’t. That’s exactly my point. It is virtually not possible to avoid drinking alcohol in Russia, even in the oddest circumstances, such as being on a commuter train from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

The excuses to drink any time of day in Moscow are endless. I could see that developing an alcohol problem would be really easy here. As I overheard yesterday: people drink vodka because “it makes life go by faster.” Often, that could be a good thing here: spend a cold, rainy day or two in Moscow, trust me. There is nothing enticing about it. Vodka: you can always count on it.

Finally, St. Petersburg!

We pulled into the Moskovskaya train station in St. Petersburg around 10 pm. Russian train stations are always named after the destination they service. The train station from which you go to Moscow is called Moskovskaya, the train station from which trains go to Kiev is Kievskaya, etc. Needless to say, there are a lot of little train stations everywhere and they all service only that one general route.

Here is the thing that was strange. It was 10 pm and we were a little tipsy. That’s not the strange part. The weird thing was that it was broad daylight outside. I forgot how far north St. Petersburg was. They actually get white nights here in June. Even at the end of May, it was getting dark between 11pm and midnight and it was daylight again at 4am. I noticed the extra hours of daylight gave me extra energy. You need all the extra energy you can get in St. Petersburg. You want to see as much of it as possible. It is a stunning city! More on that later.

From Russia, with love.