A Few New Tips From Old Hands.

How we travel is constantly evolving. Especially in this modern age of internet and all that stuff.

Welcome to the future!

For many of the older travelers technology is seen as a hindrance to true travelling though. If you take your laptop and are constantly updating your progress on twitter through your iPhone, are you really travelling? Well, yes. You are travelling. You are moving through other countries. I suppose the reality here is that the idea of ‘travelling’ in the minds of these old folks is actually far more about escaping something than it is about going somewhere. It is about escaping the apparent confines of modernity. It is about escaping the west. It is about escaping modern technologically advanced capitalism. So of course you have to leave your iPhone at home: it is exactly what your trying to escape. Right?

Pictured: A type of people it is ok to hate.

This old travelling idea is based on the notion that by leaving the west you are travelling to a different world and a different time. The question is: Who is more defined by their western-ness? The ones who are trying to escape it and have delineated the world along a line of west and the rest? The ones who see the rest of the world as a completely distinct other that exists in a different time period? Or the ones who simply want to go somewhere else for a bit to have fun?

Hmmm…. this is tough.

Well, as an older hand, I’m going to say that the young douchebags are worse than the old douchebags. I don’t know if I really count as a ‘traveler’ these days. Not in the way I used to be. Nowadays I drive my car to the airport. I park my car up and I take some moving flat escalator to the fancy lounge and get on my all to comfortable flight to my all too comfortable hotel. It is, generally, all too comfortable. And I use the internet more than anybody. I use www.TripAdvisor.co.uk to check out my hotel.  I compare my flights on www.Skyscanner.net. I even check out the best price for parking my car on www.airportparkingmarket.co.uk.

Just a cool guy getting stuff done.

So who am I? I have to recommend those sites, they help me. They help me travel. But am I missing something because of them? Am I not getting the real travelling ‘experience’? Or is that all a load of stupid, patronizing, nonsensical nonsense?

Answers in the space provided…

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Hello and welcome to the future of travel.

That’s right…. the future of travel.

I know. A bold statement right?

Well it’s a bold idea. In my years of traveling I always find myself trying to get from some city or another to some other city or another and having to spend hours finding obscure trains that go out into nowhere just to hop of and get a bus up a mountain not knowing where to get of, missing the stop going around again, getting of at the wrong stop, walking for 5 miles just to get a train, arriving at an abandoned train station, crying on the tracks with Laris moths all around you, getting on a bus, sleeping, waking up, being ordered off the bus in a language you don’t understand. Finding yourself in a city you don’t recognise.

Drown and out in Laris and Pundon.

Now to some that sounds like a lot of fun, and in a way it is, but it is mostly only fun in hindsight. At the time, it sucks. So here on Travel Rate we want people to share stories of these weird journeys: how they were made, and how they could be made better. Also, we want any little lessons people have learnt on the road, tracks, water or air. What is the best entrance to use at Beijing Airport? What set of trains do you want to get to go from Dubrovnik to Kiev? Is the Funicular that takes you up the hill to the Italian/Slovenian border working at the moment?(No, by the way, it is not). These are the type of obscure but essential questions we want to give the answer too. Because I’ve always had them and have needed them answering. And the way that I’ve answered them seems somewhat inefficient.

‘that’s not a sandwich… its a computer… not a sandwich.. go out and buy a sandwich if you’re hungry… don’t just eat the computer, why are you eating the computer??? Just buy a sandwich…jeez. Do you type ‘how to make friends’ into a sandwich? No… you type it into a computer… and eat the sandwich!‘

So this is it, we just want to help everyone get from A to B. No matter if that’s Amsterdam to Budapest, Anchorage to Bloemfontein or Albania to Beijing. So let’s get to it…