The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Diary of a veteran Interrailer
At the age of nearly 50, Chris Moss set off from Devon on a modern grand tour of Europe that rekindled memories of budget rail travel in his student days
Frseeeeeeeeefrong. I was on the 9.38 from Trieste to Milan, half listening out for that famous onomatopoeic train sound from Ulysses while thinking about the previous evening. It had begun with a trip to Trieste’s James Joyce museum, followed by an aperol spritz at the Caffè San Marco, a glass each of refosco and malvasia wines, a long chat with a Greek publisher, a short one with the former Italian ambassador to Bulgaria, then a swift Martini, dinner with an Italian journalist, then a brandy…
Out of the window, I watched as the steeples of Venice, the foothills of the Alps and lakes Garda and Iseo, slipped by. We entered a spring shower and then, just as soon, left it behind. I was feeling drowsy when a smiling man appeared with a trolley. “Café, signor? White, black?” “Capo in b, per favore,” I said. I’d been in Trieste, capital of coffee, and picked up a bit of the lingo. A few days earlier I might have asked for kava, or a melange, or kaffee.
When I’d told friends I wanted to go on an Interrail trip, they’d doubted the pass for it still existed. Chris Moss 30 years ago, above, when he last went Interrailing; and on his most recent trip Even some travel editors weren’t sure. Then they queried my age: 49 years and 11 months and two weeks, they said, was not the time for Interrailing. I agreed – I did one 30 years ago, while at university – and then politely disagreed. Because I love trains, like slow travel and am tall (ergo I hate plane seats) and, anyway, all the kids are in Malaysia and Chile now, or on Ryanair, so someone has to tour Europe by rail. Which is how I found myself setting out from Totnes on the slow Waterloo line, then Tubing it to St Pancras for the Eurostar service to Brussels – the day after the March bombings – to connect to Amsterdam. That first trip probably sounds like hell, but it was merely a warm-up. I had chosen Amsterdam because I’d ended my teenage Interrail trip there. It hadn’t changed that much and was still a lively, slightly shabby city full of people who looked like dropouts or at least opt-outs.
In time-honoured Interrail fashion, I only stayed a day and a half, limiting my tourism to a sprint around the zoo and the Micropia museum of microorganisms and a look at the Van Gogh collection: the main exhibition was rammed, but a sideshow, on the art of prostitutes, was empty and educative.
On a blue, drizzly dawn the following day, I set off for Copenhagen, taking a series of five trains over 11 hours. There used to be a night train, but it had recently died. A bad day’s travel, a good day’s? I’m not sure. I arrived dizzy with visions of boggy fields, dun skies, cold platforms and rolling-stock interiors.
Post-Noma, Copenhagen claims to be a gastronomic capital. I joined a Danish Delicacies tour, tucking into hot dog, pork crackling, porridge, chocolate and beer. Not so delicate, but definitely delicious, though I can’t help feeling foodie revolutions are what rich cities do when they don’t have the energy for real ones.
I had to retrace my route through fields of stubble and South Jutland’s fine drizzle to get to Hamburg. Europe’s northern powerhouse had its Warehouse quarter and Kontorhaus (office) district listed together as a Unesco World Heritage site in July 2015. With guide Tomas, I cycled for three hours around the windy city, admiring the red-brick expressionism, and ogling the new philharmonic hall, new live-work spaces, new housing blocks for musicians (where everyone can make a racket together) and a new coffee shop-cum-deli-cum-lifestyle temple. By the end of the ride I’d overdosed on newness.
City-hopping compels the traveller to make a quick reading of a place, Interrail being a modern, proletarian, time-poor equivalent of the old grand tour. Where aristocrats once travelled to Florence and Rome to admire antiquities and study painting, we now go in search of gastronomy, shopping and culture, this last all mixed up with consumerism. No one city has it all.
But a theme did begin to emerge as I travelled south. In Berlin I did another bike ride around what’s left of the Wall, explored the new Spy Museum and an excellent new free exhibition called Alltag in der DDR (Everyday Life in the GDR), and did a walking tour of the defunct Tempelhof airport. I was born in Burtonwood, Cheshire, from whose USAF base the C-47s and C-54s took off for Berlin during the 1948-49 airlift. The airport is a masterpiece of Nazi monumentalism but contains a basketball court used by bored American servicemen and a brown Seventies bar where I could imagine equally brown diplomats smoking and drinking. The airfield is now a public park, the apron empty but for one old airlift plane and a couple of refugee camps. History still unfolds here.
For young travellers, Berlin is best known as a party capital, but tour guide Sascha said history and hedonism are connected: “The city was a sort of Wild West after the Wall came down. People from East Berlin, especially, took some time to change. Their part of the city, half empty and collapsing, flooded with people seeking an ‘alternative’ lifestyle.”
I took the 18:14 Euronight from Berlin to Vienna, the only sleeper train that fitted neatly into my three-weekplus itinerary. Paying a €90 (£75) supplement got me a single cabin as posh as some on private trains I’ve taken, with WC and shower. When I closed my door I had a glorious feeling of being in a projection room, watching the dank fields of central Germany steaming with rain.
Jan, the Czech attendant, served me a goulash for supper and then I lay down to sleep. But this was an old train, on standard lines, and the service stopped frequently – often in stations noisy with freight trains – and when it got going again, it did so at a moderate speed, joltingly. I entered a sort of semi-slumbering narcosis familiar to me from other night-train journeys, eventually finding sleep only after hours of gazing out over a meandering river in Bohemia.
I waltzed around Vienna, admiring the Habsburg palaces and the extraordinary paintings of Schiele, Kokoschka and Klimt at the Leopold Museum, and drinking in some of the less mobbed vintage cafés. This was the first properly grand city on my grand tour, but from the opulent hotels on the Ring to that evening’s performance of La Clemenza di Tito at the Staatoper, it was a grandeur I couldn’t access.