My boyfriend and I are going to Iceland in June and we need to do it as cheaply as possible in two weeks. What would be the best way to travel through Iceland, and is it a good place to hitchhike? We've already looked into couchsurfing and are considering bringing a tent.
Anna Fenton
I trust you're trying to do your visit as cheaply as possible rather than genuinely travelling with hardly any funds to draw on, which would be difficult. Iceland remains one of Europe's more expensive countries to visit, though you may find that in June you escape the worst of the peak season.
You should be able to arrange a couchsurfing.com place to stay in Reykjavik, where the network has good coverage, but elsewhere in the country you'll often need to make more traditional accommodation arrangements, such as hostels, farms or campsites. Take a sleeping bag - using your own always costs less than made-up beds in hostels. You should also consider booking ahead.
Buses are the cheapest way to get around the country, unless there are enough of you to bring the cost of hiring a car down which will cost around 20,000 Icelandic Krona (£108) a day. For bus passes and timetables, see sterna.is/en/bus-passport and re.is/IcelandOnYourOwn/Passports.
A daily budget of under 5,000IKR (£27) is possible, but doesn't account for special trips like whale-watching, horse riding or a snowmobile tour. You could save, though, by giving the iconic Blue Lagoon a miss (£25); instead visit the much cheaper, but still thermally heated, municipal baths across Iceland. Laugardalslaug, an Olympic-sized swimming pool with hot tubs and a long water slide in Reykjavik, costs £2.50 to get into.
One significant expense that you can save on is food and drink. Supermarkets won't feel noticeably more expensive than at home – as long as you don't buy alcohol – and self-catering is possible. You could bring pasta and other camping-friendly food with you.
We (myself, my girlfriend and our seven-year-old son) are hoping to go to visit my Italian relatives, who live in Cuneo (in Piemonte, south of Turin), during my son's half-term holiday in early June. We were hoping to go by train and on the way also meet up with friends from Rome somewhere in northern Italy. What is the cheapest way of doing this? Is it Eurostar to Paris and then an Interrail pass, or are there more cost-effective alternatives? We took trains from Rome to Geneva during last year's Ash cloud fiasco and found it a very agreeable way to travel.
Mark
Agreeable is the right word for a journey like Rome to Geneva, and I'm sure your son will prefer the train to flying. The best resources for planning a rail journey in Europe remain Deutsche Bahn (bahn.co.uk) for time-tables, The Man in Seat 61 (seat61.com) for information and tips, and Rail Europe (raileurope.co.uk) when it comes to booking. There are plenty of other rail travel agencies around, including European Rail (europeanrail.com). The trick is not finding sites offering cheap fares – fares are structured and fixed within the various available ticket types – but booking at the right time. Most European tickets go on sale 90 days in advance, with Eurostar services on sale 120 days before travel. As you might expect, the cheaper tickets, especially at busier times, go fastest.
For this journey I'd get two tickets: a London-Paris Eurostar return, and a Paris-Cuneo return, via Turin. The Artesia (artesia.eu) daytime TGV from Paris to Turin, with onward connection for Cuneo, costs around £153 return for an adult and a child for various dates I tried in June, travelling via Lyon and Modane. Eurostar tickets cost from £69 return, £49 for children under 12, but you may need to be flexible with dates to find these fares – £59 each way is more usual. A rail pass is worth it only if you're doing plenty of travelling, so put your energy into securing the best fare.
I've got six months off work and I'm really keen to travel around the Pacific Islands - but on as tight a budget as possible. What would you recommend as the best way to get around? Ideally I would like to fly into New Zealand/Australia and work across to Easter Island and South America. Is this a well rehearsed route or is it not really possible to do independently?
evansjig
The Pacific islands don't lend themselves well to an international island-hopping itinerary like you outline. Many popular destinations across the South Pacific tend to be connected to hubs and outlying settlements rather than to each Pacific nation or group of islands. The reason, rather boringly, is lack of demand. Not many people want to travel from Vanuatu to Samoa or Fiji, but considerably more people in all these places want to go to Sydney, Brisbane or Auckland. Easter Island, for example, is linked by air only to Santiago in Chile, which is a domestic flight, and then to Papeete in Tahiti and, as a recent addition, Lima in Peru. Flights between Pacific destinations, where they exist, tend to be expensive.
What is more than possible, and the way many people explore the region, is to see one or two south Pacific nations on the way between the US and New Zealand/Australia. This is how I visited Easter Island and French Polynesia, and a friend who I parted company with in Papeete, Tahiti, went on to Fiji and Rarotonga in the Cook Islands before we met again in Australia. Round the World Flights (roundtheworldflights.com) has a selection of popular routes which allow you to do this. Travellers usually visit Fiji, the Cook Islands or Tahiti this way. You can always venture to remoter areas once you're in a particular group of islands. Moorea is one of several islands that can be reached by ferry from Tahiti, and Fiji has several archipelagos that can and are travelled independently. Another economical option (given we're talking about travelling as far from the UK as is geographically possible) is to get as cheap a ticket as possible to Australia and have a look at budget flights offered by Pacific Blue (flypacificblue.com) to various Pacific destinations.
South Pacific Organizer (southpacific.org) and this Lonely Planet noticeboard are good resources for planning a trip.
We're off to Athens to visit my boyfriend's family in May. It is his birthday while we're out there and I'm after some advice on something special we can do on the day. I expect we'll be with the family in the evening, so if there's anything quirky, fun and not too formal you can recommend, I'd be really grateful. He's been to Athens many times, so something a bit different but special would be great.
KMayBe
Even for the Athens buff there are always fresh aspects of the city to discover. I'd recommend John Freely's Strolling through Athens as a great way to find new spots to visit on foot.
It's hard to know what you've yet to see, but the new Acropolis Museum (theacropolismuseum.gr) may have become fully operational since you were last here and is one of the city's must-sees. At night you may enjoy visiting the area of Gazi at Kerameiko metro: there is a big art centre called Technopolis housed in a former industrial complex. There are lots of bars and cafes for all tastes and budgets and it has a marvellous, car-free atmosphere long into the small hours.
Exploring neighbourhoods in detail that you may not know as well, such as the cafe culture and shopping in well-to-do Kolonaki or edgier Exarchia – see here for a good profile – is likely to be your best bet to finding a different side to the city.
