All aboard for a European adventure

Interrail is a ticket which allows you to use whatever train services you like in Europe – as long as they are permitted – within a set time frame. It is a great way of exploring the Continent without the hassle of, and with more freedom than, pre-booking every ticket.

It is greatly associated with student travel, but when myself and my partner embarked on a three-week journey we found it offered us a great way to see the best of Central Europe without ever setting foot on a plane.

The trip started by taking one of GWR’s newly-refurbished first class carriages from Newport to London Paddington.

GWR is the new name for First Great Western –it was a nice and comfortable start to the long trip ahead of us.

Getting from Paddington to St Pancras is easy by Underground, but it helps if you have a contactless debit card ready to get through the ticket barriers – else you face queuing with all the other visitors.

In 20 minutes you arrive at St Pancras, and we arrived in plenty of time for the Eurostar security checks, and before we knew it we were swept under the streets of London out into the Kent countryside. Despite our fears there were no problems at Calais, and we arrived on time three hours later in Paris.

France isn’t great for Interrail – there are supplements to pay everywhere on the TGV high speed train – but that wasn’t why we came here.

For us, Paris was a convenient point from where to get trains to go east.

We stayed at the Gatekeeper, a hostel/hotel in the 10th arrondissement that was a 15-minute walk from our arrival station of Gare du Nord. After a night taking in the sights and a morning enjoying the cafes of the nearby Canal Saint-Martin, we caught the TGV to Munich.

The wonderful thing about trains in Europe is the simplicity – there were no queues, no lengthy check ins.

With TGV we had to book a seat, but this was relatively inexpensive. In six hours we were in the heart of Bavaria, at Munich’s central station.

We spent a leisurely three nights and two full days in the beer capital of Europe – enjoying Munich’s historical charm and its traditional beer gardens.

I gained a liking for radler – a half beer half lemonade concoction which tastes a whole lot better than the sugary shandys at home.

The city has some excellent museums – one we spent an afternoon in was the National Socialism documentation centre, essentially a museum that tracks the rise and fall of the Nazis, and the impact that their crimes had on their victims. It is deeply moving and a great insight into the events that wrought this part of the world more than 70 years ago.

Our next train was a simple local service to Salzburg in Austria.

On each train Interrail asks that you fill in a form listing your destination and where you are going.

Some people report that train guards do not understand the ticket, but we never had any problems.

After a short hour and 45 minute journey we arrived in this Alpine resort, with plenty of time for a day’s sightseeing.

Salzburg is blessed with beautiful landscapes that you can enjoy from its timeless fortress in the mountains – accessible from a funicular railway at the bottom of town.

It is also where the classic musical Sound of Music was set and partly filmed – there are plenty of guides online to show where to look for locations from the film which I enjoyed picking out from the easy to explore Old Town.

After a night’s stay in the luxurious Crowne Plaza Salzburg - The Pitta - which is in a great location close to the old town and offering stunning views from its panoramic Imlauer Sky bar and restaurant - our journey began again to Budapest.

In several Central European countries high speed services are totally accessible with Interrail tickets.

Unlike the TGV, you pay no supplement unless you want to guarantee a seat.

The Railjet is a speedy service that uses tilting trains to power through the Alps to get to Vienna from Salzburg. It is totally free with Interrail as long as your journey begins in Austria or Germany. It continues to Budapest Keleti, a gloriously cathedral-like terminus that is a little rusty at the edges, but is a great gateway to this city of contrasts.

The best thing about Budapest is its public spas.

We arrived in 35 degree heat, so we opted to visit the Szechenyi baths, a massive outdoor and indoor complex of pools, all with differently heated waters.

We jumped from one pool to the other out of the sheer novelty of it, sampling the saunas for as long as we could stand them.

Budapest’s other big attraction is its night life and off the wall youth culture – mostly gathered around the 7th district.

Bars are constructed out of ruins, varying from more arty establishments to places where the focus is on the drinking. There are plenty of fantastic places to eat too as well as galleries that sell work from local artists. And there is fantastic architecture everywhere in Budapest, best viewed from the city’s castle – converted into an art museum during the Communist era.

We left Budapest Keleti and took a short ride to Bratislava. The vibe there is much sleepier than Budapest. It is the capital city of Slovakia, but is smaller than Leeds. It has a wonderfully preserved Old Town, and has heaps of bars and restaurants, with excellent local breweries that serve their own food and drink on site. There isn’t a lot to see – but we chose it because of its proximity to Vienna.

This is where Interrail excells – we were able to take a day trip there without adding to the cost of our trip using the quick local train which gets you to the Austrian capital in less than an hour. It meant that we could enjoy a day in Vienna – including a visit to a traditional Kaffeehaus – while saving a little money in the cheaper but charming Bratislava.

From Bratislava we took the Czech train to Prague. The service is fantastic – the restaurant car offers a variety of meals but if you take First Class they can be served at your seat. We asked for a cup of tea, only to end up with a huge porcelain tea set – pretty different to the cardboard cups we’re used to at home. Prague is huge city that is difficult to cover in just a two days stay. A walking tour is useful to cover the big historical attractions, like the astronomical clock and the Jewish ghetto. But it is worth exploring Prague Castle in the evening, with stunning views when you reach the top. It is also blessed with fantastic quirky public art which is fun to stumble upon, and the crazy Charles Bridge which is like the Czech-answer to Covent Garden.

After two nights in Prague we proceeded on to the German capital of Berlin. Again, we took the same Czech train service, spending our remaining crowns on a slap up meal from their fantastic restaurant car. The train slid through some of the most breath-taking scenery of our trip, pounding past hills and citadels as we approached Germany. Berlin offers a variety of places to alight the train – we left at Berlin Südkreuz (South Cross) which was convenient for our stay at an AirBnB flat in the Neukölln district, requiring only a simple change for the S-Bahn suburban trains, and then the U-Bahn tube trains.

Neukölln was a working class district of West Berlin before the wall fell – and it still is, but it is also now home to many of the artists, students and others who have been attracted to Berlin’s counter cultural lifestyle. Our flat was in the Schillerkiez district, directly adjacent to the impossibly huge Tempelhofer Feld, a public park that was once one of West Berlin’s two airports. Locals cycle, run and walk the length of the park’s runways, which remain intact. Back in Schillerkeiz – a mass of apartment blocks set out in a grid; there are galleries, restaurants and cafes. We enjoyed a fresh pasta bistro called Caligari and a cafe called Engels which offered a superb breakfast menu. Everything was in decent walking distance of the U-Bahn, bringing tourist haunts like the Brandenburg Gate and the German Parliament building, the Reichstag, within easy reach.

Our final destination was Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It was a seven hour journey from Berlin, with a change at Amersfoort from the express train to a double decker local service. Rotterdam Central station has not long been refurbished and includes a vast new atrium which looks like something from a Star Trek film set. That could be said of much of the city, which is dotted with fantastic modern architecture from the functional but quirky Market Hall, to the high rise De Rotterdam and the down-right weird Cube Houses. Rotterdam is less than an hour from The Hauge, the country’s administrative centre with a much more traditional street scape and a kitsch but fun seaside resort.

Returning to Britain was simply a case of taking the international train from Rotterdam to Brussels, and then changing there for the Eurostar. We had some time to kill, allowing us a whistlestop tour of Brussels Grand Place and Royal Palace, and for lunch. We checked in to the Eurostar, and after a connection to Newport from London our journey arrived at its close.