Sons of Loki

I’ve been thinking about visiting Russia at some point next year – there’s borsch, and gorgeous Metro stations in Moscow, and the beautiful State Hermitage in St Petersburg, and also lots and lots of vodka. The only problem is how to get there.

I’m used to hand assembling my travels – find a flight, then find a hotel, then arrange transport. If you get a choice of holiday deals from a travel agent, you might not get exactly what you want, but there is the advantage of sometimes getting a better deal than you could booking it yourself – plus not having to worry. It’s all done for you – you just have to pays your money and takes your seat.

I think we take the EU for granted – you just need a passport and you’ve got unlimited travel across 27 countries. It’s only when you go outside the EU that you realise that the rest of the world is carefully wrapped in red tape. To visit Russia, for example, what you need is a lengthy checklist:

• Find a hotel and book the dates you want.
• Receive a letter of invitation.
• Send it off to the visa company with your passport, application form, photo, and – if you’re un/self-employed – provide a sheaf of bank statements.
• Pay £50 for the visa, £26 for the service, and £7.40 for your passport to be posted back to you.
• Finally, book your flights.

fun fact: I have bathed in the same water as Natsume Soseki

One of the best parts about travelling is picking up your travel money. It’s like a taster of the journey ahead; weirdly coloured notes with strange faces and ridiculous numbers – 100s, 1000s, 10,000s – that are only dreamt of in pounds Sterling. And it’s also great to open up that envelope and see a fresh clutch of crisp, clean notes, worthless now but to be used and enjoyed in a matter of weeks or even days when you reach your destination.

It’s hard to know how much to get. It’s sensible to work out a budget: apparently British families spend about £2,000 during the average holiday. In these days it’s pretty easy to find an ATM in a foreign country and withdraw cash straight from your account, but you’ll be charged a currency conversion fee and a cash advance fee if you’re using a credit card, and that all adds up. My bank used to be pretty good for this, with free international withdrawals, but they unfortunately ditched that last year. It makes sense, therefore, to get a good chunk out beforehand. Not only will you get a better deal and avoid commission charges, you’ll also have cash in your pocket the second you touch down in the country without having to worry about finding an international ATM (which are woefully scarce even in countries like Japan).

It is, of course, a little risky to carry around enough money for the whole holiday in your pocket, so you might want to look into getting traveller’s cheques – they’re worthless to anyone without your passport and signature, and you can replace them if stolen or lost. But it’s a lot of hassle, I find, to track down a bank or somewhere to get them changed, and there’s always one left over when I come back that I never use. It’s nice to have the option, though, and it’s not like you’ve wasted the money because you can always get it exchanged when you come home.

I am woefully undertraveled. Actually, I’ve been around the world a fair bit, but always to odd corners; Japan, South Korea, Kentucky. I really want to see Europe at some point. I’ve been to France once, for a couple of hours, on a day trip to the Somme; which was beautiful and moving and historic, of course, but not exactly a great holiday. I want to see Europe. I was poking around for good places to visit when I found some flights to Fuerteventura and thought hey, this is where I need to go.

photo by Roy Webber

I always seem to ‘travel’, which is nice, but involves a lot of lugging backpacks from train station to train station and sleeping in hostels and eating McDonalds because it’s hard to tell what’s safe to eat and what isn’t. I was thinking what I really need is an old fashioned holiday, somewhere just to lie on a beach and read a book or go swimming. Fuerteventura’s a tiny island in the Atlantic, part of the Canary Islands. Right now it’s 10 degrees C in Leeds, and raining. In Fuerteventura it’s 21C and sunny. In January. You’ve got the nightlife and the clubs and the touristy stuff – live music in Corralejo – and nice accomodation (I’m kind of taken by the idea of getting my own villa for a week: I can but dream). And there’s surfing, which I – I might be good at. (I’ve never tried, unless you count that time Jade and I got an inflatable crocodile in Kamakura and floundered repeatedly in the Pacific while unbeknownst to us crows ate our watermelon – long story).

But really, what I want to do is to find a quiet fishing villageand just lie down. And read. Or write, I don’t know. Or just do nothing. And then go for a walk in the hills. There’s this certain urge, I think, for ‘travellers’ like myself to let the travelling get in the way of actually enjoying yourself. There’s itineraries to be stuck to, flights to be taken; museums to be trod around, and photographs to be taken religiously, lest any of the trip be forgotten. And then it all kind of boils down to travelling for travelling’s sake. I spent a weekend last March riding for an entire day on local trains to reach Niigata before I realised that actually, I wasn’t enjoying myself. I was in Niigata, a town with nothing to do, just treading the streets. I can do that at home. It would have been much more sensible to save the price of the ticket and just go soak at Oedo Onsen for a couple hours.

So, yes. Next time I travel, more … relaxing, less travel.