I am starting to think I have missed my vocation in life as a travel agent! I have spent the past few days trying to plan a journey from Bratislava to Szombathely in Hungary, where my boyfriend and I will be attending the IJK at the end of July. I have to say, it is the most complicated piece of travel planning I have ever undertaken in my life, and I am now so incredibly confused that I’m starting to think the most agreeable option might actually be to stay at home

It all started with booking the flights a few months ago. The website of the IJK makes it sound like Szombathely is ideally placed near to three major European airports, but in matter of fact it is miles from anywhere useful. The closest airport is Graz, with a transfer time of under two hours, but regrettably Ryanair are the only operator to fly to Graz from the UK and they don’t offer flights on the days we need to travel The next closest airports are Vienna and Budapest, each with a transfer time between three and four hours. Flights are offered by a variety of operators, but they either depart from Up North or Down South. The best offers seemed to be with Easyjet from Luton, but they didn’t quite comply with my idea of a cheap flight. It was going to come to £160 each, not including the cost of a train fare to actually get to Luton in the first place.

For this reason, I decided that we were going to fly from Birmingham to an airport which they optimistically call “Bratislava (Vienna)” with Ryanair. I stand by the fact that this was the most economically logical decision to make. The total cost of the flights has come to £80 each, including all taxes and outrageous add ons for the privelege of taking a bag. It doesn’t realistically get any cheaper than that, and it doesn’t get any more convenient either than flying from Birmingham

The only slight challenge is getting from Bratislava to Hungary. Bratislava and Szombathely really aren’t very far away when you look at it on the map, which I did last night in order to illustrate the details to my mother. Unfortunately, the only way to travel between the two points, however, is via Vienna, which is actually a pretty big detour. Task number one, therefore, was to figure out a route to Vienna.

On the face of it, this seemed like it was going to be pretty straightforward. Ryanair have a deal with a company who run a transfer bus from the airport to the city centre, and the cost is only €8 for a single ticket. Cool Sadly, closer inspection of the timetable revealed that they only run 4 buses a day and we would have around a two hour wait between our flight getting in and the earliest possible departure. Bearing in mind that I knew our total transfer time would be in excess of five hours, a two hour delay just wasn’t an option if we wanted to arrive that evening

Not one to be defeated, I started investigating trains. The airport isn’t connected to Bratislava proper by train, but there is a bus 61 which runs four times an hour, takes 25 minutes and costs absolute peanuts. It seemed like a plan, until I looked into the actually connections from Bratislava to Vienna. The timetable was such that we would just miss the optimum train and have to wait over an hour for another. Again, not ideal.

I then started googling Slovakian transport sites. This was hampered slightly by my lacking competence in Slovak, but actually wasn’t entirely impossible; firstly because I know some rudimentary Czech, and secondly because some websites had shaky translations in German. I chanced upon the website of the Slovak Eurolines, only to discover that they also run a transfer bus between the airport and the main bus station in Vienna. It takes two hours, costs 400 SKK which I hope is only about £10, and there is a bus departing 45 minutes after our plane lands which is just about the right time, assuming we don’t get delayed

Things were looking up, but I was worried about booking on their website. Parts of the booking form are in English, parts are in Slovak only, and the whole page is rather temperamental and prone to crashing. I decided to go back to OEBB, the Austrian National Railways, and look up connections there.

I think OEBB has the best train website in Europe, better than die Deutsche Bahn, because it also gives you connections by buses. In fact, it provided me with a total itinery connecting the bus journey I had just discovered above with a couple of trains into Hungary. Cool It looked like there was an option to book online, but when I tried to do so I got the frustrating message that they can’t quote for international fares on the internet. There was, however, an address to email to make a booking.

I duly emailed, and received a response that they could only sell me a ticket for the train part of my journey; that is to say, the two trains from Vienna to Szombathely. That was better than nothing, and after some brief correspondence in German I said that was fine and am hopeful that my tickets will arrive in the post within the next few weeks. They also helpfully directed me towards the Austrian PostBus website, and suggested I ordered some bus tickets there.

I went to their website, and tried to order tickets from the airport to Vienna. I was surprised to get redirected to what looked like an identical booking form to that of the Austrian railways, but decided to give it a go anyway. Within a few hours I had a response that I couldn’t book bus tickets through the website, but I would be able to if I emailed a separate airport bus company.

I duly emailed the separate airport bus company in my bestest German and tried to reserve tickets for the relevant times. They emailed me back within half a day to say it was all cool. I asked how I could pay, and they said I could pick up my tickets from their counter in Vienna station and pay for them there. I pointed out that I’d reserved tickets from Bratislava to Vienna, and therefore wouldn’t be physically able to get to Vienna to pay for the tickets. I asked if I could pay online and have them posted. They said, “Erm sorry, posting tickets is impossible so you’re screwed”. :cry:

Back to Slovak Eurolines then. Having revised some Czech on the bus this morning, I just about managed to navigate my way through the form until I reached the payment page. I was a little worried that I might only be able to pay if I had a Slovakian bank account, but eventually I found a place to type my card number. Just two minutes ago I appear to have had two pdfs emailed to me which look like they might be tickets, but the narrative is beyond my linguistic capabilities and I haven’t had time to print them off/stick the mail in an online translator. I’ve just got my fingers crossed

Assuming that’s worked, I’ve now secured our journey from Bratislava to Szombathely. We land at 14.40, catch a bus at 15.25, arrive in Vienna at 17.25, skip to the station and catch a train at 17.59, change somewhere weird in the middle and arrive at our destination at 20.32. A bit late, but that seriously is the earliest time possible.

All that remained to sort was then the journey home. In order to check in for our flight on time, we needed to be at the airport for 1pm. That meant catching the bus from Vienna at 11am. OEBB suggested a very convoluted route, involving catching a bus from Szombathely at 7.30 to a place in Austria called Oberdorf. Arriving there at 8.45 we would allegedly make a connecting bus at 8.46, which would take us to a random tram stop in Vienna, from where we had to jump on the correct tram and hopefully arrive at the main bus station for our connection to the airport.

You can imagine that I was a little bit dubious about this itinary, as the potential for something going wrong was enormous Nevertheless, it looked like the only option so I found the website of the bizarre little bus company operating the routes. I couldn’t find the right timetables on their site, so sent them a email asking for help. They finally got back to me this afternoon, and said that the first bus is in fact run by someone else. If that bus is on time, you can run across the road in Oberdorf and hop on theirs. If it’s late, you have to wait two hours, with the result that we would miss our flight.

I didn’t feel that was a risk that could be taken, so it was back to the drawing board In desperation I started investigating leaving Szombathely the night before and sleeping on a platform somewhere. For reasons I don’t understand, this brought up a connection which hadn’t shown on my search before: there’s a train which leaves Szombathely at 6.48 and goes directly to Vienna :)

Okay, so catching a train at 6.48 isn’t ideal, but it’s genuinely the only option there is So, I have emailed OEBB again, and they are hopefully now processing my second request!

My head hurts :cry: But I *think* that I might now have cracked it. The only thing which could really go wrong is that our Ryanair flight will be delayed. If that happens, I think I can probably sweet-talk the Austrian conductors into letting us travel on the already purchased tickets (have done it before!), but the next connection means we probably won’t get to the IJK until after 10pm.

Hmmm. I have mixed feelings about Ryanair. To be fair to them, I flew to Carcossonne with them last summer and they were amazing. My only prior experience, however, was an ill-fated return flight from Dublin to Birmingham in 1998. In those days before the internet, they cancelled our flight without informing us and then sent us on a wild goose chase across the airport which culminated in our entire family running out onto the runway and yelling stop at an England-bound plane that had just taken off, under the mistaken impression that our luggage was aboard it. In that pre-September 11th world, it was perfectly possible to run through security and onto the runway of Dublin airport without anyone so much as asking what you thought you were doing

In a couple of weeks I am going to sort out some Slovakian currency in case something does go wrong and we get stranded in Bratislava. And I am going to brush up on my Czech, because according to my book the two languages are 95% mutually intelligible. At the moment all I can remember to say is that I have a sore throat and am looking for a bookshop, but I used to be able to say more useful things than that I have also bought travel insurance for my boyfriend and I and read the small print avidly so that I know exactly what I can claim for in the event of a disaster

When I am not being stressed, I am very much looking forward to going. I was first invited by someone to an Esperanto event in 2003, and back then I could never have imagined that I would one day tell my mother I was attending one and not meet with a dreadful reaction. But I told her yesterday that I had just booked the flights, and she was actually very cheerful about it and said how exciting it sounded etc etc. I didn’t exactly tell her the truth because I had in fact booked the flights some months ago, and I made it sound like my boyfriend had paid for and organised his own which wasn’t exactly the case, but on the whole it was a fairly accurate rendition and she was cool with it

Whew. I’m off to bravely print my Slovakian bus tickets. And perhaps do some work. I’ve spent the afternoon on the phone to a very inept insurance company trying to extract some information out of them about a client. Highly frustrating, but at least it has allowed me to organise my holiday to a background of classical music In other news, I have discovered that anti-depressants cure PMT, but am still undecided as to whether or not this is a good thing!

Tags: Esperanto, IJK, Szombathely, trains

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Esperanto, Holidays and outings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.