More pointers on the way I travel.

5. I don't tend to get drunk, but feel free to do so. The object is to relax, not jump through a lot of hoops. Besides, the locals are often rather tipsy as well. For full effect, a bottle of hard liquor like Vana Tallinn or Rigas Black Balsams in a bus station buffet is mandatory, but the time I did that I got sick the day after, so it's now strictly optional.

6. Hotels with private rooms are actually cheaper than hostels. Booking is optional. Finding a hotel or hostel in Eastern Europe is quite easy, even if arriving very late at night. I don't enjoy backpackers' hostels, for the reason that I don't enjoy backpacks. You don't get the full flavour of the trip unless you find a room that hasn't been decorated since the 1960s and still has the commie decor to match. The places with these kind of rooms are getting hard to find in tourist places but are still plentiful off the beaten track, and Czecho-slovakia still has a good number of them, as does Poland. Even fairly modern hotels elsewhere are still cheap enough to be viable, with the lovely Kolonna chain in Latvia being the most cost-effective hotel in the pretty town of Kuldiga. Being in one of these places is a good boost to the local economy even if you do have to stay on an estate that looks like something out of news footage from Bosnia (particularly the Cyrillic graffiti) - the Hotel Jura in Liepaja may have looked dodgy but I appreciated the insight into local lifestyles even when I realised the bus went into town from outside the hotel but didn't necessarily terminate there going the other way.

You can sometimes get good deals by booking in advance, but in a lot of Eastern Europe the best deals aren't even listed on the internet. It is risky turning up somewhere late at night without a booking but I was really annoyed when I turned up in Liepaja with a 25 lat (~£30) booking to see the local Soviet concrete box in the middle of town offering rooms at 10 lat (low season prices).

But I'd rather that than some idiot with a guitar strolling into the hostel dorm at 3 am and taking a noisy shower and turning all the lights on in the process. I had two or three nights of virtuous youth-hostelling on my first Interrail trip and then fled to private rooms all the rest of the way. The Jugendgasthaus Birgittenau in Vienna, where I stayed when I went on two Young European Federalist trips, is the exception to this rule.

7. Souvenirs are OK but people back home don't want a plate with ZAGREB written on it - they want something nice and usable. Buying from cheaper establishments makes sure the money goes to local craftspeople; a few days in Romania and I could tell the dolls which were mass produced and sold in every gift shop in every town, and which places sold more genuine souvenirs. I brought back a tablecloth from Kalemegdan Park in Belgrade which is still used by my parents every time they have dinner guests - it fits the size of the table almost serendipitously, and it doesn't have BELGRADE woven into it (still less a big black-and-white target on it, as a lot of Belgrade souvenirs still have after the NATO bombing of 1999).

8. Language opens doors - learning a little bit goes a long way with everyone. There's no need to study the finer points of Lithuanian literature (such as it is, with one of the local legends being about a woman who finds a snake down her blouse which turns into a handsome prince) before you go, but you'd be amazed how little is written in English even in tourist hotspots like Tallinn. Knowing "please", "thank you", "yes", "no", and particularly "where is the toilet" is enough but it does open doors - sometimes quite literally.

9. Guide books are all right but are necessarily somewhat out of date and things change so quickly that it's doubtful that on the third visit I really needed my Lonely Planet. On the other hand, the In Your Pocket series is good for any visit to anywhere in Eastern Europe - they even do magazines for cities in Albania now - and have spawned rip-offs like Parnu This Week (2008-09), so for a lot of larger places it is worth relying more on those than on LP or the Rough Guides: better maps, better listings, more accurate and up-to-date timetables, and that's just the Minsk edition. I still buy the bigger volumes, and on my Baltic trip I took the library's copies of the Thomas Cook and Bradt guides with me for a second and third opinion.

If in doubt, just chuck your books in the bin and wander around the place. The best places aren't in the book. In fact, I can't remember the name of the pub in Parnu which had a lot of drunk squirrels lolling around the place, but perhaps it's meant to stay that way.

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More to follow anon. Very little of interest is going on with our friends Dave and Gordon that isn't just a twist on things prior to the PBR. We've yet to see whether Dave has set things alight with the latest tax policy (small point, Foxy: with interest rates so low, savers aren't exactly that common at the moment) but I don't feel it's worth getting excited about it. The main thing of interest is that my father has pronounced the Tories "unelectable". I will try and do some more topical writing, but since I haven't been posting much on Conservative Home - abandoning it to its own fate - I'm not really in the cut and thrust at the moment and have a chance to consider what I'm going to do in the longer term.