Parliament of Fowls

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.

I thought before I went much further with writing up my tour of the Baltic States I would elucidate my philosophy of travel somewhat. There have been numerous books on the subject - and I am in the middle of trying to write one which would combine my interests in travel, the Baltics and Poland, politics and history/culture. I am a political animal and can't really escape the "issues" involved in being a responsible traveller around Europe and occasionally beyond. I am however at the same time a conservative Conservative, sceptical of the extent to which climate change/global warming is dependent on man-made factors (a subject for another post of its own) and my belief is that "fair trade" has actually meant that the developing world has become too dependent on cash crops.

Within Europe, the issues are different but similar. What struck me in Riga particularly was the number of businessmen there from Scandinavia and Germany. Call me rather cynical, but the two northerly countries used to be colonies of Germany and Sweden, with the Danes founding Tallinn, from the words taani linn, "Danish city". The countries have come full circle - they may have political and civil freedoms now that they didn't have twenty or thirty years ago, but the economic benefits of capitalism have been largely the result of foreign investment and not indigenous growth. There were a number of indigenous developments, such as the Kolonna firm of parfumeries and hotels (one of which I stayed in in Kuldiga for a more modest amount compared to the normal "boutique" developments). Responsibility here therefore meant that I tried very hard not to buy food produced elsewhere, that was at least marked as local brands, such as the lovely Laima chocolates, Lithuanian baked goods and traditional Christmas sakotis (though the latter ended up as bird food because it was too crumbly to transport home and too rich to eat all at once).

My general method of holidaying is to try and "do" places by fitting in to the locality in which I am rather than skim the surface, do the tourist parts, have a few beers (or Diet Cokes in my case) and flit out to the next hotspot. I devised a few rules in the process for "conservative responsibility" which are as follows:

1. Travel alone. The definition of "alone" varies, but when I did go with someone else - my boyfriend and then my mother - my style of travelling rubbed off on them rather than theirs on me. My mother is also a big fan of exploring and was also a driver, meaning that we got further below the surface of life in a hired car than even I can get without being able to drive. The "alone" is to make sure that you can meet people who will show you life in the country you are visiting, even if they are batty old owls in Prague who take a rather proprietal attitude towards the secondhand books he had given to a nice antique shop to sell and paw you in the process. Although you can hire guides, you get much more of an appreciation if you meet people spontaneously - though perhaps the intimate details of the internal politics of the Latvian hospital (the night staff were all Russians, and the day shifts were taken by Latvians...ge that!) were something that I could have done without knowing on my first trip there.

2. Budget airlines are OK but flag-carriers are now offering better deals in and out of the main Eastern European destinations in competition with Ryanair and easyJet. I have no objection to budget airlines per se or how they have opened up travel to parts of Europe other people haven't reached yet. However normal airlines like Malev, Estonian Air and airBaltic all offer decent rates at holiday times to make them attractive to someone who finds the Ryanair complaints site more interesting than the latest Michael Palin film. Keeping national airlines in business also is in accordance with the idea that the commercial success of Eastern Europe ultimately depends on the Eastern Europeans themselves, and paying slightly more to use struggling flag-carriers. Estonian Air is the subject of a custody suit at present between SAS and the Estonian government, each of whom is offering to buy the other out in order to give the airline - which only has five or six aircraft in total - a needed cash boost. I would rather put money in the pockets of the Estonian government than into Stelios' or Michael O'Leary's bulging moneybags.

Also you have more chance of not being ripped off on board by Ryanair's penny-pinching schemes or suddenly finding yourself stranded due to a tiny pinhole in your passport, and you have the protection of compensation schemes if something goes wrong, which it nearly did on the flight out in November when Tallinn ended up snowbound and the storm progressed to Stockholm, directly in our way.

3. Suitcases, not backpacks. I have never really travelled light; I think I must have been a soldier in a past life because I seem to end up overburdened, even when on a weekend break in Prague (not, I hasten to add, a flying visit - being stranded in Warsaw station one evening waiting to see my mother off back home and the train back to Lodz, on the spur of the moment I bought a ticket to Prague for the weekend and went home just to get an overnight bag...which metamorphosed over the weekend into a larger holdall to hold all the rubbish I found myself buying there).

Travelling with a case forces you to slow down. You quite literally find cities a bit of a drag, but the feeling you get when you dump the case in your room and head off back out is the most liberating feeling I have ever felt, even when I only have one night in a place. Too often it is tempting just to get a taxi, but in my experience walking around trying to find one often brings you to the hotel you were looking for in the first place. You have to plan things better, make sure there is somewhere to park your bags, interact with locals, and sometimes even friendships are made when some lovely lad on the tram asks "Perhaps I can help you?" in his best English. The first trip I made as a student was made possible by the wheeled case, and indeed the trips I make were named for it. I can see that wheeling something like my LGS up the mountains to Macchu Pichu would be a challenge...but I'm game for anything these days.

4. Smart clothes. At all times. It can quite literally save you from disaster - my mother learned not to wear shorts and teeshirts in Latvia when a large alsatian took a chunk of flesh out of her bare thigh in Cesis in 2002. Even the alcoholics who "owned" the dog were smarter dressed than she was. As a tourist you tend to stand out if you dress differently to the locals, and although you can often tell the Latvians from the Russians in Riga by the way the Russians all look like extravagantly made up Slavic tigers (leopardskin coats and pointy boots which would make Santa's elves wince) and the Latvians like sleek, demure and conservative Nordic foxies, they are all dressed up to the nines. Westerners in combat pants and teeshirts and three-day-growth are immediately recognisable, and more of a target. When you are approached by someone asking a complicated question in the local language, like P J O'Rourke in Russia, you know you have arrived. And I don't mean on Ryanair from Stansted.

More later but I think I smell my aunt's moussaka well on the way so adieu for now.