Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

As always the Heritage Days weekend is a bit hectic so today the schedule included a family fun day, the Titanic tour and Springhill.

The tour basically takes a run along the harbour emphasising various spots that had a role in the history of the Titanic or of Belfast shipbuilding generally. It starts off in what was one of the oldest parts of Belfast harbour but which has since seen the most renovation work so, at the moment, is the most modern area in use although that’s going to change soon when building of the Titanic Quarter is completed.

As with the architectural tour we saw a number of places where we’ll be going back to for a more detailed look. The first major one of those is the harbour masters office, then it continues on past the various drawing offices where the Titanic was designed. Along the way you get to see the pillars which are the only visible part that remains of the giant slipway built for the Titanic. They’re constructing a gigantic Titanic exhibition at the end of that and there are some plans to restore at least part of the slipway. From there it’s on past some of the older parts of the docks before reaching the Titanic pump house where the Titanic’s dry dock remains completely dry after almost 100 years. That’s having a special opening later in the month when we hope to have a closer look.

The whole tour runs to around an hour and would be reasonable value at the normal £10 (£30 for families) price though obviously if you’re not in a rush it would be best to wait for the Heritage Weekend next year as it’s free then.

Not so long ago you were encouraged to put as much as you could into checked luggage so that the passenger area of the plane wasn’t cluttered with a whole heap of a little (often a lot) too large carry-on luggage.

Of course, it’s completely different now and they want you to do without checked luggage altogether if you can. Despite their normally over the top approach to charging even Ryanair has raised the carry-on allowances to a notional 10kg  (Ryanair say “It should weigh no more than 10kg”). In practical terms, so long as you go for online check-in, there really isn’t a limit so long as you can actually carry it onto the plane and so long as it’s not too far off the 55x40x20 size.

Even the liquid limits don’t seem overly severe so long as you don’t try to bring drinks. Normal sized tubes of toothpaste might look big but they’re no more than the 100ml limit. You can even bring on drinks so long as you buy them after you’ve passed through security thus avoiding the ridiculous prices on the plane (though don’t be drinking too much on Ryanair as it’s £1 for the toilet).

Laughably these days you’re still not allowed to take “magnetised materials” on-board although that’s a rule that has been totally impractical to enforce since credit cards came on the scene not to mention the magnetic stripe on many tickets. I wonder when it’ll occur to IATA to revise this?

What is a real pain is getting everything into the one bag. As you read this I’ll be struggling to get a weeks worth of clothes plus assorted items for my OU summer school into a bag: white coat, big lump of a course book, computer, etc. I’m sure that there’s room for a “how to pack a carry-on bag” course!

All being well, we’re heading off to the maritime festival in Belfast shortly.

It’s one of the original festivals (which include the summer carnival and autumn film festival) that were started before we began to get large numbers of tourists. In fact, the last time we were there was just before the big jump in the number of tourists so it’ll be interesting to see how they cope (not well if last year was anything to go by!).

It’s one of the natural festivals for Belfast in that there’s quite a substantial history of things naval including, of course, the construction of the Titanic. Last time we were at it, the kids wouldn’t go on the baby Titanic that was there as they were sure it would sink! Worth pencilling in is the opening of the major Titanic exhibition in 2012 (the hundredth anniversary of the sailing).

Anyway, must tootle on as we’ve several other things to do today as well as the festival.

Much as most people like their summer holidays and many of those expect to be flying to somewhere in Spain, there’s major uncertainty this year thanks to the Icelandic volcano.

So what should you do?

The most reliable approach is to forget about any holidays requiring air travel in the northern hemisphere. In practical terms that will limit the number of places that you can consider quite considerably unless you’re prepared to devote quite a lot of your holiday time to travelling. Typically, from England you wouldn’t be able to go much further south than northern Spain or much further east than Switzerland with two days travelling in each direction, drop that to one day and you’re largely limited to northern France, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, and, of course, somewhere in the UK.

If that doesn’t suit, and you really must go by air then assembling your own holiday by booking your flights and accommodation separately is going to require good holiday insurance that definitely covers volcano problems. Whilst the airlines might be required to be reasonable about paying for accommodation, those laws don’t extend to accommodation and you could easily find yourself paying for accommodation that you can’t get to. Alternatively, if you book a package deal you should be covered for problems. Either way, do bear in mind that a cancellation can leave you either stranded at home (less costly obviously) or at your destination and if it’s the latter you need to budget for a lot of potential extra expenses ie don’t aim to spend down to the last penny on your day of departure.

Of course, the biggest plus of booking a holiday involving flights is that it’s quite likely to be considerably cheaper all-round in that there should be a whole lot fewer people booking such holidays this year which means a lot of surplus accommodation.

The cancellation of pretty much all air travel throughout Europe this week has shown up just how radically different people are when they need to take responsibility for themselves.

This was a pretty much unprecedented event. With 9/11 the flight cancellations were short and for a known period. This time around, they’re for a completely unknown period and the way that this period has been extended seems to almost have been designed to create the maximum amount of stress for all concerned. If it had been announced at the outset that flights were off for the next week then those affected could have reacted better. Being stuck in a foreign airport for a day isn’t an unknown experience but a week is a whole different ball game.

Thus, people have had to reach the point all by themselves where they needed to say that enough was enough and it was time for them to work out an alternative means of getting to where-ever they needed to be. That’s hard to do. Few people decided to search for that alternative right away and those that did seemed to end up doing crazy things like spending a thousand pounds or more on a taxi when clearly a train would have been cheaper and more practical. We’re seeing the effects on the ferries now for the second wave who have now decided that they really need to get home: early on the ferries could easily cope, now that’s not so much the case obviously.

However, I suspect that there are still considerable numbers of people waiting for “someone” to do “something” for them and get them home. That’s unlikely to happen. The majority of those stranded will have gotten to their destinations by way of a discount airline and one of the features of such airlines is that there is little or no slack in terms of staff. Even with the best will in the world, it seems unlikely that they could get everyone from what’s usually an isolated airport to another isolated airport: as we all know, the transport infrastructure around the airports that they use is almost non-existant.

So, how long will these people wait around? Will they still be there this time next week if the planes still aren’t flying? I suspect that quite a number will be if some of those on the phone-in programmes is anything to go by. For instance, during the week one distraught lady phoned in to complain that the airline wouldn’t fly her with her severely disabled daughter. She wanted the plane to take her regardless of any grounding: her reasoning seemed to be that since her daughter was severely disabled then she had the absolute right to get on the plane regardless of anything else. This was someone who was in Paris and who would have had no problem going by train if she’d just paused to think about it.

How many other people are thinking that this will go away in a week or two and are already booking their flights for the bank holidays in May? Quite a lot if the pricing on some routes is anything to go by: they’ve gone up almost ten fold in the last two weeks.