Travel

Four Countries in Half a Day

It sounds like that trip you did when you finished college. I assure you, it was the opposite.

We all have that one friend who once went to Europe in their 20s, but neither now nor then has any idea where they went because they ripped through 15 countries in 5 days, drowning in Jägermeister, on a package tour.

If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit to having done that too.

The eye rolling prospect of hearing their stories again mercifully declines as you get older, because by the time you get to this age, one’s understanding of and approach to travel has hopefully changed.

There’s a slowing down with this stuff and the realisation that there is a serious difference between being in a country, seeing things in it and taking photos of it all, and actually understanding it. The former is a question of minutes, hours and days. The latter can take a lifetime.

I did have it in mind at one point to get to every country in the world, but have sensibly put that aside. Meantime, there is no shortage of people on YouTube who are busily documenting their valiant attempts to do just that. I’ve wondered how living an experience and filming the whole thing and then spending just as long or even longer rewatching your day and editing it down to five to fifteen minutes of usable footage that people will actually watch, actually qualifies as travel.

I’ve also wondered how it qualifies as fun. Everything you do in a new country would seem to have to revolve around what kind of footage you are going to get, and manufacturing situations to give you that content. You can’t miss anything, but you would seem to be missing everything.

But hey, if that’s you, then by all means, fill your boots. We know France is easy. We imagine Eritrea is hard. And I suppose flights and everything to the most obscure, most difficult to reach and most arduous to enter countries of the world is expensive. Someone has to pay for it.

But then it happened to me today, this business of quickly blasting through countries. I do still have it in mind to reach 100 countries before I turn 50 and though it’s unlikely to happen, there are those days when my list of remaining countries gets a bit shorter.

It is not often that an accident of political geography and family history combine to make a day like today possible, in which I spent time in four separate countries. Three I had been to and one was new to me. For me, my personal rule states that to have “been in a country”, I have to have walked around, gotten lost, had a beer and asked someone from there for directions. That’s it. Can we all agree that being in an airport on a layover does not count as having been to a country?

I had been spending time with family in southern Germany, an area that is so well connected that one can really go anywhere from there, so why not to other countries in which German — and its various regional dialects — is spoken in each?

From Ravensburg in Baden Wurttemberg, I was briefly in Bavaria and over the Austrian border by train, ending in Feldkirch. One and a half hours, no passport check and barely a sign announcing the change. The crew on the train switched between Germany and Austria and the change in accents on the intercom was really the only indication that I had arrived somewhere different.

In Feldkirch, Austria I took a bus to Schaan-Vaduz, Liechtenstein. Twenty minutes later and I was already in country number three for the day. Same thing, no passport necessary, although I did notice a few flags and different licence plates. Beautiful place, with the granite walls of the Alps to the east.

And. completely. quiet.

I managed to have a local beer and have a few conversations, though the place is far too small to get lost in. It still counts, right?

From there, it was another quick bus to Buchs, Switzerland in ten minutes, including a bridge over the worryingly low Rhine River. The last stretch was a packed train to Zürich, Switzerland, where I arrived one hour later.

Truthfully, it was all a bit too easy and I felt more like a commuter than a traveller. Everything functions here as it is expected to and everything is on time. Everything is quiet. Everything is clean. No one is watching YouTube videos without earbuds.

A few years ago I did a trip that involved going from Zimbabwe to Zambia to Botswana in a short period of time. That is an entirely different kind of travel altogether and a story for another article.

I really do hope that you like what you have just read. If you want unlimited access to thousands of writers, consider a subscription to Medium. It will set you back $5 a month and if you use this link, then I get a slice of that and I’ll start writing about some slightly more challenging border crossings.