London to Athens by train and ferry

I recently arrived back in the UK after attending a wedding in Athens. To continue my four-year no-flying streak driven by concern about the environmental impact of air travel, I decided to go on an adventure to Greece and back over the land and sea while working remotely (as the iOS team lead at PSPDFKit).

In this post, I’ll share a few photos and notes about the trip.

Route and pace

The route I took is described well on Seat 61 (a terrific resource for train travel). I took trains across France and along the Adriatic coast of Italy, followed by a ferry to Greece. Here are the main parts of the route:

• London to Paris by train (2.5 hours)
• Paris to Milan by train (via Geneva) (3 hours + 4.5 hours)
• Milan to Bari by train (7 hours)
• Bari to Patra by ferry (17 hours overnight)
• Patra to Athens by integrated bus and train (3 hours)

The minimum time needed for this route is usually three days, with nights in Milan and on the ferry. However at the time I was booking, a landslide in the French Alps last summer was still blocking the direct route from Paris to Milan. (I understand this is still the situation.) Therefore it seemed best to travel via Switzerland, so I believe the minimum realistic time was four days.

Due to various constraints, I could only spend three weeks for the whole expedition out and back. (One reason was I expected Apple’s WWDC to be in the first week of June rather than the second.) I wanted to have plenty of time in Greece while friends were there around the wedding. Another goal was to make the journey relaxed and so I could see the places I travelled though. This was the balance I decided on:

• Nine days for a laid back journey out
• Eight days in Athens
• Four days for a ‘fast’ trip back

Since I mostly took the same route out and back, below I’ve combined photos and description from each part.

Trains between London and Bari

I spent the entire first week making my way slowly from London to Bari. I stayed two nights in each each of Paris, Milan, Termoli and Bari — so I had five moderate travel days and four stationary days. This was an excellent pace, as I made steady progress without rushing.

I specifically wanted a day in Paris to visit the Louvre, but my day was a Tuesday, which is when the museum is closed. I suppose I’ll just have to go to Paris again sometime. Instead I went to the Institut du Monde Arabe, which was generally very interesting and in particular had a good mini-exhibition from Ubisoft about the efforts that went into making Assassin's Creed Mirage historically plausible.

The one train that didn’t run smoothly on the whole trip was the one Swiss train I took. Can’t trust those Swiss trains. I had to take three slower trains instead, so I arrived in Milan later than I hoped. Anyway, I still had fabulous views of lake Geneva and the Swiss alps.

Milan has big city vibes. I don’t recommend it as the best place to experience Italian culture. I took the opportunity to drop by the Piazza Liberty Apple store to try the new iPad Pro.

As a side note, you can enter and exit public transport in Milan with any standard contactless payment card. No tickets or separate card needed. This isn’t Apple’s Express Mode, so you still need to authenticate with FaceID or TouchID. The main limitation is that not all the metro access and exit gates have the necessary hardware. In a row of six gates, two might show the contactless payment symbol.

The Italian Frecciarossa train service is so good! Buying tickets well in advance from Trainline, business class was the cheapest option, so the trip further south from Milan was luxurious and fast.

As the train races down the Adriatic coast of Italy, you can see hundreds of kilometres of sandy beaches.

The high speed train between Milan and Bari calls at various places along the Adriatic that look like wonderful options to stop and explore, including Rimini, Pescara and Termoli. I picked Termoli somewhat arbitrarily, and it was everything I had hoped for. Termoli is a small seaside town with beaches, cafes, ice cream, a tiny old town, and a very chill atmosphere. If you’re looking for anything more than that, head elsewhere. There were lots of tourists, but except for me they seemed to all be Italian tourists. I was very happy to be there.

I also spent two nights in Bari before taking the ferry, which turned out to be a stroke of luck (see below where I talk about the ferry). Bari was decent but felt overcrowded.

After Greece, my way back from Bari to London was compressed into three days (although theoretically this could be done in two days). All trains ran exactly as planned so there isn’t much to say.

Ferry between Bari and Patra

My second week started calmly with a Monday focused on work in Bari. The ferry I had booked to Patra was supposed to leave at 19:30 on Tuesday. However when I went for online check-in on Tuesday at about 10:00, I found the ferry company had altered the deal on me: My ferry was instead set to leave at 12:00 with Igoumenitsa as the final destination! This raised multiple concerns:

• I needed to pack up and leave my accommodation right away.
• Igoumenitsa is at least on mainland Greece, but there are no trains in the area and I needed to get to Athens.
• I’d be arriving at 23:00 with no accommodation booked.
• I didn’t know what the Internet connectivity situation would be on the ferry.

So I rushed off. Getting to the ferry on foot through the port in Bari wasn’t that great an experience. Pedestrians were clearly an afterthought in the design.

In the end, after speaking to a couple staff members I found a bus would be arranged taking us off the ferry to Patra. Since the ferry tracks the Italian coast, my portable router picked up signal for the first few hours so I was able to book a hotel in Patra with a 24-hour front desk. Phew!

I hadn’t taken a long journey on a ferry before. The experience on the ferry itself was very pleasant, with lots of space, a cafe open the whole time, and a cafeteria at key meal times. I had a cabin, which wasn’t so useful since the ferry out ended up not running overnight, but it was still nice to have. It was a shared three-bed cabin, but nobody else showed up.

Since these ferries mostly transport freight and people with cars, there were only six of us to be transferred from Igoumenitsa to Patra so we went on a minibus. It took about three hours, arriving at 2:00. The upside of this trouble was hearing about the inspiring adventures of the other minibus passengers, including the English couple cycling to Crete and the gentleman from Japan kicking off his seventies by exploring Europe with his fold-up bicycle.

It’s inexcusable that Superfast, the ferry company, didn’t notify me about the change to the ferry. I spoke to other passengers in the same situation as me, and they were also not notified. If Superfast had notified me of the change and that a replacement bus would be available, then the experience would have been significantly less stressful.

The return ferry from Greece was thankfully unaltered from my booking. Setting off at 17:30, there were stunning views until sunset. (The only downside was I wasn’t lucky enough to have the cabin to myself a second time.)

Bus and train between Patra and Athens

The last part of the journey was the only section for which I didn’t have tickets booked in advance (because you can’t). This is an integrated bus and train across the Peloponnese, changing in Kiato, and it was extremely smooth and easy. The train track connecting to Patra is being rebuilt, which will at some point make this even simpler. The views from the train were great.

Finally I arrived in Athens. Many friends were in town, and we had a marvellous few days. (Everybody else took flights.)

And of course it wouldn’t be Greece without cats:

Really remote work

I didn’t want to take three weeks off work. Being able to work on trains was an essential part of the plan because I don’t think sitting on trains for so long would be a good use of precious time off.

Staying two nights in each place on the way out was not only more relaxed but made work easier. While I can get a lot of useful work done on a train, the unreliable connectivity limits some activities, especially meetings. We have a pretty good meeting culture at PSPDFKit so being unavailable every other day was no problem.

For the duration of the trip, I took two days off per week, so I was working at 60% capacity. This was a fine balance. Most of the time off was used spending time with friends in Greece and taking the ferry each way.

Would I do this again?

If another particular reason to be in Greece comes up, yes! This adventure was a huge success. If I’d taken flights, the wedding would still have been lovely, but it would otherwise have been an unremarkable trip. It was expensive, but most of the cost went towards short-term accommodation for three weeks rather than the mode of transport.

Of course taking more time would make a journey like this more enjoyable. However if I had the same time constraints, I wouldn’t change much about the planning. If I take exactly this route again, I’d stop in different places along the way for novelty rather than because the places I chose were lacking.

Up next: three weeks in Berlin in July and August for cat sitting and another wedding. London to Berlin is a straightforward one-day train trip that I’ve done several times before.