Contiki Conclusion

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This is basically just summary for anyone who may be curious on doing a Contiki tour from my experience.

Contiki Conclusion - European Whirl

Tour in general is incredibly fast paced. It's designed to maximise your amount of sight seeing in a short period of time.

Typical days would consist of:
Day 1: Travel for Full (or large part of) Day
Day 2: Explore city all day from early on in the morning

The first half of tour is spent in Hostels, the majority which are sweet (bearable), with only a few that were disappointing.
Second half is spent at camp-sites which again vary. The worst one I stayed in was in Venice.

Favourite Country: Germany
Favourite Cities: Berlin, Paris, Rome
Most Beautiful Scenery: Switzerland followed closely by Austria.
Cities I probably wouldn't go again in terms of sight seeing as I think I've seen all there really is to see: Venice, Amsterdam, Prague
Funniest Excursion: White Water Rafting

Food - Vegetarian

Food for Vegetarians was (for the most part) pretty shit. That goes for paid dinners and meals provided by Contiki. If you're Lactose or Vegan you'd do much better taking your own food or buying it as you go along. There's no cooking facilities and generally nowhere to store your food in a cool place so taken frozen meals/things that need to be refrigerated can be tough.

Special Diet meals in Europe in general is almost impossible to find, not like England where everything that's vegetarian/vegan. A helpful tip would be to learn how to say "Vegetarian" in the language of the countries you're attending as some places don't speak English and if they do, very limited.

On your Travel days, you would 9/10 being going to some crappy Diner which has fuck all vegetarian options and piss poor food.

People on Tour

Your bus has about 50 people from different nationalities, the majority of them most likely being Australian (40 on Aussie, 6 Kiwi, 2 English, 2 American on my trip).

Each person has come for a different reason. It maybe to get absolutely smashed every night around Europe, to have a few drinks or solely to explore.

From what I've heard, there's bound to be couples who generally just stick together and don't socialise much. We were fortunate with our tour that most couples were cool and participated just as much as the single people.

Everyone will break up into little groups and will probably just hang with those certain people for the remainder of the tour.

Your tour manager and driver play a large part in how everything goes. We had a really awesome tour manager (Mecha) who partied with everyone and went outside his job description to ensure we enjoyed ourselves. It's not a requirement of the tour manager to do this. All they have to do is give you info so you don't get lost in town, arrange where you're stopping off next and ensure everyone is safe.

The other tours we met up with most of the time didn't appear nearly as close and didn't have the enthusiasm our group did.

Tips

Budget about 100 Euro ($200 NZ) per day if you can afford it. You may not need it all, but even if you're not drinking etc it's good to ensure you have extra money as (depending on your Tour manager) you'll probably want to do extra things off the itinerary. Of course if you're planning on doing heaps of shopping/drinking you'll want to have more.

Do all of the Excursions if you've never done them before or you can't afford it. This can be factored into your 100 Euro a day budget (I think it's about 500 Euro all up). The only excursion I didn't do was the group photo as the people who were important on tour would be in photos with me anyway.
Even the meals were really good in terms of bonding with the others on tour.

Take some Medication for any instance you may get sick. Everyone on our tour got really bad flu's and sore throats and missed some days on tour because of it. Especially take Multi-Vitamins as they'll probably decrease your chances of getting sick.

Have locks and money belts for Security. These probably won't come in use, but the last thing you want is to get robbed on holiday.

Have a book or learn the basics in every Language. Most places can speak little bits of English, but it really makes it easier when you're trying to ask for certain things.

Take back up batteries for your Camera and back up memory cards. If you're buying a camera before tour try and get one with a decent amount of optical zoom. I missed out on a few really good shots because my zoom was only like 4x Optical.

Washing and Drying clothes is incredibly expensive about 8 Euro ($20 NZ), so try take lots of clothes or think of other alternatives if possible.


Talk to everyone. You'll be surprised how much you have in common with different people.

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Comments

[yep, me again]

re: the washing and drying, that's what bathroom sinks and those portable washing lines are for silly! that's what i did the whole trip. nothing cleans your clothes more thoroughly than your own hands!