EuroLearn Students Get Travel Savvy During Volcanic Ash Disruption
No planes? Then trains, ferries, buses and taxis are just the ticket
Kerri Hunter has a bit of fun during her long-and-winding journey back to her host university in Finland following travel chaos in Europe last month caused by Iceland's volcanic eruption.
By Stacey Hartmann
University students abroad consider airplanes a “given” travel choice when exploring other countries and regions.
But last month, Canadian student Kerri Hunter and American student Carolyn Goebel found themselves with no airline options after ash from Iceland’s erupting Eyjafallajokull volcano closed European airpspace due to safety concerns.
Hunter and Goebel, both current participants in EuroScholars and EuroLearn study abroad programs, were among thousands of travelers scrambling for alternative forms of transportation after the April 14 eruption.
Hunter jokes it was the best excuse she’s ever given a professor: “‘I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to make it to the exam on Monday due to a volcano erupting …’ Bet profs don’t hear that one too often!” she says.
An honors bioscience graduate from the University of Manitoba, Hunter was supposed to fly out of Zurich on Sunday, April 18, to Finland, where she is studying at the University of Helsinki on the EuroScholars Research Abroad Program.
Carolyn Goebel makes a meal in the kitchen of a hostel in France. "We were on an extremely limited budget," she said.
“We learned of the volcano erupting on Thursday and kept watch as more and more airports closed and flights were cancelled,” said Hunter, who at the time was in Zurich with three other students for the EuroScholars mid-stay meeting. “Eventually, on Saturday, our airline announced it was cancelling all flights, and the Helsinki airport would remain closed until at least midweek.”
Meanwhile, Goebel, a third-year history major at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was supposed to fly out of Budapest, Hungary, to Glasgow, Scotland, where she is on a semester abroad at the University of Strathclyde through EuroLearn. At the time, she was traveling with her flat mate through Hungary and Transylvania.
“It was quite stressful,” she says. “We just bounced ideas off each other and soon enough we were pretty calm about the situation. When we weren’t worrying about the extra money that we hadn’t intended on spending, we were laughing about how ridiculous the situation was. Laughing was probably the best stress reliever of all.”
Once it became clear all flights were canceled, the women madly researched their options via the Internet and any other means available, scanning train, bus and ferry timetables and working out ways to get back “home.”
Carolyn Goebel took many photos of exquisite Transylvania during her travels there and before her stressful travel journey back to the University of Strathclyde in Scotland.
“It was a bit stressful in the beginning, mostly because no one knew anything for sure,” Hunter said, “like how long the airports would be closed, and if we should wait for a re-scheduled flight or try to get back on our own.”
Emails and phone calls went out to family and friends to let them know they were safe, as did requests to professors for extensions for coursework. In addition, they stayed in contact with EuroLearn advisors in Europe and the United States who gave support and assistance wherever possible.
In fact Goebel and Hunter were two of 12 EuroLearn students displaced by the air-travel shutdown.
That all arrived safely back to their host universities “demonstrates that our students are empowered,” says EuroLearn Director Mona Miller. “They figured things out. They sought guidance and advice when they needed it. But they took control of their situations.”
Miller also notes the important role social media tools like Facebook played during the disruption, especially when cell phone minutes ran out. It allowed everyone to monitor the situation and track each student’s progress toward getting home.
“No matter how stranded we felt,” Goebel says, “maintaining a connection with our family and advisors was the most important thing to us and helped us keep our sanity.”
Kerri Hunter snapped this shot of the standing-room only train - the last one she could catch to Copenhagen.
“It was also really comforting to have support from Eurolearn and advisors,” Goebel adds, “so that we could keep informed about new developments and what our options were.
After air travel was shut down, Hunter and her three travel companions took a leap of faith and purchased non-connecting train tickets to Hamburg, Germany. Beyond that point, all other connections were sold out. They also had no hotel reservation or contacts in Germany.
“We decided it would be best to try and stay together for as long as possible,” Hunter said, “and so decided to go for a route that would take us to Sweden, and from there I knew we could easily get back to Finland if we could get to a port city.”
Luckily, it turned out to be the right decision. From Hamburg, Hunter traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, via four more trains. She then took a train across the bridge to Malmo, Sweden, and then a taxi to Lund Sweden, to an apartment of one of her fellow students. The next morning, she and another travel companion took an eight-hour bus ride to Stockholm, Sweden, and stayed the night. They boarded a ferry late the next day for Helsinki.
“We finally pulled into the port of Helsinki around 10 a.m. the next morning (April 21st),” Hunter says. “All it took was six trains, one taxi, one bus, one subway and one ferry to get back.”
For Goebel, the roundabout return to her host university included a train to Vienna, a train to Karlsruhe and then to Paris, where she spent three days, “which admittedly was not entirely unpleasant,” she says.
Kerri Hunter's shot of the busy Hamburg Central Station in Germany.
From there, she and her flat mate took a bus to Calais, with the bus driving onto a ferry to Dover, and then disembarking for London where they caught another bus to Glasgow.
“Overall, it took us about a week with travel time to get back for what was supposed to be only a week-long vacation,” she says.
"It felt good to finally see this!" says Kerri Hunter of the Port of Helsinki, which she arrived at after several days of trains, buses and taxis.
Both Goebel and Hunter say they learned a few things as they coped with the complete collapse of their transportation itineraries while traveling abroad:
- Traveling with another person or in a group makes it much easier to handle a crisis.
- Maintaining contact with family, friends and advisors helps ease the stress.
- It’s okay to “over prepare.” Printouts of addresses and phone numbers of places you are staying as well as all transportation itineraries are incredibly helpful when you’re stranded.
- Study up on the countries you plan to visit so you aren’t completely in the dark when it’s time to navigate unexpected circumstances.
Hunter adds: “I learned that Europe has an amazing transportation system. If this happened in North America, I think it would have been much worse, and we would have had no choice but to wait for the planes.”
And Goebel notes: “We knew almost nothing about the countries we were going to in the first place, and the volcano situation just made it that much more interesting. It was a good exercise in resourcefulness, practicality, and patience – on top of being an incredible adventure.”
Print
Related posts:
