Any place given that title by none other than Lord Byron himself has to be worth a visit! I’d heard mixed reviews about Dubrovnik – beautiful, incredibly touristy, overrated – but I just had to see for myself. And anyway, it’s yet another World Heritage Site to tick off my list! 🙂 I teamed, Read More
Instead of heading straight from Hvar to Dubrovnik, I caught another ferry to the island of Korcula, halfway between the two. It had been recommended by a few different people I’d met and I wasn’t yet ready to leave the coast, sun and sea behind just yet. I was greeted at the boat by, Read More
With the northern part of my Eastern Europe trip behind me, it was time to hit the Balkans. After so many stinking hot days in all the cities I was desperate to find a beach to lie on and a sea to swim in and so I made a bee-line straight for the island, Read More
From one of my fave places in Europe to another… I spent a long 12-hour travel day on a EuroCity train from Ceske Budejovice in the Czech Republic to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. The train took me through the beautiful Central Alps of Austria and then into the Alps of eastern Slovenia. I'd, Read More
Once I knew I was passing through the Czech Republic, I was hankering to get back down to Cesky Krumlov, a small, historic and World Heritage-listed town in southern Bohemia. I was last there in 1999 when it was just popping up in the travel guidebooks. I had a fantastic few days there checking, Read More
I’m on my way south now and decided to breeze through the Czech Republic on my way down to Slovenia and Croatia. I caught the train from Krakow to Prague and arrived early in the evening. I didn’t have anything booked but was lucky enough to find a cheap hostel near the train station., Read More
I was orignially planning on getting to the Slovakian side of the High Tatra mountains, but the logistics of getting there from Krakow were too much of hassle, so I settled for a day in Zakopane (on the Polish side) instead. I was up at the crack of dawn and as we drove further, Read More
We had a lazy last day in Krakow. In the morning we visited Wawel Hill and toured the castle, the royal staterooms and catherdral there. In the afternoon we walked through Kasimierz, the old Jewish quarter of the city. I guess I was expecting more, like a scene out of "Schindler’s List", but there, Read More
We caught the train down to Oswiecim, which is (unfortunate for the locals) better known by the German translation Auschwitz. We first visited Auschwity I, the original concentration camp set up to house mainly Polish political prisoners. It saw its fair share of deaths however – thousands were summarily executed by the Nazis and, Read More
We made a day trip out of Krakow to the town of Wieliczka, famous for its Heritage-listed salt mine. We took a tour through about 3km of the mine, which is only around 1% of the mine’s length – it’s been mined for several centuries and in their "spare time" the miners have made, Read More