Almost done

Today is our last full day in Belgium, having spent a brief while in each of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. From now on we're going to more or less hang out in France until our return. This might be the last time I can be bothered writing anything here, since while we enjoy France it's hardly new territory for us.

The North has been noticeable by how much more expensive it has been, especially buying food and drink. Often Alison and I have simply declined to have a sit-down meal or a quiet beer based on our refusal to pay the sort of money they are costing. The $50 lunches, with $12 beers, at restaurants in inner Bruges for instance suddenly made me considerably less hungry. 

The train trips have been quicker, more crowded and with sealed windows, so taking photos is largely useless. We flew Copenhagen to Amsterdam, because it was as cheap as the trains and far quicker. There's only so much I can take of the plains of northern Europe anyway – they're not particularly exciting. 

The rest has been pleasant, but largely as I expected, as I've been through this area before, albeit more quickly.

Hamburg was a pleasant surprise, as a city without great reputation as a tourist venue – we did three days there and could have done more. I always knew it was one of the world's great ports, but I had no idea just how maritime it is, with canals and lakes across downtown.

Copenhagen was easily the cleanest place we visited, and probably the most expensive. We largely went there for Alison, although I was keen to take the train over the bridge to Sweden and revisit my old school in Lund for pure nostalgia's sake. 

Amsterdam was the most disappointing – very crowded and while the shops weren't as full of souvenirs as say Venice, we didn't find sex shops, brothels and dope bars to be any more interesting. The houses along the canals are sweet, but after an hour they start to look very samey. I suppose if I had wanted to see Van Goghs or Rembrandts the museums might have been more interesting, but I saw them the last time I visited. 

Luckily we only did Amsterdam as a day trip, as we were were based in Utrecht. It was much nicer there, if only because less busy, and the canals and their houses just as interesting. 

Belgium was more varied than the Netherlands. We avoided Brussels, and visited Bruges and Ghent. Each was fine, but we're starting to overload on cute medieval cities. The coast was a pleasant change, and luckily we had a good day to see it. They run a tram along the whole coast and a day pass isn't too expensive, so you can travel along and see the various towns quickly and easily. We really like de Haan, in particular.

One thing we have enjoyed in this part of the world though is some really good modern architecture – domestic, commercial and municipal. They aren't afraid to build bold buildings, and have the money to do so. 

The Czech Republic

We're in Copenhagen now, having spent a while in Hamburg. They're nice cities to visit, even if Denmark is horrifically expensive, but I'm struggling to think of anything interesting to say about them, so I'll write about our visit to Czechia.

We stayed in five towns – Ostrava, Brno, Ceske Budejovice, Pilsen and Karlovy Vary. We omitted Prague and Olomouc because we'd been to them before.

Ostrava was quite a surprise, but it wasn't the conventional things most tourists like. The castle is the worst one I have ever visited (and I have visited well over a hundred, many of which were pretty poke themselves), the local churches were completely ordinary and the city museum quite poor.

But the history of the place as a coal mining centre was fascinating. We went and saw the model houses for the Rothschild workers from the 1850s and then the model Soviet Poruba suburb from 100 years later. From the period in between those there were lots of lovely buildings from the wealth the coal brought – including a magnificent town hall that has largely complete interior decorations from the Deco era.

Inside Ostrava's New Town Hall. The whole interior is in original style like this.

The city has struggled mightily since the mines closed, and isn't on most tourist lists, but while not everyone's cup of tea, we enjoyed the place a lot.

Brno (pronounced somewhat like burno) is a much bigger place with an older history, had a decent old town but again that wasn't particularly gripping. We mostly explored the edges of the town, including a nice castle at Veveri after a walk along the town reservoir. Also the Functionalist and Modernist buildings it has scattered about. There was a fascinating exhibition by Alfons Mucha, who was a native of the town, that we were lucky was still going.

From there we went to Ceske Budovice. Its German name is Budweis, and its only real fame arises from the local brewery producing Budweiser (not the US variety, which started as a direct copy, but got much worse). Alison and I are suckers for manufacturing processes, so we toured the plant.

Really we only stayed there because it was cheap and allowed useful day trips. We went to Ceske Krumlov, which is one of the best towns I have seen for retaining its medieval character. It is genuinely lovely, but that does come with dozens of coach loads of tourists, which spoil it somewhat.

Panorama of Ceske Krumlov castle and part of the new town

Once you got out of the old town and away from the hordes it was much nicer. There was a lovely Renaissance garden to walk in and it has a good museum of local history which, typically, had almost no visitors.

The locals take advantage of the extreme meanderings of the river to raft and kayak down, but we didn't have time for that sadly.

We also went to Trebon as a short bus ride from Ceske Budovice, which has a interesting and somewhat different countryside. It was a focused on fish farming in the past – although now largely a centre for people who visit the spa and/or like the local cycle trails. We walked a couple of the routes.

Plzeň, or Pilsen in the German, is the place where pale lager was first brewed. We visited the Pilsner Urquell brewery naturally, although the exact details of the brewing still largely escape me. (One consequence of having spent so long in the Czech area is that we got very used to their nice pilsner beers, and are now struggling with the sweet nature of the beer elsewhere.)

Houses in Pilsen. Need those turrets!

It was a sweet place, and the I enjoyed the houses from around 1900, since it seemed that having an ornamental turret was a sign of taste, but you'd not want to spend too many days there.

Last up was Karlovy Vary. It was famous as Carlsbad, and was a spa town going back centuries and very wealthy. The result is that the entire old town is ridiculously pretty, and very up-market as the hotels and shops compete for the wealthy clientele who seem to like it. Sadly, that also meant it was crazy full, and very expensive.

Originally the visitors were largely Germans and Austrians – it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the town was completely German speaking, until 1945 when Stalin shipped nearly all the ethnic Germans out (Pilsen and Budejovice were mostly German until that point too). Since the fall of the Iron Curtain the Germans are returning, but there are enormous number of Russians. I suspect it is cheaper than Germany but has all the same goods and that the Czechs find Russian easy to learn (apparently quite a lot of the place is now actually owned by Russians). Weirdly, and I don't know why, there were also a large number of Arabs and Israelis.

The mineral waters that made it famous come out at up to 70°C, and taste utterly vile. In the past they used to consume large quantities of the stuff (literally litres a day) but now people mostly sip it and pretend it is doing some good. Given the incredible pink scale it leaves on the fountain, I have my doubts about it, but I can see how it used to kill internal parasites before modern drugs.

 Fountain in town

It was a remarkable place to visit, despite the crowds. There were nice trails in the hills too, carefully labelled so tourists didn't get lost.

We also made a short trip to Locket, which is an old castle town in a bend in the river (the name literally means "elbow") and blessedly free of crowds for such a nice place. From there we walked most of the way back to Karlovy Vary, along a cycle track.

All up we spent over two weeks in the Czech Republic, and that without seeing Prague. It was well worth the time.

Our only real downer was that we didn't think very much of most of the food. We had a couple of nice lunches, but some of the offerings were decidedly average. If we had wanted to spend more there were nice places, but they tended to offer international food, which we could have anywhere.

Iron Hut City

Alison has a penchant for "model" towns. We've seen a few over the years, and when she heard about Eisenhüttenstadt it really had to get added to our itinerary. We couldn't actually stay there, since no AirBnBs seemed to operate, so we visited from Frankfurt an der Oder.

Starting in 1950 the East Germans built a new town, Eisenhüttenstadt, pretty much from scratch (it was not far from an old town, Fürstenberg, but initially the two were entirely separate). It was based around a new steel mill  – hence the name, literally Iron Hut City – and associated works.

The town and the mill grew to be quite sizeable. Then with the fall of the DDR, the jobs were largely gone, as the communist era mills were grossly inefficient. The mill still operates, but at a quarter the original size.  The industrial end of town is pretty grim now.

The town's population has shrunk by nearly half as a result.

One of the old mills still going. Most are abandoned or gone.

Nothing unusual so far – Nova Huty outside Krakow, which we have also been to – went through pretty much exactly the same thing. As did similar towns in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria etc.

Another of our visits was to Sillamäe in Estonia. It was a uranium mine, which went from being a model city to almost entirely abandoned overnight (the dirty way the Soviets mined did leave it just a touch radioactive).

However there are distinct differences with Eisenhüttenstadt, which made it well worth a visit.

Firstly, although even Germans couldn't make Communism work very well, they did a lot better job than anyone else, so the DDR was a lot wealthier than other communist states. Thus while all the model cities started with sweeping plans utopian for "model living" the Germans carried through with it a lot longer.

The inner centres of Novy Huta and Sillamäe were once quite grand, but almost immediately they started to build crappy Soviet-issue concrete apartment blocks when the money ran out. However in Iron Hut City they still had the budget to keep building properly. The newer blocks are actually better than the first one. The attached schools, hospitals and shops were also built as planned, whereas in most other Soviet model cities they either never got built or were thrown up cheaply.

(There were some of the poor quality apartment blocks in Eisenhüttenstadt when they couldn't keep up the pace with the inner city, but the reduction in the size of the town has meant most have been emptied out and pulled down. Most people in the town live in the "model" blocks now.)

Modern Germany is also richer than the countries to the east and south. Which means that they have had the money to restore those inner city blocks. I say "restore", but I suspect that they are actually nicer now.

One of the nicer style blocks. Each "block" is a group of apartments in similar style.

The result is that you can wander around a town that looks like the DDR intended it to look like. The places are all fresh and clean and the grounds between them tidy and with play equipment. It's really quite nice and inviting, assuming you like living in an apartment, of course.

Of course, since although the buildings were well designed and up-to-date for the time, they are now stuck in a time warp. As the town hasn't grown, the hospitals, schools, town hall etc are still big enough, so haven't required modern extensions. (There are new buildings, especially shops, but they are separate from the model DDR town.)

The shops are in matching 50's and 60's styles, which adds to the charm. 

Eisenhüttenstadt has started to realise that it can actually play on what little history it has. There's a nice museum of daily life in the DDR over the decades, and they have a well planned and explained walking route of the town.

Some people take guided tours of the city that show the abandoned steel plants and ruined apartment buildings, but to be honest you can see similar all over Eastern Europe (and indeed Detroit, Glasgow etc). While revel in ruins when the real joy of Eisenhüttenstadt is that you can see a very large model town from the Communist era looking nice? 

Wildlife

Because we are travelling without a car, we tend to spend most of our time in towns. That could get a bit samey, especially as we are travelling quite slowly, so we don't get the rapid variation in the towns themselves that a flying visit gets.

So we take the time in most places to have a decent walk in the countryside. As often as not the local trams and buses run to right on the outskirts of towns so getting out of town isn't an issue.

There's usually marked trails we can find with a bit of research, but identifying which trail is which has been an issue. This has resulted in a few walks taking fairly sizable detours, although without actually getting lost (Google Maps is a life-saver in that regard, because we can always place and orient ourselves).

What has surprised me is how much variation in animal life we have seen, and also what we haven't seen.

Southern Europe was alive with butterflies while we were there, with huge numbers and lots of variety. There's a lot fewer to be seen now, but it may be because spring is their time. We've seen loads of dragonflies, damselflies and similar too – and the fish jumping to catch them.

Deer and hares are everywhere, and we see them out of the trains frequently. There's a lot of wooden structures on stilts in the fields in Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia etc that we assume people shoot them from.

In our walks in woods we have seen deer up close when we startled a pair that were resting and a fox who studied us briefly and then went on its way. Nothing particularly surprising there, but one day we were sitting on a fallen tree and a couple of owls flew overhead and landed about 30 metres away. I wasn't expecting to see any of them, given that we only go out in full daylight. They were creepy too, because they made absolutely no noise as they flew over.

We've seen surprisingly few squirrels though, even when walking in oak and beech forests. Perhaps they stay quiet in the heat, but the only time we've seen one not in a town park was when two were having a fight and the noise alerted us to them. We saw squirrels all the time in France, so I was expecting a lot more of them.

Alison is extremely good at spotting dead animals – she watches where she puts her feet far more than I do – and among others she's found a dead snake, a mole and a water vole.

My favourite sighting was a couple of days ago though. We were walking a cycle trail largely through open countryside, when Alison saw something in the distance. I went one side of the small clump of trees and made a lot of noise, and Alison stayed still on the other. Sure enough, a wild boar headed away from me, with two piglets in tow. We knew that there were boar in the woods, of course, I just never expected to see one.

It's not a great photograph – they really weren't much interested in hanging around us. 

But the incredible find was on an amble around Treviso early one evening. It is intersected by rivers, and we were alongside a not particularly inspiring one – I think it may have actually been a diversion to form a moat for the town –  when Alison spotted an otter.

It seems that cleaner rivers and less hunting means that otters are recovering in numbers across Europe, but it was none the less a big surprise to see one inside a sizable town. We now scan every river for otters, but in vain.

All rich countries are the same

Matilda made a point that I write about buildings a lot on this blog. There's a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, I am really interested in buildings – old and modern, grand and minor – especially as it crosses my interest in history and so that's what I go to see. But also because it's not as easy to write about the countries we are in, especially as we move north.

There's a line in Anna Karenina that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". Well, recently I saw someone extend that to "Rich countries are all alike; every poor country is poor in its own way". There's a lot to be said for that.

For the most part the Czech and Slovak lands are just like travelling anywhere in Western Europe. If you are playing GeoGuessr (where you are given a view of some random GoogleMaps street view and you have to guess where you are) then you'll know that inner European cities are strikingly the same. They have many of the same shops, the same clothes, the same cars, etc. The new buildings, whether commercial, residential or industrial are identical.

Somewhere pretty. I'll be impressed if you can tell which country.

It's only when we visit poorer countries, like Jordan and Mexico, that we note substantive differences. And even then, the richer downtown areas aren't that different from each other.

We went to a really nice collection of works by Alfons Mucha yesterday. He was a Czech artist from Brno, which is where we are at the moment, so they're very fond of him here. You'll recognise his work even if you don't recognise his name.

Typical Mucha posters 

But there doesn't seem much point talking about an artist whose work is already recognised across the globe, working in a style that was internationally copied. He did most of his well known work in Paris and the US anyway.

So I tend to be most interested in what I can see around me that I could not experience at home. That does include castles and grandiose Communist palaces. Alison and I have been enjoying the large number of Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings that remain here, but again it's an international style and you can't tell a Hungarian one from a Czech one.

I also like to see the changing geography, both natural and human, but discussions on the different ways countries behave at the beach probably makes architecture look interesting.

Some of the sameness of places is reaching epic proportions. I often like to buy T-shirts from the places I am in, but like to have ones that evoke the place rather than just say "I went to Dubrovnik". I've basically given up now, because T-shirts everywhere are in English. On the streets, regardless of where we have been, it is exceedingly rare to see a shirt with any writing not in English.

Even national symbols are affected by the move. You could buy football shirts in the red and white checks of Croatia all over the place while the world cup was on, but not a single one had the name of the country as Hrvatska – it was all "Croatia".

There are differences remaining, of course, but they are increasingly trivial. The local road "people crossing" signs here tend to look more jaunty, perhaps because both legs are always bent. But regardless of that, they always have hats on! (Since the locals basically dress like anywhere else, hats are no more common here than anywhere else.)

Food is one area where local tastes still resist globalisation, at least a bit. Unfortunately the Czech and Slovak lands really haven't caught up to modern standards for cafe food, and the local dishes we have had have tended to be very disappointing. Badly cooked meat in gravy with dumplings is filling, but not hugely appetising.

The nicer places tend to serve international food, Italian dishes being especially common. The cafe we went to today had a nice roast river trout, which is very local, but the soup was gazpacho and the alternatives on the menu were spaghetti and a sweet potato dish.

It's a nice country Czechia, but it is awfully like Austria (of which it was a part for many centuries, of course, so hardly surprising).

Sl(ov)ak(i)a

I knew Slovakia was a bit different from the other countries we have visited, because it never really had a separate existence as a country prior to WWII. It was brought into Czechoslovakia because the languages are very similar, but the cultures were not and they never really got on that well. The Czechs have always been very westward looking, but the Slovaks not so much.

The Slovaks seem to have been much less perturbed by Soviet rule than most of the old Warsaw Pact, perhaps because they'd never really had self-rule before, and the Soviets let them be their own Slovak Republic inside the Czechoslovak one. So the Soviets were better in some ways than their previous rulers, who tried to make the Slovaks into Czechs or Hungarians.

The thing is huge – the statue on top is 5m high alone

It's the only place we have seen which still has Soviet iconography up on pubic monuments. You can actually see hammer-and-sickle motifs and red stars, even in the centres of towns (often with the original inscriptions removed, so not exactly glorifying, but they haven't scrubbed out the period entirely). The photo above is from Bratislava overlooking the town, and is a memorial to the Soviet liberation. It is massive, which is perhaps why they haven't got rid of it.

Because the Slovakian cities didn't grow much prior to WWII, the Soviets needed to build a lot of housing as the country folk moved in to be in the new industrial factories that the Soviets loved so much. That means that outside the small inner cities there is a massive ring of Soviet era apartment blocks. Most town Slovaks have to live in one, because they completely dominate the housing stock.

Unlike most of the Soviet bloc, the local Communists decided that it would be cheaper to stick to only a couple of building plans, and they really went to town on repeating them. Whole suburbs are the same block of what are called panelaky or panelovy (since they are built of prefabricated panels). At least they seem to have been built rather better than the average Soviet tower block, and have not started to crumble too badly.

Across the river from old Bratislava

The modern Slovaks have done what they can to minimise the damage to the visual environment. They have renovated most of them, and when doing so painted them in a mix of colours and schemes, which does a surprisingly good job of hiding their uniformity. Individually the strength of some of the colours seems odd, with strong pinks and oranges in particular, but the overall effect is as good as can be expected, and a vast improvement over dirty concrete.

The blocks were also generally built back from the road and with decent space between them (this was always the ideal, but in so many places money concerns over-rode common sense). In Slovakia those spaces now have lots of mature trees, which improve the look amazingly. Despite the uniformity of the buildings, it was quite hard to take a photo of the sort I could take easily in Romania or Belgrade, with block after block the same, because the trees shielded them.

The are exceptions, however. In quite a few towns the Soviets decided to build a series of blocks on a hill over town. No amount of trees can hide them looming over the town, and they must have been much worse in the original plain concrete.

Also in smaller towns the apartment blocks built on the outside sometimes end precipitously at the end of town, leading to a wall of them as one approaches.

The lack of infrastructure in the cities extended to administrative buildings. So the Soviets got to build lots and lots of town halls, universities and "houses of culture" as the towns expanded. That gave lots of opportunities for Alison and me to see some more of "Slaka".

The Slovakian buildings are far less grandiose and peculiar than the Romanian or Belgrade version, but they retain the essential parts of "Socialist Realist" style, and that's all good with us.

Touristing in Slovakia

After a few weeks in Italy and Austria, we're back in the old Soviet Eastern Europe. We've just finished a flying tour of Slovakia and are into Czechia.

Slovakia a nice place to visit as a tourist, although with its own peculiarities. On the plus side, they use the Euro, and prices are relatively cheap. The amount of English is patchy, but most of the tourist places have enough to get by.

The towns often had periods of decent wealth in the late Middle Ages and after the 30 Years War, and were on trade routes which brought them the latest techniques as well as styles. It then lost it as they, alongside eastern parts of Poland and Hungary, went into relative decline. They were largely spared the bombing of much of WWII. That means that all the old towns are remarkably compact and intact, built in recognisably European, mostly German, styles.

Bardejov, from the Cathedral tower

Many of them, other than the much larger Bratislava, are built around a sort of very wide main road, with the cathedral and town hall in the centre, so which effectively is also the town square (as in the picture above). You can see most of the interesting parts in quite a short walk as all of them are either on this main "road" or a street directly off it.

Even better, the old inner cores have all been either pedestrianised, or make using cars so difficult that few bother. That means you can walk the centres very pleasantly, with less noise and without being constrained to sidewalks.

The museums have been quite patchy, with some good and some not so good. Fortunately they are all cheap, so even the less good ones weren't so bad. They all close on Mondays, however, which was annoying when we turn up to Bardejov and couldn't get in to what promised to be quite a good town museum.

Getting to the smaller towns, however, isn't easy. The main cities of Bratislava, Košice and Prešov are on regular train connections, but after that we had to plan quite carefully, and make lots of interconnections to get to the smaller ones. The trains are quite well set up in terms of the connections, but the stations aren't very good about telling you which platform and intermediate destinations. We ended up taking the wrong train out of Slovakia as a result, because it turns out the "Prague" train runs two different routes – and we got the wrong one. It wasn't a huge deal, but it did waste two hours as we make a very circuitous tour to get to Ostrava.

Because Slovakia is quite small, the distances aren't huge, but we still stuck with public transport They are constructing motorways all across the place, but as yet don't even have one that runs the length of the country. Off the motorways driving involves narrow roads and negotiating frequent rural vehicles, so just didn't seem very relaxing. In five years when the motorways finally link up, I suspect driving will be a good option.

The main keep at Devin Castle

It's a good place to see untouched medieval stuff. Quite a lot of castles and old town walls survive outside the main cities, because in the period when they tended to be demolished the area was a military and economic backwater.

Devin Castle is on a Bratislava city bus route, fortunately for me, so we did get to that one – and it's a beauty. We also toured across to Nitra, to see what is one of the most disappointing castles I've ever been to (although the church was quite nice). After that the castles proved too difficult because they are out in the countryside and transport doesn't connect well, so we largely stuck to the cities and towns, with their city walls and old buildings.

For the same reason we never got to see the famous wooden churches which survive – they're even more remote.

Slovakia was also interesting for its slightly different route under Communism, but I'll cover that in a day or so.

Cheap Eastern European Wine

Alison and I have some wine most evenings at home, so we have done the same on our travels in the Balkans. As at home, generally but not exclusively dry reds, and not expensive.

Everywhere has had decent selections in the supermarkets, as they all have pretty relaxed licensing laws, both in price and variety. We've tried to keep to local wines to the country we are in, and where possible local varieties that we wouldn't get at home. That means excluding the shelves of cheap Italian and Spanish that you see everywhere. Also Jacob's Creek, which it appears has made a big name for itself in this part of the world. There has been some NZ wine too, but not a lot.

That means we've tried Frankovka Modra, Svätovavrinecké, Refošk and a whole lot of other varieties I can't remember. They've mostly been pretty good, fairly hearty if unsophisticated.

But mistakes have been made!

This is in Montenegro, this is six euros for five litres

We haven't bought anything truly nasty, because we have minimum as well as maximum prices. Five litre containers of wine rather too closely resembling cooking oil have not been on our list. While I think the carry-handles are a nice touch, I'm not sure my stomach is up for $2 per litre Riesling.

The bottling conventions, however, have caused issues. Most wine is sold in 750 ml bottles, as at home, but in the former Yugoslav republics they mix these with ones that are a full litre, which lead to buying rather more than I wanted before I learned to check the size carefully.

Quite a lot of the white wine is bottled using different bottling conventions.

I was just about to buy a bottle of the Tramin Cerveny above, when I noticed that it was alongside Chardonnay. Sure enough despite the darkness and shape of the bottles, these are white wines.

Twice I have made this mistake, being so used to red wine in this type of bottle, to a rather rude surprise. Not because it is white wine, because we don't mind, but because in the very warm weather we've been having, warm cheapish white wine isn't quite so pleasant.

I did not know that Merlot came in Rosé. I also didn't know that it came in a sweet red variety. 

In this case being labelled in English we weren't going to fall for buying a sweet when we wanted a dry, but most are not labelled in English. After a rather unfortunate accident of this type, there has been some furious Googling of "sweet" and "dry" in order to avoid a repeat.

Provided we carefully check we are buying what we think we are buying, it has been good though.

The beer is much more reliable. The default is always a lager of some sort, sometimes a Pilsner, which suits us fine. Often it's cheaper than soft-drink.

Famous sites in Italy

We did four day trips to the most famous tourist cities: Florence, Venice, Pisa and San Marino.

Florence was first. The "sights" were crazy busy. We flagged looking inside the Duomo (Cathedral) because the queue was too long, especially in the heat.

The queue down the side of the Duomo, (this photo starts 100 m back in the queue) 

Oddly, once you wandered away from the main areas the crowds thinned out to almost nothing. Instead of a queue and paying a small fortune to climb the Duomo for the view we wandered across to the other side of the river. We took in some Renaissance gardens and then the Belvedere fortress which, as its name suggests, has excellent views of the city. It was only a couple of Euros, and was virtually empty, so much better value than climbing the cathedral (also, of course, the most important thing in the view is the cathedral, so being on it kind of spoils it).

We did visit the Uffizi Gallery, if only to see what the fuss is all about. We went late in the day, because Alison hoped it might be less crowded, but it was absolutely chocker. Thirty minutes of queuing, followed by 10 minutes of security and shuffling in, to a museum packed full even before the tour groups came and blocked everyone.

Pisa has a lovely cathedral and baptistry to which the famous tower is attached, which is where everyone goes. Once you wander away from that it, and the main street leading there, it too is quiet. It turns out that Pisa has almost all its medieval city walls, which was a nice surprise.

We did San Marino from Rimini. It's a funny wee town, perched on a ridiculously steep mountain, but a nice place to visit for an afternoon.

One thing that did annoy me about San Marino, and all of Italy really, was their city museum. In most of Europe we have visited so far the towns divide their museums into quite distinct categories. These usually are ethnographic, archaeological, art, specialist, regional and city museums, and they stick more or less to their area of specialty.

The city museums are the ones I like, because they usually have quite a lot of detail about the history of the city to explain what we could see about us – why the city had been settled, what it traded in, when and why and where it expanded.

But in Italy, history museums are prone to becoming art and archaeological museums. So the San Marino city museum, had almost nothing about the history of the city. What it had was various art and antiquarian works made or owned by city members, many of really quite low quality. You could have told from the museum that San Marino had a Communist government for a few decades after WWII, for example.

Many of the other cities we were in didn't even have city museums. They had five or six art museums of different sorts, but nothing about their histories. You can even see the incredible focus on art with things like the Wikipedia articles on their churches, which often give a very brief history, a bit about architecture and then extensive details about the sculptures and paintings inside.

The leaning tower of Venice. Not so famous.

Finally Venice. I have never really wanted to go to Venice – and this despite owning several books on its history – because I feared it would be all crowds and gondolas and tourist tat. I persuaded Alison and Matilda that we should go there via the lagoon and its islands (specifically, Chioggia, Palestrina and Lido). They were interesting in their own right, although far well less known. But importantly that meant we approached Venice proper from the sea side first. It was a good decision, as the approach gave a much better sense of the city than you get from being entirely on the land.

The approach was like dozens of films and documentaries I must have seen of it. The buildings themselves were like the hundreds of photographs and Canaletto paintings I've seen. It had an amazing familiarity for a place we've never been to.

It was very crowded and was full of tourist shops, but nonetheless we enjoyed it.

Whereas "Florence" is really just a few buildings and piazzas with art galleries, and "Pisa" is really just one square, "Venice" genuinely is the entire city – and it is larger than I had realised from the (many) maps of it I have seen. Even wandering quite small back streets there were interesting and picturesque things to see and they were of a piece – whereas you don't have to wander far off the main sights and Florence is not remotely the medieval city of the tourist part.

I'm glad we went, but I'm also glad we only did it as a day trip (and half of that getting there via the lagoon).

Northern Italy

We've spent the last couple of weeks travelling around some of the towns of northern Italy – Trieste, Livorno, Rimini, Padua and Treviso. Not the usual haunts of tourists (except Italians).

Milan and Turin are too damned large to stay in, so we have avoided them. The other big names – Florence, Pisa and Venice we did as day trips because they are much more expensive, and we could cover what we wanted in a day fairly easily.

The towns we have been in are nicely different in small ways. Rimini is really just a beach town, with a huge strip for dozens of kilometers of hotels along the beaches. Along with the Lido outside Venice it really invented the sea bathing and beach holidays we take for granted today.

Being European beaches they are largely umbrellas along the sea front, but what I haven't really seen before which was (very popular) courts for beach volleyball, beach football and beach tennis in private beach areas.

Rimini seafront

Padua and Treviso, which are quite close to each other, are old walled towns full of arcades and cobbled streets and surrounded by river moats but still manage to be different. Padua is much bigger and was much wealthier, so has much more extensive walls and is packed with absolutely enormous churches, with loads of important relics.

Side view of Padua's Basilica, which is absolutely over the top, inside and out.

At the back, behind the trees is a side chapel for all the relics.

Treviso, doesn't have canals or rivers used for navigation like the rest, but has lots of water flowing through that seems to have been used for mills and power.

Trieste is Italian now, but resembles the cities of the Dalmation coast on which it is situated in most ways. It was also, surprisingly full of brutalist architecture.

Montegrisa pilgrimage chapel on a hill outside Trieste, 

which we made our own little pilgrimage to, albeit an architectural one.

Livorno is quite small and cut by wide canals, and definitely won't become a major tourist destination (we struggled to even find the entrance to the nice "old fort" because it was completely unlabeled and you have to walk through the industrial port to get to it). It does have some beaches popular with locals though, and was always intended largely as our base for Pisa and Florence anyway.

So that's where we've been staying. It's been nice being  in smaller towns without the crowds and the omnipresent tourist shops of the big sites. It's also been good to see things that are new and we hadn't heard of before.

Next time the day trips to the places you will know somewhat better.

Thoughts on the Balkans

As we come to the end of the Balkans, I thought I might make some random thoughts on them collectively.

They were good to travel. Cheap, but not nasty. Plenty to see, at least for us, with a nice mix of history, culture and countryside. However, if you stick to the capitals and biggest cities the differences between them are greatly reduced – which is a problem with those Danube river cruises, for example. Most of the cities needed two full days minimum, and often longer, just on the city part.

English has totally taken over as the language of international culture – art exhibitions will be advertised in English alongside the home language even to the locals. Most places had explanations in English, though not universally. In Ljubljana castle the explanation video was in English and you had to get a device to hear it in Slovenian!

However outside tourist spots, language was often an issue. Less so if you know some German (French wasn't a starter). We generally toughed it out, learning how to say "two tickets please" isn't that hard, but you'll lose much of the cost savings if you end up taking taxis rather learn how to negotiate trams and buses if that worries you.

Other than the Dalmatian coast, it's most not very busy. In particular you don't get full of coach loads of tourists just seeing a sight because it's on the list of sights to see, with little interest in the history or meaning of what they are seeing. There are coach tours everywhere, including deepest Bulgaria, but the ones there don't have the milling around while being sorted out, and then ignoring the actual sights, crowds that bug me. (A particular dislike, which has grown in this tour, is for people to stand blocking a busy pathway while they take a selfie. The sight won't be seen properly in the result, because the middle of the photo is taken up by the vapid person. In extreme cases the process can take 10 minutes while they get the perfect shot of themselves. Meanwhile people who actually want to see the sight in question have to wait.)

Some other thoughts

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While people say that there is considerable nostalgia for the Communist period, there is no sign of it visibly. All the pro-Soviet, Russian or cult of personality stuff is gone totally, even if it had to be dynamited out. The less excessive (politically) have merely had any labels removed, so that these enormous statues and monuments remain, but shorn of any apparent meaning.

The ex-Yugoslavs have a few remnants of Tito, but then they were never really Soviet anyway.

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People looked very much like people back home, especially in the bigger cities, with only minor differences in dress style. The middle classes seem to be doing well.

However the poor are very definitely much poorer, judging by clothing, cars etc. Houses and apartments, are still quite small and some of the older stuff rather sub-standard, although the newer ones look nice. The further south the more apparent the lack of money – Bulgaria and to a lesser extent Romania have pockets where money is clearly not plentiful.

However, while money was often obviously a bit short, the cities were mostly clean, once you got past the omnipresent graffiti.  It always felt safe, and people were usually very helpful.

In the countryside the villages were tidy and clean, even if the houses were very little.

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Most graffiti is in English, of a sort, when it isn't merely art or tagging. Much of it is football oriented. (The ex-Yugoslav republics did have some political stuff, some of it rather crude about other groups.)

The deal is, apparently, that when someone puts up "Partizan Army" to indicate that they rather like Belgrade Partizan you cross it out, rather than writing the equivalent of "sucks" afterwards. So you see quite a lot of crossed out graffiti. 

Also, they tend to put up their supporters groups, rather than the club itself, so you see a lot of  "Bad Blue Boys" and "BBB" when you enter Zagreb. Which requires knowing that they are an ultras group for Dinamo Zagreb. 

I think someone likes Hajduk Split! (Spalato is the old Roman name for Split)

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The exception was in Bulgaria and Romania that some of the gypsy areas are really quite squalid. The locals don't particularly like them, associating them with crime and laziness. The governments want them to become "normal" citizens, but they resist. Not many still live in caravans, but they don't particularly settle and live on the margins.

Begging was a big issue until we got to Slovenia and Hungary. Mostly but not exclusively gypsies, and it was often quite brazen – literally walking up to you in the street to ask.

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I'm still getting weird language rubbish on my devices. My computer in Belgrade was deciding that it would load the Google home page in Hungarian, despite having left there, and then was immediately translating it to English (sometimes not very well).

Both of us are getting advertisements in Romanian on our phones. That is because we have Romanians SIM cards – Bulgarian plans were too awkward and the EU forces providers to have decent roaming options. They are usually hard to decipher, but not always:

I particularly like how the ad is in Romanian, but the "Learn More" stays in English. 

Lovely Slovenia

It's raining today, reasonably heavily, so I thought I would catch up on what we've been up to.

Intriguingly, this is the first day that rain has interrupted us at all in three months and is a welcome break from the heat. Too many sunny days in a row have actually made things difficult, because it's so tiring in the relentless sun. What rain we have had up till now has been brief and largely at night and has barely affected our plans.

We've been staying in the two larger cities of Slovenia – Maribor first and then Ljubljana. Both are quite little and there's no way that we could spend four days in each, so we hired a car for half the time to see the rest of the country.

It's ridiculously pretty. The countryside is farmed unless it is very steep, but in a colourful mix of crops and meadows rather than monoculture. The farms seem to be quite small, and have an amazing number of barns and associated buildings scattered around .

There's pretty churches in most villages, castles and palaces are scattered over the place, and the towns have well-preserved old centres.

The couple of "big name" tourist spots are over-full (Bled Castle in particular, but not like Dubrovnik) but because outside of those sights on the package tours, visitors generally come to hike and cycle, so you aren't fighting off crowds. However because some tourists do make it to even the remoter locations, there's almost always instructions and explanations in English, which has been a boon.

Ptuj city centre. Amusingly pronounced "ptooey". Not really, actually "ptwee" listen here

The town centres are German in style now, having left behind the Italian influence on the Dalmatian coast. They are uniformly lovely, but if you've been to Austria it looks very similar. On the outskirts you can sometimes see older dwellings that are clearly more local in origin.

The towns historically were inhabited largely by German speakers, although the surrounding peasantry were overwhelmingly Slovenian. Hitler intended to make much of it part of his greater Germany on that basis, but the effect of that was to prejudice the locals against the German speakers. After WWII meant they either emigrated or started to speak Slovenian (which is a version of Serbo-Croat).

So all in all it's a great place to visit for a couple of weeks.

One downside has been that the locals love drinking coffees, ice-creams and eating cakes at all hours of the day, so there are cafes everywhere, but they don't do light lunches. In the heat we haven't really been that interested in heavy restaurant meals, so lunch has been a bit of a mission at times. A few bakeries do filled rolls, but generally we have had to buy something from supermarkets when we would have preferred a cafe lunch.

Driving to see it all has been a mixed experience. The motorways are fantastic and very quick. The main roads are OK, except that they almost never have anywhere to pull over and enjoy the view or take photographs. If you stick to the main routes between the bigger towns it's fine driving.

But the minor roads are a different story, and the roads get minor despite looking on a map like they should be decent sized. They are invariably narrow but nevertheless busy. We've faced unsealed sections, mountainous hairpins where I have been down to first gear, and blind corners on roads too narrow for two cars. The locals are good drivers, but drive very confidently because they are used to the conditions, and don't like being held up. I'm used to some pretty rough places, from unsealed windy NZ roads and zigzagging up mountains in Switzerland, but this has been unpleasant rather too often for my taste.

Still, if we hadn't hired a car we would have been stuck with the main towns, and the really interesting and different parts have been out in the countryside. 

Our Stay in Westeros

(Westeros is the setting for Game of Thrones for those, like us, who don't follow the series.)

Dubrovnik old town was crawling with advertising for its links to the filming of Game of Thrones and The Last Jedi. The mayor allowed them to film for free, on the basis that the advertising alone would pay for it (although they couldn't do it in season, of course, so they were probably freezing in some of the Star Wars scenes). That seems to have paid off, with tourists choosing the city on the basis of the filming there.

After Dubrovnik we moved up the coast to Split. The old town of Split grew around the palace Diocletian built, and it is really quite sweet to see the Medieval and Renaissance buildings built into ancient Roman walls and temples turned to churches or civic buildings with minimal changes.

A stretch of waterfront, built into the front of the Roman Imperial Palace.

The old town was quite crowded in the major attractions and as we went through some of the grander places you could hear people talking about which scenes had been filmed there. We had been over-optimistic. It turns out that much of Game of Thrones was filmed in the Split area.

But for all the excitement, the City History Museum, which was really quite a good one, was decidedly short on people.

This couple have written excitedly about many of the places at www.boredpanda.com and not a mention of why anyone might have built the real places. Given the incredible real history of the real place, it seems odd for me to focus solely on imaginary history.

Klis castle (and cell phone tower). That cliff is near vertical much of the way up.

We went to the fortress of Klis, which is just on the outskirts of Split, where its history was well explained in the little museum on the site. It was the Ottoman border for several hundred years and had been the base of the Ushkoks, who have a bit of a Robin Hood aura in Croatian folklore. Once it fell to the Turks it was a terrifying threat to the locals, being within sight of the still Christian coast. Yet all the other visitors seemed to be interested only in its links to the TV series.

So terrifying was the Turkish threat that the locals built an amazing variety of little fortified hamlets, castles, forts and bridges. Quite a few of these remain, especially along the "Kastel" coast to Trogir. We were staying in one of those villages, Kastel Gomilica, which has a fortified island, still lived in (you can stay on the island, although we didn't).

 Gomilica "Castle"

Alison and I had a nice wander along the coast one of the days looking at all the bits of interest in each of the villages – which have now merged, because the area is nicer than Split town itself and both the locals move there and tourists stay in the many small apartments and B'n'Bs.

The water is as blue and clear as it has been down the whole coast – the photo above is a good indication of what it looks like out to sea. Although the land doesn't plunge into the sea from cliffs like it does on much of the coast, there are still a line of cliffs a couple of kilometres back behind the houses. The overall effect is very picturesque.

And so now to Zagreb. We've spent just over two weeks on the Dalmatian coast (including the Montenegrin section) and while we can see what brings in the more fleeting tourists, we are going to be happy to leave it behind. It is beautiful, but travel is so awkward and too much of it is too busy at this time of year. 

Staying in Air BnBs

We've been using Air BnB for almost the whole trip so far, or effective equivalents. I thought I'd discuss how this has gone for us in the Balkans.

The answer is, pretty well really.

They allow us to stay reasonably close to the centres of towns for not too much money. Sometimes hotels would be as cheap, but would not have close to the facilities we want. Note that we have only been selecting "self-contained" places, rather than those where you share a room in a house.

They have often been small, although only a couple have been "studio" types. Partly that's because smaller ones are cheaper and there's only the two of us so we don't care too much about size. Partly it is because in the ex-Soviet places they have tended to be ex-Soviet era apartments, so about 45 to 55 square metres (55 sq m was a four-person family apartment). Even then they are bigger than any hotel rooms we could afford.

Most of the apartment building ones are either an upper floor or basement, because they are the ones people don't like (or move out of when they lose mobility). Not all of them in the more eastern places had lifts, or at least had lifts all the way, so carting bags up and down stairs has been normal. One reason we shed weight early in the trip.

Standard lobby in Bulgaria. The red door is to the (tiny) elevator. 

The rooms are much nicer.

All have had cooking facilities, except the first one in Cyprus. Often quite rudimentary facilities though, such as only two cookers, but nonetheless enough for us to prepare a dinner. Rarely an oven. That saves money compared to eating out, but also since we are traveling for so long, it is better for our digestions not to eat too much restaurant food. If we are going to buy a restaurant or cafe food, it will generally be lunch.

Luckily Alison brought a small but effective selection of cooking implements, which has proved very useful. Places have usually have most of the things you need but often have gaps –  so one place will have no strainer for pasta, the next no decent stirring spoon, and some only pathetic little blunt knives. Having a decent knife, stirring spoon, corkscrew, tongs and peeler has proved quite useful.

Everywhere has had a fridge, albeit sometimes quite little ones. That means we can have fresh milk for our coffees, if nothing else (I've been very surprised, that everywhere has actually had fresh milk). Also we can buy more than one day's worth of salad dressing, salami, cheese, butter and such.

Cooking oil has been the big issue, because it is awkward to travel with and some places have had none.

The beds have mostly been fine. Firm, in that European way, which we like. Generally queen or wider, although we have had to relearn how to sleep in doubles again. The only disaster was the one in Bar, Montenegro which squeaked tremendously every time we moved – really really loudly – which was really very annoying.

Most have had washing machines. Given the length of our trip, that has proved very important. Some of the machines have been a trifle difficult to use, as we try to guess how to use them from their instructions in a different language, but far better than trying to wrangle laundromats or paying the exorbitant prices hotels charge. (In Mexico we resorted to hand washing rather than paying hotel prices.)

Showers have been a bit of an issue. Some of the plumbing in the Balkans is ropy, and getting the showers to a pleasant temperature has proved possible sometimes only after quite a lot of effort.

Everywhere has been clean, including all the towels and bedclothes. Properly clean.

The hosts have all been excellent. Most of have spoken enough English to get by with. Some have proved a trifle over eager to help really (to the point where I often hope that they don't have much English). A few places were a bit hard to find, since street names aren't as reliable here as you might hope.

So overall, we have found them good, and we are pleased we have taken this route rather than hotels.

They don't have that sweet reliability of hotels, but unlike hotels we can cook, have a fridge, can wash our clothes etc. That's far more important than yet another perfect hotel room with perfect beige bed and fluffy towels.

Also, we have a bit more insight into how people in the countries actually live. The international blandness of hotels might be a way to avoid culture shock for some people, but we enjoy seeing the slightly different ways people do things.

Oddball Issues for the Balkans

Furnishings have been good, except curtains. Apparently curtains that keep light out aren't a bit thing in the Balkans. Many of the recent places have had shutters, but almost nowhere has had genuinely dark curtains. Bulgaria was particularly poor in regards to curtains, which were more or less non-existent.

Romanians and Hungarians apparently have not really worked out how shower curtains work – or even in some cases that they are a good idea.

Then again the Romanian places had no plugs for the sinks, and no plastic basins. Washing up is a significant issue when you can't hold water in a sink. We asked one of the Romanian owners about it and he said that it was normal in Romania – you wash them all with hot water then rinse them afterwards with running water. All for want of a $1 plug!

Every single place has had one of these sponge with scratchy backings for the dishes. They are so useless! I have not seen a brush type dish cleaner yet. 

Dubrovnik, Pearl of the Adriatic

So we've moved up the Dalmatian coast to Croatia. First point of call, the old city of Dubrovnik (formerly Ragusa) which used to be a rich and powerful place, but lost its mojo when the Mediterranean trade was replaced by the Pacific and Atlantic ones, and when it became owned by Austro-Hungary – not a noted naval power.

So it has what makes a town special for me. A rich past, so big and interesting things got built, and nothing much happening in nineteenth and twentieth centuries to spoil that.

The city has its complete city walls, of about two kilometres. Even better, they are largely original. It would have been my favourite place on earth when I was 12 if it hadn't been in Yugoslavia and out of effective sight.

Sadly, it is so wonderful that much that makes it wonderful has been spoiled.

It's not just the enormous hordes of tourists directly, because we are also tourists, but the follow-on effects.

The prices are incredibly more than we have been seeing recently. In Cetinje, Montenegro in the main street with all the tourists we could get a 500 ml beer for $4. In Dubrovnik it ranges from $9 to $12. To climb the walls to the castle over Kotor with all the other tourists cost $14, but it was $35 to do the walls of Dubrovnik (we think they might be deliberately pricing the walls very high to try to cut down on the numbers – it certainly stopped us doing them). We aren't even staying in Dubrovnik because Alison blanched at the prices, although the small village we are in is much nicer, as it is quieter and there's walks along the sea.

Too many tourists drive out the local restaurants, so that you can find any number of pizza and "Italian" or seafood places, but nothing you couldn't find anywhere else. They even tend to drive out the interesting foods in the supermarkets.

The worst thing, for me, is that the other local sights have been completely ignored – little but interesting things that smaller places would make a big deal of and are a bit different.

We thought we might like to see the amusingly named Walls of Ston (not a typo, the place is called Ston), where the Ragusans built a wall across a peninsular to protect their salt panning operations. However there's no information on it, and getting there was a total mission – despite being just up the coast.

We also thought we might like to see the Ombla River. It's 30 metres long, before it hits the sea. Yup, 30 metres. So, by some reckonings the fourth shortest in the world. But apparently such a sight is of no interest at all (probably since no-one will make any money from it). It's only just out of Dubrovnik too.

The whole coast line is lovely. If there are any walks or cycle trails along it, they keep them well hidden.

It seems odd to me that a site that is suffering from excessive numbers should make almost no attempt to deflect them away.

So Dubrovnik, which should have been a high point, has been a bit of a disappointment to me. Let us hope that Split is better. I'm not hopeful, since it has been a desirable spot since Diocletian thought he would retire there.

Edit

On the way to the bus station to take the bus to Split, our taxi driver explained that it gets much more crowded. Apparently up to six cruise ships can be docking in July and August, so close on 30,000 people, plus every hotel is full. The thought of 50,000 all trying to fit into the old town is horrifying.

So if you do want to visit Dubrovnik, do so in May or October.

It's also a lot cooler then. I know this year has been unseasonably hot, but people were melting in the heat as we walked round, and it's not yet the hottest part of the year. Spring and Autumn aren't exactly cold, though I suppose if you come for the swimming and sunbathing rather than the sights it isn't really warm enough for that. 

Planes, trains, buses and automobiles

Alison and I decided early on that we would try to travel by train as much as possible. We haven't relented from that, and I thought I would share our reasons why.

Trains are generally the cheapest form of transportation in the Balkans.

Most of the countries have networks that link the major cities, with the Montenegro/Croatian coast being the exception due to its exceptionally awkward geography, so when we shifted base cities we did so by train. We also used them for day trips

On the plus side for trains: 1) train stations are easy to find and there's only one, 2) they tend to be close to the centres of towns, so schlepping our bags there is much less hassle, 3) train stations are more pleasant to wait at than bus stations or airports, 4) trains are a reliable smooth ride, 5) you can have quite a civilised meal on them, 6) they have toilets, 7) the views tend to be better, and it's possible to take photos from them if they have opening windows, on both sides, and 8) you can shift carriages if your neighbours are particularly irritating.

On the downside, trains are often slow. This is made worse if you have to wait for a connection, and we quite often need to do that.

We found that the trains kept to scheduled departures and rarely arrived very late.

Cute Hungarian short distance train. I like trains.

Buses are not generally much more expensive, except Montenegro. We use them for day trips to distant towns if the trains don't go there or run too irregularly.

On the plus side for buses 1) there are far more extensive networks, so that it has so far not been necessary to change mid-route, and 2) they go to a lot of the smaller towns and villages that don't have railway stations.

On the downside: 1) often cities have multiple companies with different stations, and it can be quite hard to work out which company and which station to go to (in a couple of cases, basically impossible), 2) bus stations are often quite a long way from where we have been staying, 3) are often really quite skeevy places to wait at, 4) the quality of bus varies wildly, with some of them being really quite nasty rides, although others are air-conditioned and comfortable 5) eating on them is often frowned on, 6) they don't have toilets, which can be irritating on a six hour trip, 7) you can almost never take decent pictures from them due to window reflections, and even if you can it is only one side, (see photo below) and 8) when you are stuck beside three obnoxious teenage boys on the way to the beach in Sutomore, as much as you would like to move away from them, you can't.

So they take the good side to view the sea, and then pull the curtains!

Buses have tended to be on time too.

Their timetables are more difficult to find than trains, change more often, and many are unclear about where they stop along the route.

Planes are a last resort for me. Generally much more expensive obviously, although not always for longer distances. And what with getting and from to the airports not necessarily all that much quicker.

The killer though is that they aren't very scenic. Half the point of travelling this slowly is to see the places in between the big name towns.

Automobiles haven't featured much. We have hired ones briefly in Jordan, Romania and Serbia.

While I drive faster than the average bus or train, in the end cars tended not to give as much more time as you might expect. Firstly, you have to spend an hour or more finding a rental place close enough to where you are staying and booking them. On the day of the rental we had to wait for opening time, then inspect them and sign the paperwork, meaning a reasonably late start. Then we had to get the car back in working hours, and in a big city that means quite a lot of time allowed for crossing it in traffic. If you keep them overnight, you need to find somewhere to park (which in many European cities isn't a trivial task).

On the days we took them, the hire cars did allow us to get to places that public transport were awkward for. But we found that we were, if anything, more pressed for time there than in places where we could reach by bus or train.

Sometimes things were really awkward. We declined to hire a car in Cyprus because everyone basically insisted on three days as a minimum, which we weren't interested in. We have no idea how much they cost in Brasov, because no-one was in the offices when we visited (four times!).

For us, changing cities and countries on a regular basis, and wanting to be staying downtown, it generally isn't worth the bother to hire cars. A 30 minute wait at the bus station may seem a hassle, but it is actually much less time than walking across town to the agency and organising a vehicle. And if we want to return late, then we can just catch a later train, rather than have to fret about return times.

If you are visiting one place for a while, then hiring a car becomes effective. You pick it up at the airport and return it there. That means you can stay a bit further out of town too, which can be cheaper. (But before you do that, remember that driving in these countries can be pretty rough. The road surfaces in Romania and Jordan were terrible, and Serbia was marginal. Everywhere the locals overtake with glee at the first opportunity, happily doing so into the face of oncoming traffic on a narrow road, because there are no passing lanes. If you want to drive slowly, expect to be overtaken by everyone all day, including heavy trucks and buses. Driving in the Balkans and Arab countries is not for the faint-hearted!)

And, of course, hiring a car for a week seems reasonable, but over six months that would really start to add up!

So, it's trains for us, wherever possible.