Hungary like the wolf

Budapest was almost exactly as I expected it to be, which was actually rather startling after 6 months of surprises. Fortunately I had expected it to be interesting with hot, satisfying, wintery food and grand architecture so it worked out okay. (Even better than okay – there was mulled wine!).

The city bulges with museums, art, theatres, cafes, bars, statues, gothic spires and generally magnificent buildings. We wore down the soles of our shoes exploring and learnt about the scandalous love lives of the Habsburgs, that Hungarians have more Nobel Prizes per capita than any other country and that the ‘Pest’ in Budapest is pronounced ‘Pesht’.

It was the best of times and the worst of times as we both had the shortest of fuses during our time there. I’m still not sure why but I suspect being tired due to difficulties sleeping in dorm rooms, undertaking 12 hours multi-modal transit every 4-5 days for several months and the novelty of travelling starting to pall would have all been contributing factors. (I know, I know, it’s not easy being a world traveller who hasn’t had to work for six months). Thankfully the disharmony faded away towards the end of our visit and has not been back since.

Budapest is where I first started looking forward to reaching Edinburgh, where a lot of uncertainty awaited us but so did a home.


View of Buda from Pest, such a classically beautiful city


With lots of quirky art, graffiti and interesting exhibitions splattered throughout

This exhibition had some cool modern design ideas from all over Europe, the designers were supposed to draw ideas from traditional creations of their native countries. The plates on the right are commemorative plates for Kate & William's wedding... not the usual 'royal face on a plate' style!

As usual we jumped on a free local walking tour, and headed over the bridge to Pest...

...where they worship eagles and trees grow perpendicular to the ground instead of straight up... strange place

Another of our wanderings took us to the Jewish quarter, where there was also cool graffiti

The baths were a luxury we couldn't pass up!

Scrutinising Serbia

During our time in Croatia and Bosnia we were told that Serbia was the badass of the Balkans – the country that starts all of the wars. We were very intrigued by this. Was Serbia really the dastardly villain that it had been depicted as, dressed entirely in black, with a disfiguring scar on one cheek and an eye patch?

Curiously the museums that we visited in Belgrade did not have any information to do with the Balkan troubles and the people that we met did not speak of it. Perhaps the memories of life under Slobodan Milosevic are still too painful to exhibit. Or perhaps we just looked in the wrong places in our mere five days there.

Serbia seems to be a good place now though. We found Belgrade to be a delightful, fun and surprisingly prosperous city with kind people, scary traffic, beautiful boulevards, lavish public spaces, interesting electricity, plenty to see and do and amazing Turkish-influenced cuisine - we had a blast.


This is what we were expecting from Serbia, more guns than the wild west, and in some ways we got it - the war museum in Belgrade has seemingly endless corridors of every weapon you can imagine from WWI & II. Strangely there was very little in the 90's section, just some vague references to peace keeping... hmmm

Outside of the war museum Belgrade was a striking city.


With some pretty cute inhabitants...


Unfortunately SpongeBob  was not welcome


Parkour has even caught on in Serbia, trust James Bond to trigger a worldwide sensation...

Speaking of catching on... I'm surprised more things didn't catch on fire in Tessla's lab. That guy had brain the size of Einstein's and balls to match! (refer the old picture with Tessla sitting calmly in the background)

A tree does not grow from the sky

(ancient Bosnian proverb)

We arrived in Sarajevo with few preconceptions, hazily aware that it was where the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and that there was a siege there in the 1990s. Unsurprisingly there was much more to the city than that, although our trips to the museum about the assassination and to the 1.2 metre tall underground tunnel which was the city’s only link to the outside world during the three years of siege were fantastic.

We are becoming such lazy travellers – aside from those two forays into mind expansion we spent our time wandering around the lovely cobble stoned old city with its medieval feel, admiring the incredibly good looks of the local population, sipping espresso, ordering meals consisting of large quantities of meat with large quantities of raw onion and checking out the nightlife with our fellow backpackers. There really ain’t no party like a Bosnian party – the clubs were gargantuan and bursting with people and sounds. And despite the nationwide love affair with raw onion, none of our 500 fellow moshers seemed to have raw onion breath – amazing!


After months of glorious sunshine, we were struck with both cold & rain in one foul swoop...

Thankfully Sarajevo has an awesome old town, with cosy hookah bars dotted throughout.

The once top secret entrance to the tunnel that kept Sarajevo connected to the outside during their four year siege by the Serbs after declaring independence from Yugoslavia. It was fascinating to learn about such a modern war (only ended about 15 years ago) and to see first hand the infamous places like the tunnel and sniper alley. There are still signs of the conflict around, buildings that were just scarred lightly by mortar and gunfire are still in use but on the whole, it's incredible how well Sarajevo has recovered.

A small museum inside the tunnel house, and a small outer entrance to the tunnel. Most of the tunnel has been destroyed now, but some of it was saved for the sake of the museum.

Also Sarajevo is infamous for being the place where Franz Ferdinand was shot, triggering the start of Word War I. Right on this bridge to be exact.


But apart from the history lessons, we ate yummy food and wandered the streets at night... we also watched the rugby world cup final here with a couple of other kiwi travellers. I think I lost a few years of my life due to stress in those 90 minutes...