Pretty in Prague

I have always dreamt of going to Prague, visiting the haunts of literary giants and seeing some of the world’s greatest art and architecture. Prague did not let me down, although the Lonely Planet summarised it pretty well when they said “so you’ve just arrived in Prague and you’re wondering why you bothered...” On first impression it looked like an amalgamation of every other central-eastern-European city that we’ve visited, only with higher prices. We were saying things like “sure the main square is lovely but it’s no Krakow...”

But after a couple of days Prague had weaselled its way into our hearts. It is just so gorgeous, and very well preserved due to the Czech’s apparent habit of surrendering to every army who passed by. We were entertained by the Czech’s bluntness and wry sense of humour, impressed by humankind’s ability to think of every detail at the museum of torture (sawing someone in half? Why not hang them upside down so that the blood rushes to their head and they are conscious for longer?), and bemused by an unusual Dali exhibition. I really, really wish that we could have smelt the Dali perfume. I’m going to spend the rest of my life wondering what a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order smells like, argh! 

My favourite pastime of all was visiting Prague’s grand old cafe’s which are deeply entwined in the city’s literary history. They have been regularly frequented by people such as Franz Kafka and Allan Ginsberg and are spaces in which masterpieces have been written and new philosophies thrashed out. It is entirely possible that I have sat in the chair that Albert Einstein was occupying when he had a ‘Eureka!’ moment!



On our walking tour we discovered cute buildings, avant-garde fashion and a cool monument to the famous writer Kafka... inspired by a dream of his where a man wandered the streets of Prague on the shoulders of a headless man.

The astronomical clock in the centre of the old town, every hour the clock treats viewers to a magical display... but I'll leave that for you to discover.

A handsome guy, overlooking a pretty canal, next to some horrific torture... ouch.

The John Lennon wall, we were a bit surprised actually... we imagined a different Lenin for some reason.

We heard about a little chapel filled with thousands of human bones and couldn't resist a visit. Even from the outside Sedlec Ossuary was ominous...

Mmm coffee... and cake... we spent a lot of our time here... 

Once you go Krakow you’ll never go back OW!

We spent a lot of our time in Krakow learning about Poland’s rich Jewish history. It’s sort of unavoidable – it seemed as though everywhere we went had Jewish significance. Museums are located inside abandoned synagogues, the best bars in town are located in the abandoned Jewish quarter... if you look to your right you will see Oskar Schindler’s factory and if you look to your left there are some remnants of the wall which once enclosed the Jewish ghetto... it is staggering. The nearby Auschwitz Concentration Camp is the reason why these spaces are museums and bars today. Unsurprisingly the majority of the survivors chose not to return to their former Polish homes, to the extent that today only one of Krakow’s 300 synagogues is used for religious purposes.

We learnt many things that made us sad, and I just about broke my heart looking at the piles of abandoned possessions at Auschwitz. Somehow knowing what happened does not prepare you for seeing an enormous room filled to the brim with the shoes of the victims. Or the enormous room filled with their suitcases. Or the one with their hair. Or the one with...

Despite its incredibly traumatic history Krakow is a place of life and vitality and FUN – it has unbelievably gorgeous locals who dress to kill, a choice of creamy or tangy herrings and an insane nightlife (my favourite place was a bar where we climbed through wardrobes to move between rooms). Many of the backpackers that we met there went to Krakow purely to party and our 12 bed dorm was fairly evenly divided between those who slept at night and those who “slept” during the day, oblivious of the ringing of their cell phone right next to their head...

It’s just magic. It is my favourite place in Europe so far.

And – it’s incredibly beautiful too... cue Dan!



A bit like Dubrovnik in style, but no doubt its in-land position helps to prevent it from becoming swamped by cruise ships... preventing the inevitable take-over by tourist trinket shops and large people with cankles.


Once again we jumped on a free city tour, this one taking us through the important Jewish parts of town. I thought this memorial of chairs was especially powerful. It recalls a moment in the war when all the old furniture was thrown out onto the Umschlagplatz at the Podgorze Ghetto, as the inhabitants of the ghetto were finally assembled by the German SS to be sent to death.

Our day at Auschwitz was chilling, and eye-opening. It made me see another side of the Nazi's... that they weren't just driven by hatred to mass extermination... but also profit. Every part of the Jews that were sent to these camps were taken from them, not just their worldly possessions but absolutely anything the Nazi's could profit from. Including their hair which they made into rope.

A tiny portion of these possessions were recovered when the camps were taken by the allies.

This was a typical block at part two of the camp.


On a much more light-hearted day out, we visited another famous place in Krakow... the Salt mines.

Worked for over 900 years, mining salt was very profitable business (the medieval equivalent to oil). Huge chambers including this massive chapel were carved out by the miners... everything you see is made from the rock salt, and held together by massive wooden logs.

It really is quite hard to show the scale and variety of this place with a few photographs... well worth the visit.

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...

Shiny happy Dubrovnik

Dubrovnik’s old city is one of the few places where we literally stopped and stared upon arrival, absolutely blown away by its incredible beauty. It is a vision in marble, pristine and shimmering in the light.

The only problem with it really is that you have to pay serious attention while walking or you smack into the back of somebody else that has stopped and is in mid-gawp.


Millions of people over hundreds of years have worn the marble to a very jandal-unfriendly surface

Even the ceiling of our hostel was epic. Once we had settled in, we joined the hordes of tourists for a wander around the battlements. Some of the biggest & best I've seen since Jodhpur.




Aside from walking there was plenty of coffee, massive slices of pizza and jazz bars. Everything you could want on your day out from the cruise ship...

So even though it was beautiful, it did leave us feeling like another cog in the tourist machine.