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.

A Montenegroan

One day we travelled 144 kilometres from Tirana, Albania to Podgorica, Montenegro. Our journey took us seven hours and included furious arguments with two taxi drivers, walking in circles around icy Podgorica for half an hour with all of our baggage and an incident where an irately thrown water bottle hit a parked Mercedes (accidentally! there are so many Mercedes in Podgorica that it is practically impossible NOT to hit one!). Then, on our single non-transit day in Montenegro (which was a Sunday), everything was closed.

It was just not meant to be. But we have a few photographs that show what a lovely place the land of the black mountains is for people other than us. Word in the hostels is that tourism-wise Montenegro is the new Croatia. I would really like to spend some proper time there, despite the above.



The first of many, many millennium bridges in this part of the world

Despite the shops being closed, Soph still dreamed...

From the bus as we passed through a beautiful little town on the coast

We stopped off in this little town on our way to Croatia, don't ask me what the name is...

Moustache spotting in Tirana

We originally intended to spend one night in Albania en route to Croatia. However somebody left our Euro credit card in Meteora so we hung out in Tirana for a few days while we waited for it to catch up with us.

There weren’t any ‘you must see it before you die’ tourist attractions, or any tourist attractions at all really. So we walked the streets, drank lots of espresso, ate many foods with dipping sauces and people watched. It was nice feeling free of the responsibility to learn about things and appreciate them ‘properly’.

Here are the five things that I thought were most interesting: 

1. Albanians are super super super friendly and helpful. Speaking different languages does not prevent them from having a 20 minute conversation with you in the pouring rain. They are just so excited that someone has made the effort to visit their country. 
2. Many of the bleak communist apartment buildings are painted in bright colours and patterns due to a policy of former mayor Edi Rama who is also an artist. The buildings look really neat, and are definitely no longer bleak. 
3. The western clothes from the 1990s are now living in Albania. (The western clothes from the 1970s now live in India, so where are the clothes from the 1980s?). 
4. Despite every Albanian of historical importance having a moustache (except perhaps for Mother Theresa) mysteriously nowadays only about 5 people in the whole country have one. Their absence is curious... 
5. Albania is about to get its first multiplex cinema. This shows how far Albania is behind most developed nations, but I don’t think that it will be for long. It has enormous tourism potential and evidence of significant manufacturing abilities... watch out world!

Our taxi ride covering the length of Albania set us back about a tiny $25, in a Mercedes no less... entering Tirana we discovered colourful buildings, wild wires and fried chicken that almost reminded us of home.
The food was a shot in the dark mostly... sometimes it had teeth!

See the army guy? I didn't... he wasn't too happy about me taking pictures here. Don't even know what the complex was, I just wanted a picture of the clock tower.... honest


Crazy pyramid in the city, designed by the president's daughter or something. Not used for much any more but had heaps of cool graffiti all over.

And then our credit card arrived safely. So we once again flagged a Mercedes and hit the dusty, bumpy road to Montenegro.

Mighty monkly Meteora

We finished our time in Greece with a visit to Kastraki, a quaint little village surrounded by sheer sandstone cliffs. On top of the cliffs perch eastern orthodox monasteries which are known collectively as ‘the Meteora’. In the times before tourists the monasteries were accessible only by undertaking a slippery climb that was fraught with peril at every step. This made the monasteries easy to defend and tested the faith of those who wished to reside there.

The hermit monks who lived there were seriously cool and surprisingly communal. They led political resistance movements, fought in armies, were skilled craftsmen and were significant collectors and creators of literature. They also knew how to have an incredibly good time, judging by the wine cask the size of a living room. We have had to revise our impressions of hermits and monks significantly.


Getting to the monasteries was half the fun... especially scaring the tourists coming off the tour buses when you emerge from the bush covered in half a jungle and panting maniacally.

The views made all the walking totally worthwhile


The monasteries were pretty cool. Unfortunately no photography allowed inside, so you will just have to imagine the room of monks skulls, the floor to ceiling murals and cool monk weapons.

But eventually the monasteries closed and apart from the awesome food there's not much else to report from Meteora.