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Showing posts from October, 2021

Balkan Odyssey

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On my last day in Dubrovnik, I had a lunch date at the Vegan restaurant Nishta with: Germans Julie & Jana and Korean Songki. I ordered Gazpacho followed by Tofu kebab, Songki ate burritos, Jana the beautiful Almond gnocchi, and Julie went overboard with vegetable curry, dhal, rice & roti. The salad bar of fresh broccoli, mushroom, sautéed aubergine and nuts were the best I've seen on my journey so far.  MonteNegro With the RometoRio app, I'd discovered a really neat route down to Thessaloniki in Greece via Kotor, Montenegro; to Skopje, capital of North Macedonia and then a train ride to Greece.    A really cool German guy called Davide, originally from Munich, but now living in Leipzig accompanied me for the journey. Davide speaks 5 languages fluently: German, Polish from his mum, Spanish, as he did Erasmus in Barcelona, and excellent English. He's a DJ, musician in a rock band, and edits Podcasts on his travels. Kotor was just a two-hour bus ride from Dubrovnik, a

Croatia

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 I ate a breakfast of vegetarian pannini and café latte (Soya) prepared by the lovely Liliane, a worker from Moldova, and said goodbye to Ostello Venezia. I would highly recommend the hostel for a backpacker stay in Venice. I was sad to take my last vaporetto ride the Santa Lucia station, and got on a comfortable Austrian train, destination Vienna(!!) from  Venice, towards Trieste. The Slovenian border officials (3) got on and checked my ticket, my passport and my COVID pass. An hour or so later we arrived in Davica, Slovenia, in a huge thunder and rainstorm. I had three hours to wait in a bus shelter, whilst conkers crashed from the trees above.  There was a German Lady from Hamburg (unvaccinated!) and her 11 year old daughter travelling same route to Buzan in Croatia. The replacement minibus was warm and comfortable. It was due to depart at 16:12, for our connecting train at 17.07 from Buzet, an hour away.  What I saw of Slovenia was hilly and rural. We passed through the Slovenian c

Starting out: London to Venice

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Whilst waiting for my house to be rented out and the  Eurostar getting more expensive by the day, I decided to book the FlixBus overnight bus from London Victoria on Friday 1st October 2021. Scheduled to depart at 10.30 pm, at 10.50pm there was no sign of it, I took to Twitter to ask, and lo and behold a bright green double decker bus appeared. We set off shortly before midnight, however as we had missed the 2am P&O ferry sailing, we had to wait at Dover for the half past four ferry.  I had assumed that Flixbus would take the continual Eurotunnel shuttle. Onboard with the lorry drivers, the Routemaster canteen was the only restaurant serving food, so 4am  I ate the most tasteless English vegetarian breakfast I have ever eaten, to the sounds of Europe's great unwashed truckers snoring in any available seat. I lay down on deck  for a while, but couldn't sleep. We sped to Lille, but we had missed the connecting bus to Paris. I walked to Lille Gare Flanders, and for €52 picked