I wouldn't make a good hobo. I'm not addicted to crack, I haven't got a beard, and I have trouble enough sleeping in hostel beds, especially if the pillows are too big. So managing to get an hour's shut-eye on the floor of a Bulgarian railway station with prostitutes and other undesirable characters roaming around nearby surprised me. It had been none of our intentions to spend the night on the hard marble floor of Ruse station, believe it or not. Mildly hungover, we had set off from Brasov at 2pm and spent a couple of hours at Bucharest before catching [View Full Entry]

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Whenever I went to a Hallowe'en party as a kid I always went as Dracula. And not just because my widow's peak and pasty complexion meant I barely had to do any preparation. The legendary tale of the bloodsucking vamp from Transylvania was one of my favourite books, so I jumped at the chance to visit the spooky territory where the story was based. Of course, Bram Stoker's work of fiction was at least loosely based on the very real Vlad Tepes, who lived in the 15th Century and had a penchant for impaling his Turkish enemies on stakes. He was, [View Full Entry]

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Even a mother wouldn't say Bucharest is good looking. Our night train from Chisinau pulled in past foreboding grey suburbs, while everyone both inside and outside the grotty Gara du Nord station seemed to be whispering "taxi" in a highly suspicious manner. We had been warned by our Lonely Planet oracle to give these a wider berth than a crocodile with BO so, heads down, we headed for the sanctity of McDonalds. We had nowhere to go, anyway. We would stay within the golden arches for three hours. Our apartment would not be ready until 10am at the earliest. It was [View Full Entry]

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Moldova was a destination we had decided on more out of curiosity than a desire to see anything specific. It's skipped over by most visitors to the region because the small nation of about 4.5million people has little to boast about historically or culturally compared with neighbouring Romania or Ukraine. We'd heard and read a few things about its celebrated wine industry as well as corruption and poverty, which are both supposedly rife. Continuing our tradition of arriving at rush hour, the three of us waded through the hordes of incessant taxi drivers hawking for business, changed up s [View Full Entry]

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Kiev is full of people trying to get somewhere in a hurry. Buses, marshrutki (public minibuses) and metro trains cram residents in, making the London Underground at rush hour look deserted. And why not. Because unlike neighbouring Belarus, Ukraine seems desperate to shake off its former communist shackles and make its way in the world. Russia, its influential neighbour, has expressed an unease about Ukraine joining NATO. And the port of Sevastopol remains a potential flashpoint between it and Russia. But despite years under its command, Ukraine doesn't seem to be afraid. Kiev's official [View Full Entry]

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Regular readers will already be aware of the childish undercurrent to my sense of humour, so when the opportunity arose to explore a bit of Brest I was not going to turn it down. We did not want to milk it though, so we stayed in the small south western border town for just 20 hours. We had enjoyed a first class four hour journey from Minsk. It only cost 11 pounds but we didn't get any food. We did, however, enjoy the screening of 101 Dalmatians in Russian. Fortunately it's not a deep film so we could work out what [View Full Entry]

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Arriving in Minsk on a warm Monday afternoon, I half-expected the place to be set in black and white like an old war film. I expected serious, moustachioed men in beige trenchcoats and sunglasses to exchange briefcases in dark alleyways, stopping only to utter something like "Red Fox, November in Sevastopol is always clement" before scurrying off. For Belarus is technically a dictatorship, run by controversial president Aleksander Lukashenko, who encourages homophobia, xenaphobia, and has gotten away with tweaking the constitution to ensure he has stayed in power for 14 years. The KGB is [View Full Entry]

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Lithuania almost didn't make the cut for this tour. We chose to go to Vilnius because it was reckoned to be the easiest city to obtain a visa for neighbouring Belarus. As it was, we ended up getting them before we left home but rather than realign our meticulously-planned itinerary, we decided to give it a go. We scheduled four nights here, and as the frustratingly pedestrian train gradually clunked through mile after mile of unremarkable countryside, we confided in each other that 96 hours may be excessive. For Vilnius is not a big city. And according to our Lonely Planet [View Full Entry]

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The capital of Poland definitely feels different to Krakow and Gdansk. Home to around 1.5million people, it was bustling during evening rush hour when we finally got to the city centre. Our arrival saw us squeeze our way through a mass of office workers on their mobile phones on our 1km walk from the station to the hostel. This may surprise you if you read the Daily Mail, because of course it seems to be under the impression that all Poles are in the UK, stealing our jobs and our women. Things had not got off to a good start. We [View Full Entry]

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For all the cosmopolitan charm of its new town, the northern Polish city of Gdansk's real history lies within its hulking, dilapidated shipyards. From within this run down background, many believe the first nail was driven into the coffin of communism in Europe. The workers spoke out for the Polish population and former the largest trade union in the world to show their puppet government that they were no longer prepared to accept the Soviet Union pulling the strings. Now pay attention at the back there. The first rumblings occurred two weeks before Christmas 1970. Obscene food price hikes [View Full Entry]

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