So I am here in Ljubljana in a hostel which used to be a prison. Cool as that is, it wasn't an aesthetic choice, more a practical one as it was the closest budget accomodation to the train station, where I have to get a train from at 6.20am tomorrow morning. However I have heard this place waxed out by plenty of backpackers blogging about Ljubljana on here, so I was hoping to be able to see it. The train journeys here were mostly hell, to be honest with you. I was denied buying any food to bring on to me because no cash machines in Praha hlavní nádrazí were working, on the Praha - Salzburg train (6 and half hours) there was no food full stop, and I wanted to massacre my compartment at one ... read more

I was naive in thinking I wouldn't be leaving Prague until I head south for Ljubljana on the 17th, as this plus the general absence of any company at the moment led me into an absolutely comatose hermit week since finishing the metro challenge on friday, over which my sleeping pattern became progressively less defined and my energy levels falling into oblivion like a baby on a tightrope. The turning point came last night when I found I couldn't even get to sleep, even as the sun had fully risen at 7am, so I decided to give up on bed, but knew staying in the house another day would be a bad idea. So I glued myself to a map of the country and decided to go back to Plzeň for the day. I had an ... read more

So, yesterday morning I logged onto the forum of the Tube Challenge community - a clique of Londoners (and, oddly, Scandinavians) who's holy grail is the official Guinness World Record for visiting - that is, arriving to and/or departing from by train - each of the 270 stations on the London Underground network in the shortest time possible. The challenge is a rather hardcore pursuit which I've attempted numerous times a few years back, including a few times for charity. Despite what you might think it does NOT involve just sitting on trains all day; after the insane amount of planning you need to do, it involves basically spending at least 18 hours running up and down escalators, over passageways, and through the streets of strange suburbs of the city you've never heard of before, while ... read more

It was pretty swank while it lasted :)... read more

And so we went onwards to Banská Bystrica (that's pronounced "bun-scar bis-trit-sa"), which along with nearby Zvolen make the two main cities in central Slovakia. We found some creepy little guesthouse which satisfied both of our goth sides quite well, very small and nostalgic, but also very noisy as the walls were probably made from a sheet of cardboard, so you could properly hear everything bumping around. We went for more amazing cheap pizza on the town square on wednesday night and were entertained by a cool little band playing some covers and some songs in slovak (including some translated cover versions!) There was something incredibly eerie about the clocktower, at five to every hour it would chime a new tune on a huge music box, giving the whole place a bit of a fairy tale ... read more