From Skopje to the sea by train

The "Balkan Travellers" website reports that two summer-only train services Skopje to the seaside beging operating this week. A daily overnight service from Skopje to Bar on Montenegro's Adriatic coast will run until 31 August, while a train to Varna on Bulgaria's Black Sea will run on Saturdays only until 4 September. For those of you puzzling over rail maps of Southeast Europe: both trains travel via Niš in Serbia.

Photos of Székely Land (Romania)

Last month I had the chance to spend a week in a part of Romania that I hadn't previously visited, the Székely Land. This part of Transylvania is much less well known to foreign tourists than the Saxon lands - the only travellers I saw were from Hungary. Although the Székely cities don't have the mediaeval architecture that makes Sibiu and Sighişoara so appealing, the countryside is well worth exploring. In contrast to the sad decline in the number of German speakers living in Transylvania, the Hungarian speakers of the Székely Land are very much still around, and this gives the area a slightly different atmosphere to the rest of Romania.

Photos from my trip can now be seen in the Székely Land Gallery.

New and updated guidebooks: Montenegro, Albania, and more

Despite recurring reports of the death of the print guidebook, spring 2009 has seen plenty of activity among publishers of guides to the Balkan Region. Some of the books listed below are already in the shops, others are due to be published in the next few months and are available for pre-order. I haven't yet got my hands on any of them, so the following listings are not necessarily recommendations.

Montenegro

Travellers to Montenegro will soon be spoilt for choice as the Adriatic country moves further towards mainstream destination status. Two brand new guidebooks make their debuts in April 2009, Rough Guides and Lonely Planet shadowing each other as closely as ever: their guides have identical official publication dates. In keeping with the usual pattern, the Rough Guide has more pages than its LP competitor. Rough Guide author Norm Longley has also been responsible for the excellent Romania and Slovenia guides. There are now at least five English language guidebooks dedicated entirely to this small country (for the full list see the Montenegro Books page).




Albania

Albania trails some distance behind Montenegro when it comes to being perceived as a "normal" tourist destination, but it is certainly moving in that direction. Until recently the successive and ever-improving editions of the Bradt guide had the field to themselves (in the absence of an update to the 2001 Blue Guide, still worth referring to for its incomparable level of detail). Now Thomas Cook is publishing "Travellers Albania". The same publisher's CitySpots series already covers Tirana, and the new guide extends to the whole country. See the Albania Books page for the full list of guidebooks.



Western Balkans

The new guides to Albania and Montenegro will be of interest to travellers concentrating on a single country, but are probably too bulky for the many people who visit these countries as part of a longer trip. Those travellers will no doubt be interested in the second edition of Lonely Planet's Western Balkans guide, which will hopefully take account of the many changes in the region since the first edition appeared three years ago. Details are still sparse - all I know right now is that it is just 12 pages longer than the first edition. Presumably the same countries are covered - I wonder if Kosovo, barely touched on in the original edition, will get its own section?



Other updates

The roster is completed by two other updates from Lonely Planet: their guide to Croatia has moved on to its fifth edition in a relatively short space of time, while the venerable Turkey guide is on edition number eleven.

Rare snow in Dalmatia

Many parts of the Balkans have already experienced some particularly harsh weather this winter, but this week has brought something exceptional: snow on Croatia's Adriatic Coast. News reports say that the residents (especially children) of Sibenik, Split and Dubrovnik are enjoying the novelty - when they aren't attending hospital as a result of slips and slides on the unfamiliar treacherous surface. Dubrovnik Airport is apparently closed.

Read more here and enjoy some evocative photos of Zadar in this gallery.

Flights from Liverpool to Dubrovnik ... and more

Following its announcement of a new route from London Gatwick to Dubrovnik last month, budget airline Easyjet yesterday launched another connection from England to the southern Croatian airport. Flights from Liverpool to Dubrovnik will operate three times weekly (Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday) from early June.

It seems that the Dalmatian coast will be busy with Easyjet customers in summer 2009. As well as the new UK routes, the airline will fly to Dubrovnik three times weekly from Berlin and twice weekly from Geneva.

Easyjet is also making it easier to reach Greece from the English regions: over the summer they will fly twice weekly from both Bristol and Manchester to Corfu, and from Manchester to Athens.

Timeless Macedonia on video

The Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski, best known for the feature films Before the Rain and Dust, has directed a short promotional video that aims to encourage tourists to visit the Republic of Macedonia. The video will air on CNN and other television channels, and can also be viewed on the Macedonia-Timeless website.

Easyjet flies from London Gatwick to Dubrovnik

Earlier this month Easyjet announced the launch of a new route from London Gatwick to Dubrovnik. Flights will start on 1st May 2009 and will operate four times weekly (Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday).

At the time of writing one-way fares of £34 including taxes are available on a variety of dates in May and June. Not surprisingly, cheap fares in July and August are a little harder to come by, but early bookers should still be able to find some reasonable deals.

Train timetable changes in the Balkans - December 2008

Once again we have reached the time of year when railway operators across Europe introduce new timetables. The next round of changes will take effect on 14 December 2008.

According to an announcement on the Serbian Railways website, a second daily train is being introduced on the Belgrade-Skopje-Thessaloniki route. Or rather reintroduced, as this restores the situation prior to December 2007. Any improvement to the poor public transport connections between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece is very welcome.

The IC "Avala", which currently runs from Vienna via Budapest to Belgrade, will now operate on the route Prague-Bratislava-Budapest-Belgrade. There will thus be no direct daytime Vienna-Belgrade service, although it will still be possible to travel between these cities by day with a change in Budapest, and the direct overnight "Beograd" service is retained.

The overnight train from Niš (Serbia) to Podgorica and Bar (Montenegro) will now leave Niš in the morning, at least during the winter - it is not clear what will happen in summer.

These are the only major developments in Southeast Europe that I have noticed so far. There are also numerous minor timing alterations.

Sadly there is no sign of any improvement in the rail links between Italy and Slovenia. Since TrenItalia withdrew their leg of the "Casanova" service earlier this year, the only direct train has been the "Venezia Express" from Venice to Budapest, which passes through Ljubljana at an inconvenient hour of the night. This seems a very strange state of affairs between neighbouring countries within the Schengen zone.

As happens every year, the various online train timetables are struggling to deal with the changeover - apparently this is too great a challenge for the current state of computing technology. So for the next few weeks, care will be required when using online timetables to plan journeys in advance.

It's a long way from Split to Dubrovnik ... if you believe Google Maps

Fellow blogger Stuart Pinfold has drawn my attention to the eccentricities of Google Maps in giving driving directions between certain points in Southeast Europe. In his post on the topic he points out that Google Maps comes up with a slightly overcomplicated route between Dubrovnik and Mostar. Instead of the conventional 150-kilometre drive that less creative mapping software might recommend, Google suggests a more adventurous approach: a ferry to Italy, some driving, another ferry to Greece, and more driving through Greece, the entire length of Albania, Montenegro, and finally Bosnia. At 1541 kilometres it's a mere 10 times longer than the usual route - and so much more interesting. I've always encouraged travellers to venture away from the beaten path and explore less well-known parts of the Balkans, so it's nice to see Google doing the same. Not only that, but it adds a sense of history by persistently referring to Dubrovnik as Ragusa - admittedly not a name that appears very often on Croatian road signs.

I tried a few test routes of my own in Google Maps to see if this was just an aberration. Surely the straightforward coastal drive from Split to Dubrovnik wouldn't cause any problems? Sure enough, Google's answer does involve a drive along the Adriatic Coast - unfortunately it is on the other side of the Adriatic, between Bari and Pescara.



I guessed that the small strip of Bosnian territory between Split and Dubrovnik (the "Neum Corridor") might be causing a problem, so I tried an even simpler request: directions from Split to Zagreb, a route that lies entirely within Croatia. The result was even more surprising: "We could not calculate directions between split, croatia and zagreb, croatia."

So the problem runs deeper than the Neum corridor; there seems to be a more fundamental problem with Google's Croatia database. But maybe it's just Croatia that is flawed and everywhere else in the Balkans is OK? I asked for directions between two neighbouring capitals, Belgrade and Podgorica. At first everything looked fine: as I expected, the results show a blue line heading southwest from Belgrade and continuing along major roads to Podgorica. But wait a minute - what is that thick blue line southeast of Belgrade? Closer inspection of the driving directions reveals the problem: Google wants us to head southeast for 150km, turn around, and drive back to the outskirts of Belgrade on the same road before finally taking the correct road towards Montenegro.



At this point I gave up.

As far as I know ViaMichelin is more reliable in providing driving directions in the Balkans. Certainly it acquitted itself well on the examples above. However it's possible that similar horrors lurk within the databases of ViaMichelin and other non-Google mapping websites - if you know of any, let me know.

Through the Balkans by motorcycle - a trip report

Not MY trip report, I hasten to add - I haven't suddenly taken up motorcycling. But I thought that readers of this site might be interested in a new travelog by Jayne Cravens about her journey through Eastern Europe, including several Balkan countries, in September 2008. The descriptions of road conditions and campsites should be particularly useful to anyone planning a similar journey, while motorcyclists and non-motorcyclists alike should enjoy the many stories of the random acts of kindness that add so much to the experience of visiting the region.