Bus timetables in Slovenia: help is at hand

Until recently the best place to look for bus timetable information for Slovenia was the website of Ljubljana Bus Station. However this naturally has the drawback of only including routes that pass through Ljubljana. Information about other routes was scattered in the websites of Slovenia's numerous transport companies.

I've recently learned about www.vozni-red.si, an initiative of the Mountain Wilderness organisation to promote public transport. Using data from the Ministry of Transport, the site for the first time brings together the schedules of all domestic bus routes in one place.

You can input any two towns to find bus connections between them. Pay attention to the footnotes beneath the schedules as they often contain important information (vozi = runs, ne vozi = does not run, vsak dan = every day, vozi ob delavnikih razen sobote = runs on working days except Saturdays; for more vocabulary including the days of the week see the site's help page).

A few examples of schedules that previously were quite difficult to find:
Kranjska Gora to Bovec (over the Vršič Pass)
Bovec to Kobarid (in the Soča Valley)
Koper to Piran (along the Adriatic coast)

New In Your Pocket guides: Ljubljana and Belgrade

Three new cities in Southeast Europe have recently joined the ever-expanding line-up of In Your Pocket city guides: Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Athens.

In fact one of them is not exactly new: many years ago IYP published a guide to Belgrade, on which I relied during my first visit to the city - at that time it was almost the only source of English-language information about Serbia. That turned out to be a once-off edition at the time, so it's great to see IYP giving Belgrade another go.

The Ljubljana and Athens guides really are brand-new ventures. All three guides are available online as free downloadable PDF files.

A little piece of Narnia in Slovenia

The next instalment in Disney's Narnia series, Prince Caspian, is due for release in 2008. Some of the battle scenes were filmed earlier this year on location in the So&x10d;a Valley in western Slovenia. This has prompted a lengthy article in yesterday's Sunday Times.

The write describes the So&x10d;a as a "beautiful, unknown valley". Unknown? Hasn't he heard of Balkanology? The valley is a firm favourite of mine and has had its own page on the site for some time. That aside, the article is a useful survey of the many and varied attractions of the valley, from something called "hydrospeeding" to tours of the battle sites - from World War One, not the Disney film.

Guidebook news: Belgrade, Kosovo, and more

From Serbia news reaches me of a new entrant in a surprisingly crowded field: city guides to Belgrade. How to Conquer Belgrade is a locally produced guidebook that aims to provide visitors with an insider's view of the city, taking an honest and wryly humorous look at Serbia's idiosyncractic capital. In addition to the usual descriptions of monuments and museums, you can find out about the best songs to request from a Roma brass band, which cafes are frequented by girls who like books, and which part of the stadium you should sit in at a Red Star home game. The guide comes with a separate map of the city, and is available in six languages.

Another new city guide is the Bradt Mini Guide to Zagreb. Croatia's capital is often overshadowed by the more obvious attractions of the coast, so it's nice to see it getting a guidebook if its own. Bradt have also published new editions of their guides to Croatia and Dubrovnik.

Lonely Planet have also been updating their range of single-country guides. The 4th edition of Romania and Moldova is still, as far as I know, the only guidebook with any kind of decent coverage of Moldova. Although I prefer the Rough Guide to Romania, right now LP is considerably more up to date - hopefully Rough Guides will follow suit with a new edition soon. Meanwhile Lonely Planet Slovenia has moved on to its 5th edition.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of news is about a book that doesn't yet exist. Bradt Guides have pioneered the publication of dedicated guides to small Balkan countries, so it's not surprising that they plan to produce the first English-language Guide to Kosovo. The expected publication date is September 2007 - sadly too late for the hordes of foreign tourists who are no doubt planning to descend on Kosovo this summer.

Lonely Planet publishes Western Balkans Guide

The Western Balkans (the former Yugoslavia plus Albania) has received rather patchy coverage from guidebooks. The rapid assimiliation of Croatia and Slovenia into the tourist mainstream has been accompanied by the publication of a wide variety of guides, but the other states in the region have had to be content with brief chapters in larger guides, plus the pioneering but uneven Bradt Guides to individual countries.

Lonely Planet's new Western Balkans guide aims to fill in some of the gaps. It will be convenient for people visiting several countries in the region, but for several of those countries the material is not a huge improvement on the existing Eastern Europe guide. See the Books page for more.