I have never written a post about my adoptive home city of Kraków on this blog, and indeed I have generally overlooked it when it comes to writing other than...

Overlooked City Slovakia is a country justifiably famed for its beautiful mountain scenery, stunning national parks, lakes and forests, and it's true that mo...

Sando where? Small town Poland is, by and large, a fairly unremarkable affair. Unlike neighbouring Czech Republic, say, Poland's provincial places don't real...

Tumultuous History 'Gdansk' is, by Polish standards, an easy city to pronounce for foreigners. In many other ways though, it is perhaps the most complex of a...

Coming out of the Shadows Long in the shadows of hipper, more well-known destinations in Poland such as Kraków, Wrocław and Warsaw, Lublin has traditionally ...

The Hipster's Choice For many years now, Prague has completely dominated tourism in the Czech Republic, so much so that most other towns are, unfairly to say...

A Lion-hearted city There are some cities in Eastern Europe which defy logic. Lviv to Ukrainians, Lwów to Poles, Lvov to Russians, Lemberg to Austrians and G...

Elegantly wasted Centre of Europe, grand old dame of the Habsburg Empire, inventor of ‘goulash communism’ and now emerging in the 21st century as one of cent...

Baroque Beauty Hungary, similar to nearby Czech Republic, is a country which is known chiefly for its capital, which dwarfs all other cities in the country i...

Out of the box tourism Krakow: a city of dreaming spires, ancient castles, dragons, myths, cobbled streets, cosy bars and coffee shops; an intellectual hub, ...

Feeling the therms “This is the place where Budapest comes to chill out,” Laszlo, a banker in Pest, tells me. “many people come here to relax, but some come ...

What? Why? Where? Wroclaw's island area is the soul to the Market Square's heart in Wrocław. Home to a growing number of cafes, bars and restaurants as well ...

Łódź (pronounced 'Woodge') is a city for which the words 'gritty', 'down-to-earth' and 'unpretentious' barely do justice. It's Poland's industrial heartland,...

Foreword/Disclaimer This blog was originally written as a rather embittered email during a fairly lonely and frustrating bike tour in often bad weather along...

The Polish Baltic - under-rated? The Baltic: hardly conjures up any exotic images in your mind, does it? A frost-bitten, windy, deserted shore, perhaps some ...

The Mystery of Mickiewicz Novogrudok is an unassuming town between Minsk and Grodno which, with the freezing sleet and slush in which we arrived, did not loo...

Flat as a Pancake Traversing Belarus from west to east and back again in the middle of winter is a curious choice of holiday it must be said, and aside from ...

Alternative Christmas After a couple of pleasant if uneventful days spent wondering around Brest’s provincial streets we moved to the capital, Minsk. Tempera...

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true inspiration in art and science” – Albert Einstein Belarus: An Ide...