I was pleasantly surprised by North Macedonia: Fairly pristine nature and very affordable. The clear water of Lake Ohrid particularly impressed me, so I stayed there for 5 nights. After that, I took a shortcut through Albania to Greece. The first thing I saw in Greece was Motorway 29. Curiously there are no signs banning…

The Tour De Serbia was underway and by chance I followed more or less the same route out of Belgrade with the same end point for that day (Cacak). It wasn’t easy figuring out which entry points into Kosovo were legal. For me the easiest route was to take the mountain road from Novi Pasar.…

Tourist accommodation is a cottage industry in Hungary. They have their own reservation system called Szallas similar to Booking.com. The government also give grants (loans?) to private hosts in small villages. So I slept on the Hungarian side of the Danube on my way to Budapest. But EV6 in Hungary is not nice. It is…

I followed the Váh River from Zilina nearly all the way to the capital. I discovered that long stretches of this route (002) have been upgraded with tar cycleways. A tripoint is a point where 3 countries meet. Most tripoints are closed to the public due to border security concerns. Others are mountain peaks or…

I’ve made over 50 successful reservations with Booking.com. Until recently failures were rare and always due to mistakes by the host: For example a hotel in Beijing didn’t say in their listing that they cannot accept foreigners. A hotel in Bulgaria didn’t properly block out their listing for a weekend when they hosted a wedding.…

In the era of train travel passengers would write their details with paint of their suitcases. A reminder of who most of these victims were and how futile their journeys were.

This salt mine operated commercially for over 700 years. I took the guided tour. Although we walked many km and descended 130m, we saw only a few percent of the mine.

From Debrecen I headed North to the wine lands. From there the Euro Velo 11 provided me with good roads almost all the way to Slovakia. The area around Kosice wasn’t too great. But halfway to Prešov, I turned left on a quiet road and it was an absolute joy all the way to Spis…