Day Fifteen (Saturday 5 October): Bratislava and Budapest
It was very hard to leave Vienna, knowing that we had so much more we wanted to see and counting down the hours until we said farewell to the group, with all of us...
Author: Chris Bounds
Days Thirteen and Fourteen (Thursday 3, Friday 4 October): Vienna
Well, contrary to expectations, the trip turned out to be a lot of fun, with our new friends in good form — at some stage I am going to have to write about the...
Days Eleven and Twelve (Tuesday 1, Wednesday 2 October): Cesky Krumlov
Another day of travelling brought us to Cesky Krumlov, which has the obligatory UNESCO rating handed out to towns suffering from communist neglect and large castles. Sorry to sound cynical, but while the town...
Days Nine and Ten (29, 30 September): Prague
Sunday was a long, long trip in a minibus which, while not uncomfortable, would not be my favourite way of travelling four or five hundred kilometres. It had the strategic advantage of being able...
Day Eight: Cracow (Saturday, 28 September)
Our arrival in Cracow, after four hours of bus travel and five hours touring Auschwitz, could not have come quickly enough, but we realised that we hd come across the prettiest and perhaps most...
Day Seven: Auschwitz and Cracow (Friday 27 September)
Like anyone with an ounce of soul, I came away from the museum moved, horrified, repelled and bemused, the latter because one was confronted with ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. For all the labelling that...
Day Six: Zakopane (Thursday 26 September)
It was a very long day yesterday: when we disembarked from the train in Cracow, we had a two hour trip into the mountains ahead of us on a coach, and then a minibus...
Day Five (Wednesday 25 September): another bloody train trip!
Last night’s trip had only whetted our appetite for a walk in the restored Old City of Warsaw, so we federated with Gail and Barry and following Leigh’s leadership, staged a mutiny. It was...
Day Four: the Warsaw Train
The scene is Berlin. Grey clouds shower unwelcome rain on the laden pilgrims as they inflict their oversize baggage on the city’s public transport system. The local mental health system is bracing itself for...
Day Three: Monday and it's full-on Berlin
I think we walked our legs off today. A little too enthusiastic about the exercise, we jogged for about six km in the morning and then found that Raf — the tour guide who...