Croatia

By this point in our trip we knew we wanted to end up in Corfu, Greece, for our final destination. The way we chose to do that was to take a cheap flight from Serbia, and to get to Serbia we went through Croatia.

Croatia

 

We would have liked to visit the coast also but we didn't have the time. We went instead to the capital Zagreb, which was great to visit in itself. It also contained what was probably our favourite hostel of the trip: The Cherry Hostel - which you can read bout here if you're planning to visit Zagreb any time soon!


The above photo is taken nearby the Lotrtrščak Towere, where we saw - and heard,VERY loudly! - the cannon, which is fired every day at noon.

By the time we got to Zagreb, we knew we needed to get only one train to get to Serbia. And because of how many days of train journeys we were allowed with our ticket (10), and how many days we'd had up to that point, we knew we had one spare day of train journeys. Gareth was determined that the spare day of train travel would not go to waste, so on one of the days in Zagreb we took a random train to the middle of nowhere, and got off it when we felt like it. This is where we ended up:

 

 

We got some food and hung out here for a little while before heading back to Zagreb. From where the next day we would be going on to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia...

Slovenia (and a glimpse of Austria!)

A few of our train journeys took us through Austria, and so we got to see a lot of it's beautiful countryside. I'd like to visit it properly at some point though we didn't get to during this trip. We did stop there for a wander in a town though and some grub, which was nice.



Here is a little glimpse of Austria. I might share some more pictures
from the train journeys another day but not sure.

The next country we went to visit properly was Slovenia. I have to admit I’d not heard much about Slovenia until around the beginning of our trip. That’s because one of the friends we went to Belgium with had spent quite a bit of time travelling around the whole of that country and had a lot of good things to say about it. As I said we were planning where we were going as we went along, and based largely on her recommendations we decided we’d really like to visit Slovenia.

We first went to the capital Ljubljana:

 

 

Apparently the oldest ever wheel with an axel was found in Slovenia, in the Ljubljana marshes. We visited a light installation connected to this at Ljubljana Castle. You can read more about this here. Here a few pictures of it:

Next we went to Lake Bled:

 

We really enjoyed a relaxing day by the lake. It was nice to do a mix of things, not just visiting busy cities all the time. And though the lake is a tourist hotspot and so very busy, it was really nice to sunbathe and swim in the lake, in such a breath taking setting.