Foreign travel

Photo blogs and in-depth write-ups of my travels.

A long weekend in… Warsaw

Here’s a fact that will make you a pub quiz hero. The population of Warsaw before the second world war was 1.3m people. At the start of the Warsaw uprising, in August 1944, 900,000 remained. In 1945, once the uprising had failed and the Germans had finished their systematic destruction of the city, 1000 people remained and Warsaw was dead.

Human spirit is an incredible thing, because the Warsaw of 2017 is a vibrant, modern city boasting the newest old town in the world and an atmosphere far removed from what you may read in the press about a far-right lunatic government. Oh, that Government, let me count the ways… The environment minister Jan Szyszko said that “human development is not detrimental to the environment” and thought it would be a good idea to allow logging in the primeval Białowieża forest. He somehow squares the destruction of Poland’s wildest spaces with something he completely misread in the bible. He’s an idiot.

Back to human spirit, which Warsaw has plenty of. It’s an underrated city absolutely worth a visit. In a region with the opulence of Vienna, the old town charm of Bratislava, the beauty and stag-dos of Prague and Budapest, Warsaw has had to go back to the drawing board on what it can offer as a city. It has a wealth of history, a history so violent and shocking that much of my long weekend there was taken up in museums, mouth agape at the sheer horrors that Warsaw and Poland has gone through. But, modern Warsaw also has some great attractions for hipster living, and just general fun times. I left Warsaw feeling it struck a note between Stockholm and Berlin, with a mixture of beauty, gritty realism, a lust for life and sitting on deckchairs. Deckchairs were everywhere; outside the front of the Palace of Culture and Industry, up on the viewing platform of the Palace of Culture and Industry, outside the Neon museum, along the river and many places in between.

Warsaw is a messy bedroom when it comes to architectural styles, there’s a bit of everything scattered around. From the Stalinist wonder of the Palace of Culture and Science, where a New York skyscraper may well have flown into the centre of the city, to the other major communist gem, Constitution Square, Warsaw announces itself as somewhere important. Constitution square is a slice of socialist realist architecture that really captures a moment in time, when the Soviet Union could do anything in its imagination, if not in reality. The square is surrounded by grand blocks that gracefully echo the strengths of the union, sculptures of heroic workers adorn the sides of buildings in a celebration of soviet myth. An updated version might show a bored woman giving you change at a supermarket, but it would somehow lack the power required to carry everyone forward into the light. On the square are three glorious oversized lamps that add a touch of brute elegance. This architecture of power is always fascinating to see, and there’s some irony in the enormous Samsung illuminated logo on the top of one of the buildings, bringing brazen capitalism into view. The square and immediate surrounding remind me of Karl-Marx Allee in Berlin, but more glitzy.

Constitution Square

If I was to think of glitz and Warsaw, I would be drawn to the biggest building in the country, the eighth biggest building in the EU and a testament to the ways the USSR would wield their power. The Palace of Culture and Industry. Back in 1950’s Warsaw, Stalin was keen to offer Poland a gift. With Warsaw in ruins, you might think a hospital, a university or even somewhere for people to sleep might be a good gift, but as our tour guide said, when Stalin asks if you want something, there is only one answer. It was constructed in three years and in making it, 16 people died, which we were told was pretty good going for the 1950s. A sobering thought for the pointless 2022 Qatar world cup is that over 1,200 have died to make their vanity project. The rush to build the Palace was intense, and construction went on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A benefit of having no neighbours, I suppose. It is, I’m sure, a symbol of the evil of Stalin but the Palace is a marvel and we had a commanding view of it from our rooms in the Intercontinental hotel. Never having to live through communism, I can appreciate the structure, without having to worry about the morals of it.

The building today is a genuine people’s palace, unlike in the days of Stalin where only members of the communist party could attend events, by invitation. It is rumoured that new year’s parties here went on for four days. Keeping that spirit of booziness alive, in 2012, I heard that Roman Abramovich hired a hall in the Palace for Euro 2012 and turned it into a strip club. Today it holds a cinema, four theatres, two museums, a bookshop, a swimming pool and a viewing platform on the 30th floor. You can also go on fascinating guided tours of the building, some taking you down to the basement to see the antiquated machinery and up to the viewing platform.

The Palace of Culture and Industry!

The history of Warsaw’s near-total destruction is covered in forensic detailed in the Warsaw Rising museum. By January 1945, 85% of Warsaw’s buildings were destroyed, with an estimated 40% of the city levelled by the Germans once the uprising was over, with the population gone aside from a thousand people hiding in the rubble. Germans went around the city with flamethrowers and explosives to gut every building they could, focusing on anything of historical value or national pride, with the aim of reducing Warsaw to nothing more than a military transit point. The biggest building in the old town is the Royal Palace, which Hitler wanted destroyed as early as 1939. During the war, the Nazis conducted aerial bombardments of the palace, removed precious artefacts, tore off the roofing to quicken the building’s demise and in 1944 they spent six days blowing it up. All that remained was two small fragments of wall. Today it stands as the focal point of the reconstructed city and is an attraction worth visiting to understand the history of the building, a fascinating microcosm of Poland’s ups and downs over hundreds of years. One room, the Knight’s Hall, was removed and transported to Russia in 1832 and returned to Poland in 1922. It survived the onslaught of 1939, was removed again by the Germans and only returned to the castle in 1984. This is just one of many original fragments of the Royal Palace that through chance, brave Polish workers spiriting away contents in secrecy and the evil efficiency of the Nazis, managed to survive. The Knight’s Hall is a true gem, with a glorious wooden floor, busts, opulent chandeliers and more.

The Knight’s Hall

Similarly, the Conference Room survived by workers managing to remove many features of the room in 1939, including a chimney piece, wall murals, portraits and even a floor made from thirteen types of wood. In our minds, perhaps a war seems very immediate, but history shows it to be something very different, where people don’t flee their cities but do their best to stall the senseless damage. The reconstruction of pre-war Warsaw was partly down to the work of Canaletto, who was commissioned to paint twenty-two street scenes of Warsaw. These paintings, like much in the city, was first nabbed by the Russians, then by the Germans, and they somehow all survived the turmoil, now sitting in one place in the Royal Castle. We visited the Castle on a Sunday, when it is free to visitors.

The old town is so remarkable, it’s hard to take it all in. You see what looks like a fairly standard eastern European old town; buildings painted many beautiful shades of green, peach, yellow, crooked rooflines, enchanting views from all angles. But it’s all of 60 years old, if that. The reconstruction of the city is a glorious act of defiance that stands at odds with how Britain rebuilt after the war, in a festival of concrete and ring roads.

All of this, about 60 years old!

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is a spectacular building, designed by Finnish architects and every bit as adventurous as that would suggest; the exterior is relatively square in shape making the interior’s grand curved entrance even more startling. The building opens up to represent a parting of the seas and is lit from above allowing shadows and shapes to dance over the sprayed-concrete interior. Shapes are everywhere, from the spiral staircases to the slanted doorways. The main exhibition space is below ground and traces the history of the Jews in Poland since the middle ages and it would be fair to say that squabbles and power play have been a constant between the Jews and the Polish, with both sides enacting petty rules against the other whenever it suits. As we travel through history and edge towards the Holocaust, the space feels more oppressive as you get closer to the second world war and the tone is more frantic as history takes one of its bleakest turns. It is important to note that the Holocaust is just one aspect of the museum and the story ends in the modern world, reminding us that Jewish history did not end in the 1940s.

The Museum of Polish Jewish

A much smaller museum is the Museum of Life under Communism, which squeezes hundreds of artefacts, photos and tat into a few rooms that imitate a home in communist times. A cheesy record plays on an old record player, with the staff coming along to start it up again. Every room has information in English to tell you about the great time-saving abilities of the commie kitchen – stuff that Westerners will probably look at half in interest and half in amusement, but across the homes of many millions of people would be the same sort of products and the museum is a great time capsule. The house was stacked with Zenit cameras with old film stock, cleaning equipment called Prozek and Wedel Chocolate. Wedel is an interesting company; in the war, the company refused to collaborate with the Nazis and so they were persecuted, with their factory being destroyed in the uprising. Afterwards, the company made attempts to get back on its feet when the communists nationalised it. Since then, it’s been owned by a bunch of global names and now one of Poland’s best- known brands is owned by a Japanese-Korean conglomerate. A history lesson in a bite of chocolate.

A few minutes’ walk more and you’ll find the Neon museum, a celebration of liquefied air that when illuminated, makes everything look immediately cooler. Discovered by Brits, but finessed by the Polish, the neon museum has a heap of Warsaw’s old neon signs that adorned the buildings of the city during the Cold War. Some of the pieces include depictions of bikes zooming off, milkshakes, flowers bursting with colour and the symbol of Warsaw, a Mermaid. The museum also restores iconic neon in their original locations, and it looks like the museum’s work has made Warsaw reminisce for the illumination of old because the city crackles with the sound of neon on many shopfronts.

If the weather’s good, head to the University of Warsaw garden, a huge green space around the university and on top of it. The gardens are separated into two sections; the lower gardens with a pond, many spaces to sit and sculptures by Ryszard Stryjecki. The upper garden is even more impressive as it covers the roof of the university building, with four areas full of paths and differing plants and trees. The views of the riverside and the city centre are remarkable, with clusters of skyscrapers here and there and the familiar outline of the Palace of Culture and Industry dominating.

In the breaks between history and culture, a drink is always welcome and you can’t go wrong if you head to the bars of Pawilony, the cluster of little bars tucked away behind a gate at 22 Nowy Świat. Despite it not being announced by any signs, beyond the gate is pivo enough for everyone. The atmosphere is relaxed yet busy, the clientele a mix of young and older and choosing somewhere to go is really just a lucky dip. As we left the bars, a stag-do came along, singing their songs of fighting and so on. Actually, we had no idea what they were singing but the guttural chanting didn’t sound sweet in nature.

For food, Warsaw packs so much on your plate that you’re going to need elasticated trousers for a few weeks afterwards but it’ll be worth it. A new food outlet is Hala Koszyki, a gorgeously renovated market hall transformed into a grand food hall with tiny bistros nuzzling up to food stands and restaurants. Finding a table was hard to do, so you might find that you eat wherever you can, rather than where you want. Spend some time here checking out the lighting which is an artwork in itself. Just looking around the market is entertainment enough. We had a great brunch at Sam, which sprung up in 2012 and has a deli, bakery, bar, and food through the day. They bring you many, many menus that offer you all sorts of food options, so you can even bring along your fussiest. I’ve noticed this in Poland; some menus will have little arrows telling you that chia seeds are “blah blah good for you” and the omega 3 is “blah blah whatever it does” and that the meat is from some special Polish place with the eggs being from blessed chickens. Menus are turning into little booklets on nutrition and I swear it worked its magic on me when I ordered Shakshuka, which is full of “blah blah all good eggy things”.

We had dinner at Stary Dom, inside an unprepossessing façade a tram ride outside town. The interior is high on rustic charms, with a wooden vaulted ceiling, lots of pictures of old people and generous sized tables with room for all the food and drink you’ll order. It’s genuinely nice to go to a restaurant and have space. It’s not all that fun doing Tetris with your pierogi. Our waiter had a good sense of humour and coerced us into downing shots of the strongest vodka known to man. Clever man. To balance out new Warsaw and old Warsaw, we visited a milk bar. For the uninitiated, a milk bar is a communist-era cheap cafeteria serving up dairy-based food, so expect mashed potato with everything. We visited Bar Sady, where the interior seems little changed from communist times and it’s all the better for it. The extensive menu offers Polish staples like soup, meat and veg with sides of cabbage. I had a mushroom soup with pasta in it, breaded chicken cutlet with potato and red cabbage. The entire meal with a soft drink cost under £5.

Warsaw has many great bakeries, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll stumble over one but here are my highlights. For pastry needs, there’s Vincent where I had an orange croissant. For beautifully structured cakes you can head to Lukullus or Odette but be warned that you’ll not want to eat it because it’s like a work of art. Then you’ll eat it and just buy more.

I went to Warsaw expecting something altogether more grim; after all, I was told it was an “interesting” city with rough edges. Seeing Warsaw in excellent spring weather was a genuine delight. The city might not appeal to those looking for something like Prague, but it has a real depth of character that gives the city a sparky personality. Resilience turned Warsaw from a charred wreck into what it is today, and that’s a thoroughly enjoyable destination I’ll want to visit again.

Many of the photos courtesy of my friend Rokos who has an eye for detail and a head full of 80s pop tunes.

Skåne – It’s Swedish for beautiful

Skåne, pronounced like this, is the most southerly county in Sweden and stretches from Malmo in the West to Simrishamn in the West. Absolut Vodka lives in Åhus where you can tour the factory for free, and the region is one of the richest areas of farmland in Sweden so is famed for its food scene. The endless flat fields, calm orchards, green landscape and beautiful coastline led me to put Skåne on my to-visit list a long while back but Sweden’s biggest-ever selling TV show The Bridge as well as Wallander have put Skåne on the global map, but for different reasons. Where Wallander revelled in the beauty of the region, The Bridge was much more gritty, with little need for gently waving fields of rape. If anything, this photo from the BBC Wallander could neatly sum up why I wanted to visit.

Ystad

The bright colours and endless blue skies look so inviting, even grumpy Kenneth Branagh couldn’t deter me from wanting to see it. After Wallander’s Ystad charmed everyone senseless, visits by British tourists increased by nearly 20% so I’m far from alone in wanting a slice of Swedish life. From spending two days in Copenhagen where flights are far cheaper than to Malmo, we took a train to Ystad. Our accommodation was Our House, a fifteen minute walk from the centre of town. It’s a great choice in a quiet location – the rooms are well sized and spotlessly clean with our shared bathroom being shared by just us and our travelling partner. Breakfast in the morning allowed me to go overboard on eggs and coffee.

Just twenty minutes stroll away was the sea – when we went in late May it was empty but I doubt it’s ever overcrowded – and the Ystad Saltsjöbad Spa hotel and fantastic restaurant. We ate in the smaller, American-themed diner called Vitas and the burger was so good it destroyed my strong belief that you can’t get a good burger outside of London. Perhaps I’m unfair as it was Bristol that let me down with the world’s grimmest burger or as it should be called, a rubberised disc of meat. Bread and butter accompanied the food and it was a novel touch to have the bread skewered on a spike. While the cocktail cost upwards of £10, it was worth every kroner. With the choice to sit in the gorgeous bar or out on the terrace hearing the water lap against the shore, you can’t go wrong.

For our other meals, we weren’t so lucky, mostly because we were stuck with the notion that eating past 9pm is a thing. I can tell you, it’s generally not a thing in Ystad, even less so on a Sunday night. At Broderma M we ate pizzas from the posher end of the menu, but the service remained indifferent. When I asked a waitress if she had any local beers she flatly said “no” and poked her finger at the menu. Huh. But it was fine and stopped us from starving to death. It also had the bonus of having some genuinely hideous furniture that seemed like a hipster attempt gone horribly wrong. A real gem of a cafe was Soderberg and Sara, near Ystad train station. The cinnamon bun was outstanding, but even better was the cardamom bun which could only be described as life-changing. With this king of buns came a fantastic flat white. I was in paradise.

Ystad is a very pretty town that doesn’t need to have any outstanding features to make a visit worthwhile. Simply being in Skåne itself is treat enough, but the town and surrounding area offer plenty of attractions. If you’re a fan of Wallander, there’s the film museum and guided tours as well as this website of locations used in the films.

Tim models the hell-chair range

Around Ystad

Forty minutes along the coast is Sandhammeren with beautiful white sand. Some say this is Sweden’s finest beach and pictures from there look more like a Caribbean coast than one facing the Baltic Sea.

Sandhammeren Beach

We headed to Simrishamn on a grey day to pick up bikes and cycle around the coast and orchards. The first cycle place was closed but luckily Hotell Turistgården had plenty of ladies bikes with baskets we could use. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I loved that basket and the staff made hiring the bikes the easiest experience possible. No booking fee and a fee of 130 kroner per day (about £11) is a very fine deal. We headed north of Simrishamn towards the coast and found a stunning spot about 3km from the Hotel. The beach was completely empty, the sand soft and bright yellow, the waters freezing but intensely blue. I’d happily have spent the day here if time had allowed. Here’s our journey to the beach:

Sweden is home to some of the most peaceful moments of my existence, and this beach was no exception. Lying on the sand, looking up at the big sky I was getting into the relaxed state that almost always leads to falling asleep. Once I slept through a ferry dropping passengers off on a small island and setting off again.This time, I managed to move from the beach to the rocky outcrop round the corner where I spotted some picturesque boats and a deserted house.

After about 90 minutes of lazing about, we headed further north. I imagined that Vik would have a cosy cafe so we cycled onwards with grumbling tummies to find Vik was a beautiful village lacking any food whatsoever. As luck would have it, about half a mile north of Vik is the Österlens Golfklubb with a glorious cafe. Ok, I had half a pint, a banana and a cinnamon bun but it beat eating sand. The cafe served sandwiches but despite my numerous trips to Sweden, no sandwich sandwich with mustard, cheese or fish in is getting past my lips. Which is most sandwiches.

We took a more taxing route to Simrishamn, via back roads to Gladsax and onwards to the Hotel. Away from the coast, we were in a world of trees, open fields and the occasional tractor spraying muck on the fields. Yet again, the variety of the countryside in Sweden reminded me why my love affair with the place doesn’t weaken over time. I don’t think it’s possible to have a bad trip in Sweden.

Skåne is an ideal place for a short break, easily accessible from Copenhagen, one of Europe’s finest capitals and just 40 minutes from Malmo. It offers a different taste of life to what you might know from Stockholm or Gothenburg where the pace is slower but the pleasures of life are savoured. A long lunch, a brisk walk, idling on the beach are all enhanced by the natural beauty of the area.

wobblelikejelly |Photos of the year

It is to my eternal regret that I don’t get enough photos printed – it’s obvious that photos look better in tangible form. In the absence of real photos, a gallery of my favourite photos from 2014 will suffice for now. It’s been a good year, with plenty to see and do. Enjoy!

Brussels is easily one of my favourite cities and having been there four times, it is somewhere I feel very comfortable in. If someone who hasn’t bothered to visit Brussels tells you it’s boring, just come to me and I’ll bore you senseless with Brussels love. Grand Place at night looks like nothing else, and with new lighting installed, everything looks more sensational than ever.

Norwich is somewhere I raved about back in February and rightly so. It is quite simply a great city in its own right. It is remote enough from other big cities to have to bow to anyone and it’s all the better for it. I was especially “omgomgomgomg” about the John Lewis building and my trip seemed to focus on the architectural gems of Norwich. Go!

This year I went to Paris for the third time, but every visit feels different from the last. This time the weather treated us to a carefree April trip full of rests in parks and a daily mojito. I fell in love all over again and our trip up Tour Montparnasse gave us the added bonus of not being able to see it ruin the skyline.

Liverpool, what a swell place! As I left Liverpool after a fantastic day of sight-seeing, I regretted deeply that I never went to university there. I doubt I’d have ever left. The cathedral was an absolute highlight for me and I’m keen on going back and just gazing lovingly at it.

Bosnia and Croatia made up my summer holiday destinations this year, and despite being mistaken for a drugs traffiker (I’m usually mistaken for Harry Potter) sitting on a coach which was vaguely on fire for 8 hours, almost throwing up every time I went near the harbour in Split, I loved it all. Mostar and Sarajevo hugely appealed to me, even if the cities made me think seriously about the evil that humans can do to one another. Croatia had gems in the form of Zadar and Plitvice Lakes, with Zagreb offering a vibrant capital city experience.

Sarajevo Town Hall

Mostar

Beautiful Mostar

Zadar’s superb waterfront

Plitvice Lakes

Zagreb

If you were to sum up the holidays I have been going on on the past few years, you will keep coming back to Spain and Scandinavia – and rightly so! God damn, I love them both so much. This year I went with my friend Rokos to Andalucia and saw some sensational places, from the gobsmackingly gorgeous Ronda to the incomparable Alhambra in Granada. Cordoba had the Mezquita and a charming city to boot and Seville was just a knockout place for food, drink, sights and the shock of 35c weather in late October.

Seville

Ronda

Cordoba

Seville – Alcazar

Alhambra – Granada

Eleven reasons to go to Trondheim

In September 2013 I wrote about my love for Scandinavia and highlighted my seven wonderful trips there. Since then I’ve been back to Norway twice and remain deeply in love with the region. The beauty doesn’t get old, the people always seem at peace and a night out in Trondheim is never going to end at a kebab van fighting a guy who thought you were checking out his troglodyte lover. Generalisations aside, Norway and Scandinavia in general doesn’t have the of menace my high street has and every time I visit, I don’t fancy coming back to the UK.

For my 9th trip, I visited Dave from Life in Norway in Trondheim to see the area a little better and I’ve come away with a firm impression that this is a city with a great deal to offer, one where I could imagine being very happy. Here’s eleven happy reasons why you should visit…

Reason 1: Getting a direct flight Trondheim is hassle free from London Gatwick; for under £90 you can get a return on one of Norwegian’s shiny new planes with intermittent wi-fi on board.

Reason 2: The cosiest pub with the best terrace, is right in the centre. Den Gode Nabo is a wonderful pub right by the Old Town Bridge where Dave gasped at the price of a pint of Dahls being 60kr, about £6. For Norway, it’s about as cheap as you’re likely to find and it’s a good pint, too. The outdoor terrace floats on the river and gives beautiful views down the river.

Reason 3: The Nidaros Cathedral. It’s one of those places that seems to be super important without anyone ever having heard of it. But…it’s the most northernmost medieval cathedral in the world, the most important cathedral in the country and parts of the Cathedral have been modelled on Lincoln cathedral. We took the tour of the Cathedral and found it informative without actually focusing on the religious stuff. Phew. The most eye-opening fact was that sections of the Cathedral were used as stables for hundreds of years – but to find out why you’d need to visit.

Reason 4: The cafe at the contemporary art gallery. Trondhjems Kunstforening is a modern art gallery I didn’t manage to visit but I did manage to have the same salad, exactly a year apart. On both occasions, the salad was a highlight of my year. Enormous and so so fresh, this is the salad of the kings.

Reason 5: Trondheim Microbrewery. Aha! Just my sort of place. The website might not have an English translation, but beer is a universal language. The IPA is good, and from trying a bit of all the different drinks we tried, I can vouch that this is a good place to hang out. As ever, it’s relaxed, people are drinking for pleasure rather than as a sort of bloodsport (at these prices, etc…) and the music isn’t ramped up to the point where you might as well forget ever talking to your friends again.

Reason 6: Solsiden. This area is primarily a shopping centre, but it’s wonderfully landscaped and being by the water is fantastic in the sun. There are remnants of Trondheim’s industrial heritage scattered around and there are of course, many restaurants to throw your money at. Which leads me to number 7…

Reason 7: A reasonably priced Chinese restaurant in Trondheim! Shanghai Restaurant, on the banks of the river at 21 Kjøpmannsgata, offers large, tasty meals for about £13 with beers around the £6.50 mark. I ordered the pepper beef which came with a ton of rice. Even when my fellow diners were nibbling at my meal, we couldn’t finish it.

Reason 8: Rockheim! One thing I really like about Norway is that each city feels important in some way. Trondheim doesn’t feel like some provincial city and giving it the national museum of Norwegian pop and rock music sets that tone. Rockheim is as about as fun an afternoon as you can have for £10. Interactivity is the key here and if you ever come across my song – mostly me saying “Lindaaaa” like Jill does in Nighty Night over some confusing drums, feel free to draw up the record contract. It turns out I am not a talented guitarist, but I can dress boys up to look real pretty.

The building is fantastic, the exhibits are much more interesting than you would expect and the views from the top floor are superb. Rockheim is how all museums should be!

Reason 9: Trondheim’s ‘alternative district’. Ok, it’s small but it’s cute and as you’ll walk past it if you go to Reason 10, there’s nothing to lose. As Dave writes here, the bar called Ramp is where hipsters can go and be tattooed and beardy, free from the daily oppression they never face. Actually, I wonder if a hipster in Trondheim would wear one yellow and one pink Converse like one I recently saw in Tesco metro in Walthamstow? Around the area is a brilliant installation made of…bits of old plastic I suppose. Check it out:

More information on the district is here.

Reason 10: Ladestien, the trail leading past the Lade peninsula is a great walk that starts with the fantastic megasized megaphone that the University of Science and Technology gifted to the city. I had hoped I could play a tune down it and the city would be treated to some Lana Del Ray, but that utterly failed. However, it is huge and is fun to play with.

The walk leads on to the usual Norwegian trio of big sky/water/trees, always leading me to feel so comforted and calm. Damn you Norway, you’ve got it going on. Along the way is a piano high above the path that is terribly out of tune, for my ability at the piano is legendary. Who would take a piano, carry it about fifty feet up a hill? A cool Norwegian, that’s who. Carry on along the water and you’ll reach a beach area where Ben, my friend on the trip with me, dived into the water immediately. I was avoiding this crazy behaviour and ate my sandwich on a picnic table. It rained, then it stopped, then it rained again.

Reason 11: Let’s hike in the hills, people! My, don’t the Scandi folk just love the open air? I was becoming one of those people when I lived in Devon. Weekends of bliss on Dartmoor – piercing cold, windswept afternoons…none of it mattered because Dartmoor is Dartmoor. Now I live in London, the first spot of rain sees me scurrying into a cafe in case I get a chill. But seriously, the weather we had in Trondheim was so pleasant, the walk around Bymarka was just the ticket. It’s a massive city forest with hundreds of kilometers of marked trails and once you get beyond the initial throng of people, you can find yourself alone in the open space. The big skies of Scandinavia really appeal to me; I feel smaller but more free and there’s something beautiful about being part of nature, picking berries and letting all thoughts slip right out of your brain. From the city centre, we took bus no. 10 right to the forest and walked a route marked as 5km, but with our meanderings, selfies and diversions, it was more like 8km. We walked to the tram stop at Lian where we took the tram back into town. The walk had us gasping for a beer back at Reason 2.

170,000 people call Trondheim home, and I bet every one of them is content to be there. It’s a real charmer of a town, in a country I adore going to. But there’s so much more to Norway for me to see, as Dave loves to point out. There’s Tromsø, there’s Flåm, there’s the Lofoten islands. Until next time!

Zagreb

Zagreb is an intriguing holiday destination which maybe suffers from some sort of unjust curse. So, in the interests of research, go and ask 10 people what the capital of Croatia is and see if they answer correctly. My money is that they’ll look blankly, scratch their heads for a while and say it’s Split, it’s by the sea or “god, I dunno, I’m not wonderwoman” and storm off into the night. It’s a bit like trying to differentiate between Slovakia and Slovenia’s capitals, but fear not as I’ve a handy way of knowing the difference between the two. Slovakia’s capital, Bratislava is boring and Slovenia’s, Ljubljana is really pretty but you can’t spell it.

Kino Europa bar

To put Zagreb’s tourism draw into perspective, Zagreb had 2.3 million passengers in 2013 for a city of 700,000 people. Dubrovnik airport had 1.4 passengers in 2013 for a city of under 50,000 people. And yet, Zagreb is a real delight of a city to visit. It might lack the stunning city walls of Dubrovnik or the beautiful (though when I was there, smelly) waterfront of Split but it has a spirit and vibrancy I found lacking elsewhere, though surely this is because real people live there, people who inhabit the city and aren’t all Brits abroad. It was in Zagreb that I found a bar with a great terrace, The Beertija, that sold a huge variety of beers, but sadly not the Bosniak beer I was after which was even advertised outside. In my head, when the waiter suggested I try a “really nice Croatian beer” I archly replied, “if you can find a nice Croatian beer, I’ll happily have it”. My internal chuckles turned sour when he returned with a really nice Croatian beer. To finish our evening, we had a drink at the bar of Kino Europa, something akin to a Picturehouse in the UK. Definitely worth a trip to see if any decent arthouse films are playing.

Zagreb feels different to the rest of Croatia in that a number of trendy London-style places appear to be popping up all over the place. Inevitably, they’re full of the cool kids and we found ourselves roaming the city for a suitable place for dinner. Lari and Penati was completely booked up and the crowd was, in Lonely Planetese, a bunch of 20-something hipsters looking for the coolest spot in town. It was a shame it was full as it did look excellent. After a while, we happened upon Mundoaka Streetfood which succeeded in being warm, welcoming and on the right side of hipster. I opted for the pork, heavily doused in soy sauce and bursting with flavour while my fellow traveler Ryan opted for the chicken with a harissa sauce. His meal won hands down and if I mentioned that Croatian food hadn’t made much of a mark before, this time it really impressed. Olive oil in test tubes is a cute touch, as well as being practical.

Zagreb is a city for walking, with a series of parks dotted around the streets making it a green and open place to be. The outdoor cafe culture is superb, and even if you’ve just had your 15th coffee of the day and the caffeine in your system could power a village, every cafe seems inviting…it would be far too easy and pleasant to while the day away going from sight to cafe to sight to park. The botanical gardens are free and offer shade from the sun and a place to snooze. An excellent breakfast is to be had at KavaTava on Britanski trg (the most Zagrebian of all Zagreb sqaures, apparently) where I had weiner, fried eggs and salad. The pancakes and puddings looked awesome but I had to save myself for ice-cream later on. We found good ice cream at Vincek where I had a peculiar mixture of Snickers and rum punch scoops.

In the upper town, there’s a Museum of Broken relationships which is as funny as it is poignant; all the items on display are sent in by members of the public and while some are petty – a toaster being taken so the guilty lover can’t make toast – some are heartbreaking like a mother’s suicide letter. A walk around this area brings you to St Mark’s Church with the best roof in all the country; the coat of arms of Zagreb and other national symbols.

For a couple of days in a relaxed and buzzing city, Zagreb’s got it all. As a bonus, it’s not far by coach from Plitvice Lakes. Next time someone tells you that Dubrovnik is “simply a must”, think about heading to the north of Croatia where there’s plenty of fun to be had.

Plitvice Lakes national park

After a “beach day” in Zadar, where the weather was grey, the beach was a heap of rocks and the water was not in any way inviting, we fled to Plitvice Lakes. Partway through the journey to the coach station the weather went all apocalyptic and at the moment it’d be ideal for our driver to concentrate on not killing us, he decided to spend ages trying to find out the Kuna to Euro exchange rate, which I already knew. Luckily he didn’t kill us and proved himself to be awesome by parking his car in a bay at the coach station so we didn’t get soaked. En route to Plitvice, our coach stopped at the traditional money pit (the coach toilets never, ever worked so people used the pit stop loos and ended up spending money) and this one was full of stuffed animals which made me feel queasy. Eww.

As we approached Plitvice, the scenery became progressively more like a painting but I was so tried from a wild night watching Ab Fab on YouTube I couldn’t help falling asleep every few minutes so went through a cycle of going “wow, I need to get my camera outzzzzz” and knocking my head against the window, my party trick when asleep on transport.

Arriving at Bellevue Hotel, a few minutes walk from where the coach dropped us off, I was struck by how this hotel clearly modelled itself on The Overlook in The Shining. For one of Croatia’s biggest attractions, the hotel was eerily empty and it became clear that the complex of hotels and restaurants in Plitvice Lakes was in a 1970s, communist timewarp. So far, so good.

Then the rains came again – with a ferocity that made leaving the hotel completely impossible. It felt like that episode of Father Ted, where they look at the brochure of their location, find there is a road and a tree stump to look so resort to turning the kettle on and off endlessly.

Eventually, we took the plunge amid thunderstorms which sounded like jet fighters overhead and set out. And it was intensely beautiful. After a few hours in which being drenched became bearable and walking inches from waterfalls actually warmed us up, the weather lifted and we were gifted glimpses of sunlight. The change of weather transformed the landscape once again. Plitvice ranks alongside my evening with the midnight sun in Sweden, Jordan’s Wadi Rum and Petra and the train journey between Oslo and Bergen as the most beatiful places I’ve ever been.

Clock on the images to increase their size.

: Plitvice Lakes

Zadar

Quite simply, Zadar is a delight of a city. Within moments of leaving our great apartment, Villa Lipa, we saw a beautiful sunset which leads me to fact of the day… Alfred Hitchcock off of the movies thought Zadar sunsets to be amongst the most beautiful he’d ever seen. Having seen the midnight sun in Lapland I’d have to disagree, but it was a stunning sunset all the same. After admiring the sun and the water, we took the ferry boat across the water to the old town and headed straight for the two pieces of public art that make Zadar stand out.

The sea organ uses a series of pipes under the steps by the sea and water flows into it, generating a soothing sound. The second piece is the greeting to the sun which uses very whizzy technology but in simple terms it uses solar panels to create a stunning light show in the evening.

The old city itself is charming, scattering Roman ruins among a smart clutch of modern buildings and beautiful churches. Zadar felt more like the real Croatia, it didn’t seem to be loaded with day trippers and people were enjoying the balmy evening. We headed to Fosa for food as I was craving fish (but also fearful of shells, heads and tentacles) and to my delight the gratinated fish of the day was fillet of sea bass. And it was sensational. Croatia had not impressed me with good up to this point, I suspected someone had decided that if all flavours were turned down, all tourists could enjoy it. Fosa had ignored this and if it wasn’t for the racist Aussie sitting on the table next to us, it would have been a perfect meal.

To finish our night off, we wandered the alleys of Zadar, finding it to be the most prosperous-feeling city we’d been to and the most livable. Back at our brilliant apartment, we sat outside on the terrace until the mosquito attacks became unbearable.

Split, featuring words!

As someone who prides themselves on going to more obscure holiday destinations than most, Croatia, with its stunning coast and effervescent waters doesn’t seem terribly daring. So far on this trip , Dubrovnik was glorious but overrun with tourists, Mostar was touristy in a few central streets and Sarajevo ticked all the boxes for me. Split, as alluded to last time was beautiful but also a tad dull. It’s hard to criticise though as Split doesn’t oversell itself. The location is superb, the food is generally good and Diolclectians palace is one of a kind.

Entering Split at the main bus station from Sarajevo was a joyful and emotional moment. During the hellish 8 hour journey, ws spent about 2 hours or more subjected to acrid fumes coming from the engine as it slowly bus surely smoked from the *some sort of machinery* making us all very faint and suggestible to the advances of our amorous drivers.

Seeing the glittering sea and bidding farewell to the hateful bus made me feel very warm towards Split for about 10 minutes until the egregious wealth on display made me feel a bit like singing songs from the old days of socialism. Only, I don’t know any. The endless yachts along the harbour were gaudy as can be and I longed to see an old woman who had lived her life in Split carry groceries back from the market. The tourist miracle of Croatia makes this ordinary sight seem almost a miracle in itself.

For our first afternoon we are at the superb Galija for pizza, just outside of the old town. We were so content with the ffood, ambience and terrace looking out onto the street that we stayed for a few beers, enjoying the weather. After this we nosed around the palace, watched real pretend Romans do dress up to huge crowds before we checked out bars further down the coast. The unfortunate thing about the coastal bars away from the central walk is that they’re all owned by the same company and are all decked out similarly. It’s like an episode of Scooby Doo backgrounds and they’re all full.

The next day saw us get up around midday and attempt to get breakfast. One place, Bepa!, did all day breakfasts and it was all style and no substance. They handed out iPads for ordering, but failed to put a teabag in the tea, gave us everything in disposable form with hilarious paper forks and Lee’s chicken came armed with gristle. our omelette, tasty as it was, was really toast with scrambled egg and ham on top. It felt like a food place run by a committee of young people in tight tops. After this we headed back into the palace and found a real gem of a bar, Marcvs Marvlvs, on Papaliceva. It’s a library/bar and when you get your bill, it comes inside a book. It works because it’s the opposite of most bars in Split. In total, I went there three times and only when it attempted an Irish night in aid of Calcutta (you just put on a Guinness t-shirt and put on Irish fm), did I suspect it might have already jumped the shark.

In terms of beaches, Split isn’t gifted with them from what I could gather… Or we went to the wrong one just outside Marjan park. Here, the beach was completely rammed to the point that people were lying on beach towels on the car park floor and when a slice of “beach” was available it was akin to a construction sites, so rocky it was.

Overall, Split was a mixture of brilliant and not so brilliant. I’m a fussy bugger so Sarajevo is the type of place that’ll grab my interest because it doesn’t immediately grab you with beauty like Split does. My next adventure is to Zadar, with the unique sea organ. I’ve a good feeling about that city.

Sarajevo

Sarajevo has a clever marketing phrase at the moment. One board declares the city is the “start of the 20th century” and the other board, at the Sarajevo tunnels museum, declares it’s where the “20th century ended” and in both cases we are reminded that in world events, Sarajevo has played a pivotal part in how Europe has been shaped, first allowing the first world war to come into being after Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and then being witness to post world War 2’s biggest atrocities. The story of Sarajevo is a fascinating and bittersweet one.

To try to unpack the history of Sarajevo into a blog post would inevitably fail to grasp the complexities, the backroom deals, the dictators and the internecine warfare that erupted not just in Bosnia but throughout the former Yugoslavia.

Unlike Mostar, merely looking at the city won’t tell you what happened as Sarajevo has had a lot of reconstruction money pumped into it, but two excellent museums told us a great deal about the war.

The History Museum, which looks closed, such disrepair it’s in, features an exhibition with artefacts from the time which will bring tears to your eyes. The aftermath of the market massacres the Serbians launched, the bloodstained blackboard showing where the teacher was struck by a shell, the decomposing body in sniper alley. Seeing the images taken two days and 15 years after the war show you how far the city has come. Afterwards, the cafe behind the museum is a great spot for people watching. You might see this beautiful Dog, who wagged not just his tail but his entire body.

The war tunnel museum offered a fascinating insight into the seige of Sarajevo and the way people tried to survive in a city surrounded by Serbian forces and living off ten UN aid planes of food a day. Our guide Adnan explained the situation with as much impartiality as he could muster but it would be so easy to hang on to resentment about the way your city was destroyed. It wasn’t just the infrastructure that were targeted, but the religious tolerance and love between different cultures was also fractured.

There’s a point as you walk down the main street of Sarajevo when you notice on the floor a sign saying goes this is the place where cultures meet, with an east and west sign. This is evident by the Austro-Hungarian architecture on one side and the oriental-style architecture on the other. Further emphasising the cultures was the single firework signaling the end of fasting for those adhering to Ramadan. Soon after, families and friends were feasting and we thought that Dulagina was a particularly good street for food and drink with Bahana and Zembilj restaurants boasting tasty food at incredible prices. The local wine went down way too quickly.

The old town, Baščaršija, offers a real change to the European feel of most of the city. In my mind, this makes Sarajevo stand alongside Tbilisi in Georgia as a city that feels genuinely different to the norm and it’s so much more exciting for it.

There is a predictably depressing communist sector of the city where concrete slabs reign supreme but the 1984 Olympic Park excels through still featuring the fantastic logo of the time. Thirty years on, that logo proudly covers all aspects of the park and is in my mind a symbol of the city. Sarajevo is partially frozen in time… The war stifled so much here that it’s almost obvious that the Olympics would still seem of something to be proud of. Remember, it was just over 7 years after this that Yugoslavia self destructed.

Having seen Mostar and Sarajevo, I
now want to see more of this fascinating country, not reflecting on the past but seeking out examples of how the country can move forwards. With an unemployment rate of 40% and a slowing of investment to repair and renew Bosnia, the future might be slow to come, but there are all the signs that it will get here and Bosnia will prove itself as a superb place to visit.

At the border, Croatian police came onto our sweltering bus that nearly exploded and took me and a friend off the bus and told us we were to have a drugs test. Honestly. Is that even legal? As I quivered, wondering what the hell I’d done to anger this copper, he toyed around with us, enjoying his power until he grew tired of us, much like a cat with a toy. Ahh. Holidays!

Images from Mostar

Day two in Mostar went by in a whirling dervish of sights. Actually, think the dervish thing is completely inaccurate but there’s a wonderful mixture of East and West here, from the mosques, calls to prayer and bazaar in the old town. Mostar is not ideal as a day trip as there’s so much you might miss. Here’s a few images from my second day in an unforgettable city.

It’s hard to comprehend how destroyed Mostar was, but even now the scars are still obvious. It doesn’t seem like it has been twenty years since the end of the war and there’s an air of progress having halted. Perhaps the recent recession had an impact, explaining the many half-completed building sites.

The Ottoman building of Muslibegovic House is definitely worth a visit, and it’s doable from the city centre.

We’re onto Sarajevo tomorrow and from what I’ve heard, it’s a city built on a human scale and is supposedly easy to traverse and enjoy. Looking forward to it!