Story#101
A night train to nowhere useful
The compartment had four bunks and five people, and the fifth was fine with the floor. Tea arrived in glasses with metal holders at six in the morning whether you were awake or not.
Travel stories, quotes and fun facts, part 2
30 stories, 50 fun facts, 20 quotes on this page. It covers Ukraine, Montenegro, Albania, Estonia, North Macedonia, Latvia and 38 other places. Page 2 of 10.
Page 2 of 10
30 stories, 50 fun facts, 20 quotes on this page. It covers Ukraine, Montenegro, Albania, Estonia, North Macedonia, Latvia and 38 other places. Page 2 of 10.
Countries on this page
Every country page collects its entries in one place, with a fact sheet and the guides for going there.
Entries on this page
Fun fact#102
Montenegro means black mountain
The country's name refers to the dark pine forests of Mount Lovcen, which appear almost black from the coast.
Quote#103
Live your life
Live your life, take chances, be crazy. Don't wait, because right now is the oldest you've ever been.
Fun fact#104
Albania once banned private cars
Private car ownership was effectively forbidden in Albania until 1991, so the country went from almost no cars to full traffic in a single decade.
Story#105
The bells of Tallinn
At Christmas the old town smells of almonds and every second doorway leads to a cellar bar. We got lost twice inside two hundred metres because every street looks like the postcard.
Fun fact#106
North Macedonia's lake is ancient
Lake Ohrid is among the oldest lakes on Earth, holding species found nowhere else after two to three million years of isolation.
Story#107
Art nouveau ceiling
I looked up at a stairwell ceiling in Riga and stayed looking for so long that a resident coming home stopped and looked up too, then said something in Latvian that clearly meant yes, it is good, isn't it.
Fun fact#108
Serbia gave the world vampire
The word vampire entered western European languages in the 18th century from Serbian folklore reports sent back by Habsburg officials.
Quote#109
Roads were made for journeys
Roads were made for journeys, not destinations.
Fun fact#110
Bulgaria grows rose oil
Bulgaria's Rose Valley supplies a large share of the world's rose oil, and it takes roughly 3,000 kilograms of petals to make one kilogram of oil.
Story#111
The republic of artists
Uzupis has a constitution on a wall in forty languages. One article says a dog has the right to be a dog. Another says everyone has the right to be unhappy. Both feel earned.
Fun fact#112
Romania has Europe's heaviest building
The Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest is the heaviest building on Earth, using around a million cubic metres of marble.
Quote#113
Better to see once
It is better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times.
Fun fact#114
Transylvania still has wild bears
The Carpathian Mountains hold one of Europe's largest brown bear populations outside Russia, along with lynx and wolves.
Story#115
Midnight football
The sun did not set. At half past midnight there was a full football match on the astroturf and a queue for the pitch afterwards. Nobody looked tired.
Fun fact#116
Moldova has a wine city underground
The Cricova cellars run for more than 100 kilometres of tunnels with street names, and visitors tour them by electric car.
Quote#117
The world is big
The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.
Fun fact#118
Ukraine's tunnel of love
A working freight train trims a leafy corridor near Klevan into a perfect green tunnel that has become a pilgrimage for couples.
Story#119
Waiting for the lights
Four nights of cloud, and on the fifth the sky opened for eleven minutes. Nobody in the cabin spoke. Afterwards a Danish couple opened a bottle of something and we drank it out of coffee cups.
Fun fact#120
Belarus keeps a primeval forest
This forest on the Polish border is the last large remnant of the woodland that once covered the European plain, home to wild European bison.
Story#121
Reindeer right of way
The road was blocked by forty reindeer moving at their own pace. The driver turned off the engine, poured coffee from a thermos, and said this was quicker than trying to hurry them.
Fun fact#122
Russia touches eleven time zones
A train from Moscow to Vladivostok crosses seven time zones, yet the whole Trans-Siberian timetable was long printed in Moscow time only.
Quote#123
The mountains are calling
The mountains are calling and I must go.
Fun fact#124
Lake Baikal holds a fifth of fresh water
Baikal contains roughly 20 percent of the planet's unfrozen fresh water and is deep enough to swallow several stacked skyscrapers.
Story#125
The rain in Galway
It rained horizontally. In the pub, a man told me there is no bad weather, only the wrong jacket, then bought me a pint because my jacket was clearly wrong.
Fun fact#126
Ireland has no snakes
Ireland genuinely has no native snakes, not because of St Patrick but because the island separated from Britain before snakes recolonised after the Ice Age.
Quote#127
In every walk with nature
In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.
Fun fact#128
The Cliffs of Moher face Atlantic storms
The Cliffs of Moher rise 214 metres at their highest point and take the full force of Atlantic swells that begin near Newfoundland.
Story#129
Sheep on the single track
Twelve passing places in three kilometres, and a sheep asleep in every one. The oncoming driver reversed a quarter of a mile with one hand on the wheel and did not stop talking on the phone.
Fun fact#130
Scotland has an official animal
Scotland's national animal is the unicorn, chosen in medieval heraldry as a symbol of purity and untamable strength.
Story#131
A castle with a kettle
The bothy had four walls, a fireplace, a visitors' book and no door key. Someone had left dry kindling and half a bag of coffee for whoever came next. We left tea and matches.
Fun fact#132
Edinburgh sits on a volcano
Edinburgh Castle stands on the plug of an extinct volcano, and Arthur's Seat in the city centre is another part of the same ancient system.
Quote#133
Climb the mountains
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
Fun fact#134
Wales has more sheep than people
Wales counts roughly three sheep for every resident, and its hill farms have shaped the landscape for over a thousand years.
Story#135
The bus that waited
We came down off the ridge nineteen minutes late and the last bus was still there. The driver had seen two head torches on the mountain and decided he was not leaving until they came down.
Fun fact#136
The longest place name is Welsh
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll and its full 58-letter version was reportedly extended in the 1860s by a local tailor to attract railway tourists.
Quote#137
Going out was going in
I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
Fun fact#138
London's Tube is the oldest
The Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863, making the London Underground the world's first urban underground railway.
Story#139
Sunday in Bloomsbury
Every museum was free and every cafe was full. We spent four hours in one room of the British Museum, ate a sandwich on the steps, and did not see the rest of the city at all.
Fun fact#140
Big Ben is the bell
Big Ben is the nickname of the great bell inside the tower. The tower itself was renamed Elizabeth Tower in 2012.
Story#141
Low tide at St Michael's
The causeway appeared out of the sea over about twenty minutes as if someone were slowly drawing it. Everyone stood at the edge with their shoes in their hands waiting for permission from the water.
Fun fact#142
Stonehenge stones travelled far
Some of Stonehenge's bluestones were transported roughly 250 kilometres from the Preseli Hills in Wales more than 4,000 years ago.
Quote#143
Not knowing where you're going
A good traveller does not know where he is going, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.
Fun fact#144
Bath's springs never cool
Around 1.1 million litres of 46-degree water rise through Bath's Roman baths every day, heated deep underground and falling as rain thousands of years ago.
Story#145
The Faroese fog
We drove through a tunnel and came out in a different weather system. The village on the other side had sun, sheep on the roofs, and a shop that sold both fishing tackle and cake.
Fun fact#146
Cornwall has its own language
Cornish died out as a community language in the 18th century and has since been revived, with road signs and schools bringing it back.
Quote#147
We travel to change
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.
Fun fact#148
Faroe Islands hire sheep as cameras
When Street View cars skipped the islands, locals strapped cameras to sheep and mapped the roads themselves in a campaign called Sheep View.
Story#149
A bear on the trail
The guide stopped, put a hand out flat, and we all stopped too. Two hundred metres up the slope a brown bear crossed without looking at us once. Nobody took a photograph until it was gone.
Fun fact#150
Greenland's ice is kilometres thick
The Greenland ice sheet averages about 1.5 kilometres thick and presses the island's bedrock down below sea level in places.
Fun fact#151
Andorra has no airport
Andorra has no airport or railway station. Everyone arrives by road through the Pyrenees, which is part of the charm.
Story#152
The stone that fit exactly
Our guide slid a bank card at a joint in the Inca wall and it would not enter. He did this for tourists twenty times a day, and it still made everyone go quiet.
Quote#153
Travel is more than seeing
Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.
Fun fact#154
Monaco is smaller than Central Park
Monaco covers about two square kilometres, and much of its newest land was reclaimed from the Mediterranean.
Story#155
Marrakech at first light
At six in the morning the Jemaa el-Fnaa is empty except for cats and a man sweeping. By nine it is a market, by seven a food court, by eleven a drum circle. Same square, four cities.
Fun fact#156
Gibraltar's runway crosses a road
Traffic on Winston Churchill Avenue stops every time a plane lands, because the road runs straight across the airport runway.
Fun fact#157
Turkey's underground city held thousands
Derinkuyu descends eighteen levels and could shelter around 20,000 people with livestock, wine presses and ventilation shafts.
Quote#158
Man cannot discover new oceans
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Story#159
The tea ritual
Three glasses: the first bitter as life, the second strong as love, the third gentle as death. Our host poured from a great height each time and would not let us leave until all three were drunk.
Fun fact#160
Istanbul spans two continents
Istanbul is the only major city built across two continents, with commuters crossing between Europe and Asia by ferry every morning.
Fun fact#161
Cappadocia's rock is soft enough to carve
Volcanic tuff in Cappadocia is soft when freshly cut and hardens in air, which is why entire churches and hotels are carved into the cliffs.
Story#162
Sand in everything
Two months after we came home I found Saharan sand in the spine of a paperback. It had crossed a continent inside a book and I could not bring myself to shake it out.
Quote#163
A ship in harbour
A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
Fun fact#164
Pamukkale means cotton castle
Calcium-rich hot springs have built white travertine terraces down the hillside at Pamukkale over thousands of years.
Story#165
Blue in every doorway
There are at least nine blues in one alley and the paint is refreshed by hand each spring. A woman repainting her step let me help for two minutes and then politely took the brush back.
Fun fact#166
Cyprus has a divided capital
Nicosia is the last divided capital in Europe, split by a buffer zone patrolled by United Nations peacekeepers since 1974.
Fun fact#167
Europe's oldest restaurant is in Madrid
Sobrino de Botin has served roast suckling pig continuously since 1725 and still uses its original wood-fired oven.
Quote#168
Throw off the bowlines
Throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Story#169
Bargaining badly
I accepted the second price and the seller looked genuinely disappointed. He explained that the negotiation was the point, poured tea, and gave me a better price than I would have got.
Fun fact#170
The Alps are still rising
The Alps grow roughly a millimetre or two a year as Africa pushes into Europe, though erosion removes almost as much.
Fun fact#171
The Danube passes ten countries
The Danube touches or crosses ten countries and four capital cities, more than any other river on Earth.
Story#172
The felucca captain's nap
The wind died and our captain tied off the sail, lay down on the deck, and slept for forty minutes. We drifted backwards. When he woke, the wind came back within five minutes as though he had ordered it.
Quote#173
Life is either a daring adventure
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.
Fun fact#174
Europe's largest canyon is in Crete
The Samaria Gorge runs sixteen kilometres to the Libyan Sea and narrows to just four metres at the famous Iron Gates.
Fun fact#175
The Camino has many starting points
There is no single Camino. Pilgrims walk from France, Portugal, Seville or their own front door, all converging on Santiago de Compostela.
Story#176
Sunrise on the Nile
Twenty balloons went up at once over the Valley of the Kings. From the ground it looked like the sky had been decorated. From the basket it was completely silent except for the burner.
Fun fact#177
Northern lights need dark and luck
Aurora hunting works best between September and March under clear skies far from town lights, and even then patience matters more than equipment.
Quote#178
The best view
The best view comes after the hardest climb.
Story#179
The bus with no timetable
The bus left when it was full and not before. Full meant something different than we expected. We made friends with everyone in three rows and arrived eleven hours later knowing four words of Amharic.
Fun fact#180
The midnight sun never sets
Above the Arctic Circle the sun stays above the horizon for weeks in summer, and locals often play football at two in the morning.
Fun fact#181
Hallstatt has a salt mine older than Rome
Salt has been mined at Hallstatt for around 7,000 years, and the world's oldest wooden staircase was found preserved in the shafts.
Story#182
Coffee three times
The ceremony took an hour: green beans roasted in the room, ground by hand, brewed and poured three times. Refusing the third round, we were told, is a small insult. We stayed.
Quote#183
Take only memories
Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time.
Fun fact#184
Sintra's palace has an inverted tower
Quinta da Regaleira hides an initiation well, a spiral staircase that descends 27 metres into the earth instead of rising.
Fun fact#185
Bruges froze its own skyline
Bruges lost its sea access when its channel silted up in the 1500s, and the resulting poverty accidentally preserved its medieval centre.
Story#186
Priests in the rock
A priest unlocked a church cut down into the ground and held up a cross older than most European cathedrals. Then he sat back down on a plastic chair and continued reading his phone.
Fun fact#187
Ghent banned cars from the centre
Ghent removed through traffic from its historic core, and shop revenue and cycling both rose in the years afterwards.
Quote#188
Leave no trace
Leave it better than you found it.
Fun fact#189
Tallinn's old town is nearly intact
Tallinn kept most of its medieval walls and 20 defensive towers, one of the best-preserved Hanseatic centres in northern Europe.
Story#190
The gorilla that walked past
We were told to stay seven metres away. Nobody told the silverback, who walked within an arm's length of my knee without breaking step. The guide's only instruction was to look at the ground.
Fun fact#191
Riga is an Art Nouveau museum
Around a third of central Riga's buildings are Art Nouveau, the densest concentration of the style anywhere in the world.
Story#192
Crossing the equator twice
The sign said equator and a man demonstrated water draining in opposite directions three metres apart. The physics was nonsense and the performance was excellent, and we tipped him anyway.
Fun fact#193
Vilnius has a self-declared republic
The artists' quarter of Uzupis declared independence in 1997 and has its own constitution, posted on a wall in dozens of languages.
Quote#194
We are all travellers
We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
Fun fact#195
Chernobyl became a wildlife refuge
Wolves, lynx and wild horses now thrive in the exclusion zone, where the absence of people outweighs the radiation for many species.
Story#196
The migration crossing
We waited five hours at the river. Then, with no signal we could detect, four thousand wildebeest decided at once and the water turned brown. It lasted eleven minutes.
Fun fact#197
The Faroes have grass roofs
Turf roofs insulate Faroese houses against Atlantic wind and rain, and sheep sometimes graze on them.
Quote#198
Little by little
Little by little, one travels far.
Fun fact#199
Svalbard stores the world's seeds
The Global Seed Vault inside an Arctic mountain holds over a million seed samples as a backup for the planet's food crops.
Story#200
Matatu music
Our matatu had a sound system worth more than the vehicle and a hand-painted portrait of a footballer on the back. The conductor hung out of the door collecting fares in traffic and never miscounted once.
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Your turn
Propose your travel story
The missed ferry. The stranger who handed over a key. The meal that ran until midnight. If something happened to you on the road and you still think about it, send it - a few sentences is plenty, and we do the tidying up.