Author: Stephan

With Bratislava being a scant one hour from Vienna, it’s a common day trip for visitors to the Austrian capital. We therefore decided to make an overnight stop in Slovakia’s capital, on the way to Budapest, to see what the … Read More

Back in Vietnam, we met Alena, a girl traveling on our bus out of Ho Chi Minh City who was from Austria but studying and traveling in Vietnam. After running into her again while wandering around in Da Lat one … Read More

Our late night arrival in Prague was made easier by our AirBnB host, who picks up her guests for free from the local train and bus stations. After arriving in a lot of cities and hauling bags on foot, or … Read More

Our arrival in Krakow was immediately greeted with evidence of the World Youth Day in progress. Thousands of people crowded bustling sidewalks, many wearing brightly hued backpacks in one of the primary colors, with the letters SDM (the abbreviation for … Read More

While visiting Khao Yai National Park in Thailand, we met a couple, Adam and Ania, with their two young daughters, from Warsaw. After randomly running into them again in a coastal town – a couple weeks later and several hundred … Read More

One of the highest items on my list of things to do during this trip was to visit one of the last swaths of primeval forest in Europe. The Bialowieza Forest consists of 548 square miles of designated UNESCO-protected forest, … Read More

Originally, we had planned to travel from Moscow to Istanbul, then work our way north and west as we explored eastern Europe. Unfortunately, a failed military coup and resulting formal declaration of a state of emergency left the country unstable … Read More

We pulled into the Moscow train station and set off towards the station entrance with our new Finnish friends. We chatted and walked in the bright sunshine when suddenly, the daughter interjected, “did that say Stone?” I wheeled around and … Read More

While I was excited to head off on our epic train journey, I don’t think either one of us was pleased to leave Mongolia. Still, the train tickets could not be changed, so we resigned ourselves to departing and made … Read More

One of the things I had on my list for this trip was to take the Trans-Siberian Railway, the longest rail journey in the world. Begun in 1890, the rail line was designed to serve cities throughout Siberia that were … Read More