Steppe in Style: adventures in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

As well as the usual fare of history museums and art galleries — often housed in stunning old palaces — Croatia has a surprising amount of quirky and unusual museums too.  Travelling around the country for a few weeks, we had the chance to visit several of the including the Chocolate Museum, the Museum of…

I fell in love with Split when I first visited 14 years ago. That visit was a very brief one. I arrived on the overnight bus from Pula, shortly after dawn, when the old city was bathed in late September golden sunlight.  The bus took us to the edge of the harbour, where I looked…

Six months ago I was under Lockdown 2, confined to the local area, where everything except essential food shops were shut (I didn’t visit a cafe or clothes shop between late December and April). So even though I used to travel a lot pre-pandemic, my culture shock was extreme when I jetted off on a…

Now we are back in lockdown again. It was announced just before Christmas, so our plans for a couple of days in Oban were cancelled. It’s less scary than the lockdown in spring 2020, almost a year ago now, and the restrictions are a bit lighter. But still the disappointment is acute. I’d thought 2021…

We ended up spending more than two weeks in Slovenia after my daughter went down with chicken pox part-way through the holiday, and we were unable to fly home until she was fully recovered. I managed to get through the full 16 days of the vacation with my 14-item travel capsule wardrobe in Slovenia in spring even though I’d…

Koper, Slovenia’s fifth largest city, used to be an island, though that’s hard to believe today. What was once a causeway connecting the island — named as Insula Caprea, or Goat Island, by the Romans — to the mainland is now a busy highway surrounded by big box stores, car showrooms and office blocks.  It’s…

Coming back to Tashkent after almost a decade — I wasn’t able to get a visa for years — I was delighted to find myself staying in the old part of the city, just 100 metres from Chorsu bazaar. As I’ve written before in this blog, I’m a big fan of Central Asian bazaars, and…