Traveling Eastern Europe

HardBackWriter

A friend and I are hoping to travel down through Eastern Europe in April, starting in Poland and hopefully finishing in Turkey 2/3 weeks later (time spent will depend on getting time off work). Fly into Poland then rail and cheap hotels the whole way. Anybody done this/have any advice?

blue_haddock

I've done similar travel but i went from Frankfurt in germany through czech republic, poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Sweden and finally Norway. This was done on a mix of buses, trains and budget flights. I had no problem doing it and really enjoyed it as it was about 7 years ago before eastern europe joined the EU and became easily accessable.

The main concern i would have is the distance your planning on covering in such a short space of time - even going the shortest most direct route you'll be going through 5 or 6 countries which will only allow you a day or so in each country. You will quite literally spend half your holiday travelling and wouldn't be able to see much more than 1 town in each country and that would only be for a day before having to move on.

I would suggest you trim the trip down and just do 2 or 3 countries so you can enjoy them more and actually get a taste of the places your visiting.

HardBackWriter

Understand what you're saying and should probably have provided more background on the purpose of the trip. This visit is to be more of a 'recci' for a longer and more detailed trip later on. During the second visit we'll take more time and won't try and cover so much distance. Hopefully the first visit will help us to decide where to spend that time.

Kirri

Have you seen the seat61 website? Brilliant site for rail travel!