Somewhat through choice I have chosen to plan most of my trip as I go. I know I’m heading for Central Asia but hadn’t really thought through the route at all before hand apart from going via Slovenia. In many ways this has been a good thing as it gives me total freedom. I can take onboard tips and advice I pick up on the road and can change my mind whenever I want. It was much easier as I moved through Western Europe where I was able to roam on my phone using mobile data which meant I could essentially google as I go.

I find I tend to change my plan almost daily depending often on my mood. One of the great things about this is that I often arrive in a country with little idea about it, or expectations. It makes for nice surprises and also means that I can find out about places through exploration and talking to people as I go.

Sometimes, however winging it does make things a little trickier, particularly as I’ve moved further East and can no longer use my phone apart from on WiFi which is intermittent of course. For example, I arrived into Sarajevo late at night as the bus was a couple of hours late and I was slightly anxious about missing the check in for my hostel. I decided to take a taxi from the station to the hostel and ended up getting absolutely fleeced. The issue was that I’d turned up in Bosnia and realised not only did I not know what the currency was but I also had no idea how much it was worth! This was winging it a bit too much and not something I’ll do again.

I got some money out and when the driver quoted me ’20’ I did, out of habit initially contest this but realising I didn’t know the value of the currency it was a difficult place to negotiate from. Being late at night I just paid. When I arrived at the hostel and checked the currency I realised I’d be charged about 4 times the going rate. My own fault. Thankfully not a large amount of money.

Having not planned far ahead the travel too has not been as easy as I thought. I had some ideas of routes as the crow flies but hadn’t realised how limited the rail network is as I’ve got further away from home. This has meant buses which, due to the more rugged landscape take a long time and can be quite gruelling (as I’ll later describe in an upcoming post).

I’ve had one major change of plan. I was originally planning to head up through Romania, Moldova etc toward the Ukraine where I was going to try and take a ferry across the Black Sea to Georgia. I now intend to go to the south west and get to Istanbul and then take trains across Turkey to Georgia. Partly because I keep having flashbacks to my chronic sea sickness in the past and 3-5 days on a ferry could be a risk too far for me. I also fancy a change of scenery and want to check out Turkey. In fact I was discussing this plan with someone in a hostel who asked me if I had a visa for Turkey. A good thing he mentioned it because I hadn’t thought about it! Luckily it’s easy to do online.

One of the biggest problems I’ve faced is indecision. So many amazing places to visit. Where do you go? Everyone has great recommendations. It’s a good problem to have but you can’t go everywhere. My main goal now though is to get to Central Asia for September so will get a move on now. We’ll see how that works out…