The boring half. The half that
makes the rest possible.
Money, transport, paperwork, language, and the parts of the Balkans nobody writes about until you're already there. The operational notes, in plain prose.
Eighteen pieces, six categories.
Some are ready. The rest are on the to-do list, which has its own to-do list.
Cash, cards, and which one each country actually accepts.
Croatia is euro now. Bosnia and Albania still run on paper. Card here, dinar there, sometimes both, often neither.
Tipping, when it's expected and when it isn't.
The rules vary by country, by setting, and by whether the place has a card reader at all. Short version: less than you think, more often than you think.
ATMs, exchange offices, and the ones to avoid.
Euronet is everywhere. Euronet is also the worst. The local bank ATM next to it usually charges half. We name names.
Getting around by bus: the network nobody publishes properly.
Half the bus schedules in the Balkans aren't online. The other half are wrong. Here's how to read the ones that exist and find the ones that don't.
Renting a car: borders, vignettes, and the green card.
Crossing borders with a rental is allowed — usually, with paperwork. The green card is the document everyone forgets and one border guard always asks for.
Trains in the Balkans: where they still run, and where they don't.
Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo. Beyond that, the map gets thin. A short, honest assessment of which trains are worth taking and which exist mostly on paper.
Ferries on the Adriatic.
Italy to Croatia, Croatia to Croatia, the islands to each other. Schedules, routes, the difference between catamarans and car ferries, and when not to bother.
Travel insurance: what actually matters for the Balkans.
Most Western policies cover the region without thinking about it. Most aren't built for what actually goes wrong: hospital stays in Sarajevo, motorbike accidents in Albania, lost passports between borders.
SIM cards and data: which provider, where to buy.
Roaming is fine in EU countries. The non-EU four are where it gets expensive. A local SIM costs €5–€10 and saves a holiday. Here's the one to buy in each country.
When to go: the real seasons, not the tourist board version.
May and September are the best months. July and August are not. The tourist board won't tell you that. We will, and so will the Croatian coast in August.
The minimum you should know in each country.
Twelve words that get you a coffee, a bus ticket, and a bit of goodwill. No phrasebook hand-holding. No "hello, friend!" greetings nobody uses.
Reading menus, signs, and bus schedules in three alphabets.
Latin, Cyrillic, Albanian. You don't need to learn them. You do need to recognise enough letters to find the toilet and the right platform. We'll get you to that point in a morning.
Solo female travel: what we'd tell our sisters, what we'd tell ourselves.
Not a safety ranking. A practical, honest read of how the region treats women travelling alone — country by country, including the awkward parts.
LGBTQ+ travel: country by country, without the colour-coded map.
The legal picture and the social picture are not the same picture. We separate them. Eight countries, the difference between Pride in Ljubljana and Pride in Belgrade, and what that means for the trip.
Travelling with kids: the parts of the Balkans built for them, and the parts that aren't.
Slovenia is easy. Albania, less so. Where strollers fit on the bus, where they don't, and where the locals will absolutely treat your toddler like the family's.
Older travellers and slow travel: a region that rewards patience.
A trip planned around three coffees a day instead of five sights. The Balkans were built for that. The buses, less so — but we'll get to that.
Visas, residence, and what changed since the EU expansion debates.
For most Western passports, the answer is "you don't need one anywhere". For others, it depends on Kosovo. We'll explain.
Crossing borders: by bus, by car, on foot, with a dog.
Some borders take five minutes. Some take three hours. Some you can walk across with a sandwich. Crossing with a dog requires a vaccination booklet and a deep breath. All of it, here.
Because somebody has to write the boring parts too.
Most travel writing about the Balkans skips this material. There's a reason. The romance of the region — the music, the coffee, the wars that haven't quite ended in everybody's head — sells better than which bus to take from Sarajevo to Mostar.
But the romance only works if the bus shows up. If the ATM doesn't eat your card. If the rental car has the right paperwork at the border. If the SIM works when you need to call your guesthouse to say you're running late, again.
So this is the other half of the site. Less tone, more answers. Operational, occasionally opinionated. Written the same way we'd tell it to a friend at a kafana table — except this time we wrote it down.
Read it before you go. Or read it from the bus station, halfway through the trip, when something has already gone wrong. Both work.