Looking for safe and affordable travel tips in Post-Russian/ Yugoslavian Countries

[N473]

Hello everyone,

I saw this website when searching about how to travel cheap by hitchhiking or train surfing, but I haven't got enough points to look and the private train hopping post though so I am asking here.

My friends and I are planning a budget-friendly trip through some of the post-Russian Yugoslavian countries in Europe for a few weeks and we thought that using the trains would be a fun and cheap way to get around. Has anyone here travelled through this region on a tight budget? We're open to hitchhiking, using low-cost airlines or buses, and even cycling or walking.

I have looked online about train layouts and the safest spots to get onto the train but I am looking for some more reassurance.

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[EmmanuelGoldstein]

the ppl suck i hate em

 

[searover]

1. Albania is affordable, even moreso outside of Tirana. Hitchhiking is perhaps the easiest in the world. Amazing people, but you might get ripped off at restaurants, but the average wage in some of these regions is super low, so be decent about it. The wine is alright.
2. Kosovo is even more affordable, but comes with a whole lot of geopolitical baggage. Still incredibly easy hitchhiking and friendly people but it's a great spot. Just be comparatively more careful with political talk.
3. Serbia is wonderful and people are friendly. Consider exactly the logistics of it as you can't enter via Kosovo.
4. Beware of unexploded ordnance (landmines etc) and consider asking permission to camp on people's land in the balkans.

The food's all great in these regions. When do you intend on going?

And for what it's worth, Yugoslavia was famously non aligned and Tito split with the Soviets.

 

[Colinleath]

Hello everyone,

I saw this website when searching about how to travel cheap by hitchhiking or train surfing, but I haven't got enough points to look and the private train hopping post though so I am asking here.

My friends and I are planning a budget-friendly trip through some of the post-Russian Yugoslavian countries in Europe for a few weeks and we thought that using the trains would be a fun and cheap way to get around. Has anyone here travelled through this region on a tight budget? We're open to hitchhiking, using low-cost airlines or buses, and even cycling or walking.

I have looked online about train layouts and the safest spots to get onto the train but I am looking for some more reassurance.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Bicycling is fine there and yeah as the other poster mentioned it's not exactly the former USSR. Though a similar political dynamic I suppose. More recently it's sort of divided between those leaning toward the EU and US and the Eastern Orthodox contingent in Serbia and Montenegro potentially leaning more toward Russia.

I've ridden the Balkans, every one of them, also Bulgaria and Romania, and taken the train with my bike in many of them.

It should be a decent trip.

But now that I have the freedom to I'll probably stay mostly in the West. (I used to have to get out of Schengen every 90 days but it turns out you can just stamp out into andorra. At least for now).

Bicycle travel is a different animal from backpacking around and mostly chilling with people. So it really depends on your personality.

And maintaining any bicycle over long distances (or even a cloth backpack and other camping gear) (and ones own body of course) is an ongoing technical project not everyone has the patience for or interest in doing.

 

[Colinleath]

I have looked online about train layouts and the safest spots to get onto the train but I am looking for some more reassurance.

Thanks in advance for your help!

I'd think if you're train hopping in the Balkans you're doing it for entertainment or for your YouTube channel (like that famous Russian guy). . .

Not really to save money maybe.


The passenger trains are pretty cheap and often ramshackle and ancient and cobbled together (train-bus-train).

Some ancient ones are cheap and well maintained though (the narrow gauge that goes from bansko down to the main line to Sofia over the course of 4 slow hours).

But yeah I've traveled where every $ counted.

You can't really dumpster dive much in a lot of those places by the way.

Your competition is the Roma and they've often got every dumpster on a route.

In albania the only thing I could generally find was white bread.

And got a nutritional deficiency at least partly as a result. (A sign was a crack at the side of the mouth that was hard to heal).

There are also food quality issues with some things you do buy.

Suspect olive oil. For example.

And, memorably, you could buy milk in soda liter bottles from roadside stands in albania and Montenegro, maybe Macedonia too. You can glean watermelon from fields and other fruits.

If solo, people will host you and possibly share food from their gardens, cows, pigs, alcohol stills.

But it helps to get lost down the muddy back roads for that to happen.