Travelling in Eastern Europe

That's a good amount of time.

When you are in Romania you MUST go to Brasov. It's lovely and Bran (i.e. Dracula's) castle is a short bus ride away. Don't spend too long in Bucharest tho, it's a rather hectic city.

http://englishrussia.com/images/strange_soviet_buildings/strange_houses3.jpg

but i don't know where in Ukraine it is.

Thanks for the tips, Mark - I was wondering if a rendez-vous with Tuomas would make logistical sense! I was actually looking forward to Bucharest, but then I quite like hectic cities.

or why not fly into tampere on a budget airline? tampere is good, then get the train down to helsinki, and carry on from there.

i'd definitely include finland on this trip

http://www.scotlandyard.ee

eesti only though as far as I can see.

and it looks like this:
http://www.scotlandyard.ee/gfx/images/05_kesklinn.gif

1) Krakow! It's great, and everyone raves about it after having spent some time there. Good for a day trip to Auschwitz too.

2) I'd skip Kiev for L'viv about a million times over. Ukraine is cool, but you'll see all you need if you stay to the western part of the country - unless you go to the Crimea, but it may be rather out of the way.

3) The best parts of Romania are the ones with reasonable Hungarian speaking minorities (as a general rule of thumb). Bucharest is busy, dirty and nasty and not that great a city. Definitely see the Maramaros area (I think that's Maramures in Romanian). Cluj is a great city.

4) I would also include Finland on this trip if possible.

Also, Cesky Krumlov is a great small Czech town. Nice cliffside castle, Egon Schiele museum, very peaceful. It's about midway between Vienna and Prague. It's touristy (it's where everyone who wants to go a little off the beaten path goes), but still great.

I guess that's if you want to hang down to Croatia/Hungary/etc. instead. In that case Budapest is also great.

In In very broad strokes Lviv < Krakow < Prague - all feel very similar to me, so if you like one you should, like others. (I Like them all :)

Chernivtsi, in a kind of neat town that still retains distinct traces of its Austro-Hungarian past, although I'm not sure I'd recommend changing travel plans to passs through.

Otherwise seconding Rila in Bulgaria, Krakow/Auschwitz.

Go to Lonely Planet's messageboard, there will be lots and lots of disucssion there, I'm sure.

And, on the southern side, there are the Tatra mountains, an offshoot of the Carpathians on the Slovak-Polish border. If you happen to be passing through in June, head to Zakopane and spend a few days hiking. There's a pretty extensive network of trails, and remote hostels in a lot of the valleys where you can hike in and spend the night (though you may have to book these in advance). Skip this in July or August, though, as the place really gets overrun.

Farther south, I can't really say. I've been planning to take a similar trip myself for a while now and haven't gotten round to it just yet.

I've booked my ticket: flying out to Tallinn on the 24th. No return flight booked yet, I'm going to play it by ear.

Events I will miss: the smoking ban coming in, Gordon's coronation, the last episode of Doctor Who.

does anyone have any thoughts about ljubljana and slovakia?

was mesmerized by a train ride video from ljubljana to kranj recently, can't stop thinking about it. is it a nice place to visit? of course flights from my western u.s. city to ljubljana are $$ with insane layovers.

in my hitchhiking/train riding days I made stopovers in Ljubljana (very beautiful old city) and Maribor (of which I remember much less, we’re talking early 80s Yugoslav times here!). can’t tell you much about the rest of Slovenia. (as for Slovakia, I’ve never been there). still would like to revisit Ljubljana one day tho.

Frankfurt is probably your best bet, and handle your second flight independently

SLC -> Frankfurt arriving 10am. Then an evening flight to Ljubljana about an hour. There are also a good amount of buses from Germany to former Yugoslavia, will be about 9 hours though from Frankfurt

Going via LAX to Vienna looks a lot cheaper with short gap between flights at LAX. No flights from Vienna to Ljubljana, bus is about 6 hours, will be frequent same as buses from Germany

ljubljana is cool, lots of weirdo diy stuff around town and a cool contemporary art museum. there's one of those tidy formalist napoleonic central parks and right in the middle is a little museum, i walked in and there was an exhibition of peter brotzmann's charcoal drawing with a brotzmann live dvd projected on the wall at TREMENDOUS volume

best bottle of wine i ever had was a slovenian chardonnay on that same trip, lots of good wine in that region.