My first order of business today was to look at the Tucan orientation walk of Istanbul, laugh and then tear it up. No Tucan orientation walk for Istanbul, this will be Kristina's tour of Istanbul and it will be epic! The tour of Istanbul given by yours truly started after breakfast, I firstly had to find some ATM's so that people could get some money. This placed us at the entrance to thr Agia Sophia, which I spoke at length about and answered lots of questi...

I had a nice long sleep in, in my air conditioned room in Bucharest. I went down and had breakfast before going back up to spend the remainder of the morning watching TV on my lap top in my room. I'd never been to Bucharest before, but the thought of grappling with the heaving dirty metropolis in the heat really didn't appeal to me today. I had a nice long skype chat with Mum and then my passengers started filtering back in to go to the airport. At this poi...

I was up early this morning to take the group to Bucharest, the Romanian capital on the train. The cab drivers arrived on time and took us to the station. They all used their meters, which came out at around twelve lei each. I gave them twenty anyway. Bev actually left her bag in one of the cabs and the good old cabbie actually chased her down with it. Who does that in the third world? I had gotten us their stupidly early, which no one seemed to mind and w...

I woke up in Romania today on a rickety old train being bounced around six feet in the air on the top bunk of my sleeper carriage. It was about 6am and there was no need to get up just yet, but I had to go to the bathroom and couldn't be bothered doing my monkey impersonation to get back into bed for another hour or so sleep. All my passengers were now getting up and commenting on the passing scenery and taking pictures out the train window of a much poorer l...

I made myself get an early start this morning, as usually when I'm in the city of Budapest, I get less than 24 hours before I have to turn around and go back or get on a plane to go somewhere. I started out by going to Keleti station to see if I could get some kind of refund for the tickets I had purchased to Istanbul, as we are now flying. After that short errand was over, I headed over to the Szechenyi baths to really experience the city of spas. I managed...