What I've Learned

As hoped, I've learned a few different things from my travels:

*Stuff to take*

It pays to have a little "bootstrap" money to change at the station (if no ATM is there), just to get a taxi to town or hotel. After that, ATMs are plentiful (in the cities I visited) and work without problem (the occasional one is broken, as at home).

More places are favouring Euros (e.g. Turkey), so they are slightly more useful than Sterling (but I had no problems with changing Sterling).

White T-shirts (with whatever on the front) are a really good idea. I stupidly took some green and grey ones for a change, so I had to walk round showing dark patches of damp.

Taxi drivers where foreigners will arrive (e.g. Stations) can be quite keen to separate them from their money. I got a taxi from hotel to station in Sofia for under 4 Leva (€2). When I wanted to return the first offer was €10, and the driver laughed uproariously when I said 4 Leva. I couldn't get waiting radio-taxis to take me, so I had to settle on a mid-priced cab at the back of the queue, so it cost me 10 Leva (€5) to get back to the hotel.

Insisting (in advance) on using the meter is generally a good idea. "Radio cars" (i.e. come when you ring their office) are usually best, and can arrive surprisingly quickly.

Traveling alone is OK during the day, but not in the evening (for social rather than security reasons). Travelling in company during the day is nicer too.

It'd be nice to have mobile internet (GSM/GPRS/3G) so one isn't tied to internet cafes or hotel internet. It's still worth having a laptop or equivalent that can read/write to a USB key, as you can then plug the key into an internet cafe or hotel business centre PC. My PDA isn't good enough on that point.

I'm going to be looking into Solid State Hard Disks, as it doesn't matter if they get knocked. They're still quite expensive (e.g. Samsung 32GB £270) but will be coming down.

If you want to spend time sightseeing rather than trudging round (probably with your luggage), then you need to book hotels ahead. There is no substitute for the internet, to get maps, see where hotels are relative to stations, town centres, etc. and check hotel availability and rates.

Blogger/Blogspot allows posts to be published by email. I wish I'd worked that out before I travelled, as I could have posted direct from the PDA without having to find Internet Cafes.

WikiTravel.com is good. I'll be thinking about contributing an update or two.

*Where I Went*

All of the big cities where I went had "all mod cons" (e.g. ATMs).

Croatia and Turkey use the Latin alphabet. Serbia and Bulgaria use Cyrillic. Learning the sounds of the Cyrillic letters is a really good idea and will get you a long way (e.g. restaurant, beer).

Many young people in all the places spoke some or more English. Older people, particularly in places that use the Cyrillic-alphabet, typically had less or none.

Tourist-facing jobs tend to be filled by the people with more foreign language knowledge, so making life easier for the likes of me.

It is, obviously, harder to get around where hardly anyone (taxi drivers, public transport staff, stallholders) speaks English - such as Serbia.

Sofia didn't show the signs I expected from Bulgaria's Iron Curtain past. It shows how little impact 40-odd years can have on the architecture of an old city.

Bulgaria seems extremely proud of being in the EU. In 90% of cases, the EU flag flies next to the Bulgarian one. I even saw one combined flag (outside Sofia Central Station).

The Balkans don't bite.