The first time I decided to dip my toe into solo travel I was working in a software company as an intern software engineer and after a year of watching the days fly by, reading blogs of other people out exploring the world I decided that I’d had enough and I wanted a bit of that for myself(I was aged 22 at the time)! I wanted to make it an adventure in my head and quickly came upon the idea of going from one end of Europe back to Ireland via land using either trains, busses, cars, or my two feet, or which one ever would work. So, I went onto the flight comparison website of the time and looked up the cheapest flight that would take me as far away as possible from Ireland. The flight happened to be Cork to Dalaman in Turkey which happened to be a popular tourist destination on the southwest coast.

I informed my family and friends what my plan was and saved up as much money as possible for the trip. I had no real date to arrive back on but had kind of budgeted to spend in the region of 30 – 60 euros per day depending on the countries, this left me with a time frame of 6 – 10 weeks in which to make my way back to Ireland.

The countries I ended up passing through were the following:

• Turkey
  • Dalaman (1 night)
  • İzmir (2 nights)
  • İstanbul (5 nights)
• Greece
  • Thessaloniki (4 nights)
  • Kastraki (Meteora) (1 night)
• Albania
  • Tirana (4 nights)
• Montenegro
  • Žabljak (2 nights)
  • Kotor (2 nights)
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
  • Mostar (4 nights)
• Croatia
  • Zadar (1 night)
  • Crikvenica  (4 nights)
• Slovenia
  • Bled (5 nights)
• Italy
  • Venice (5 nights)
• France
  • Buxeuil via Paris (5 nights)

The journey was mostly by bus and train and covered approx. 5,300km of land.

Turkey

The first night I had booked was in a small B&B in Dalyan – a small tourist town on the coast of Turkey. I was the only person staying there and spent the evening chatting to the owner about what places I should visit while in Turkey. I remember a massive feeling of adventure as I got into bed that evening!

The main source of transport in turkey was busses and they ran to all the local towns as well as the big cities. Luckily for me most of them had their destinations printed on a card which was displayed on the front of the bus and I just had to pay a guy when I got on the bus. A funny thing which I haven’t seen elsewhere was the tendency to drive really slowly out of the city/town while shouting the name of the destination. Locals who were waiting on the side of the street (with no fixed bus stops) would flag down the bus and hop in!