One of the most irritating things about returning home after an exotic holiday - apart from having to return home after an exotic holiday, obviously - is having to leave behind all those delightful taste sensations which you quickly learn to take for granted while travelling but which nobody has ever heard of back in your own country. Of course, this sort of thing is far less of an issue these days, in a world where Google is but a click away and can provide the ...

The guide throughout my time in Mostar has been one of those supermodels I was telling you about back in Croatia - the ones who seem to make up at least 50 percent of the population of Eastern Europe and serve mainly to ensure that all visitors feel immediately inferior upon arrival. It's not just the women, either - even the male tour guides seem to resemble, well, insert the name of your favourite male movie star here. I'm not altogether sure of this, but I don...

Sometimes, when planning a long and exhausting trek across a continent, it becomes necessary to sacrifice some of the places you really wanted to go in order to fit everything into the time available. This, of course, is one of the most annoying things about travel - even if you were to set off from home as a newborn baby and spend your entire life travelling until the day you finally keeled over, you still wouldn't be able to find nearly enough time to visit hal...

You might think, not unreasonably, that staying on top of your finances when travelling in Europe has become a million times easier since the introduction of the single currency. Unfortunately, while this is undoubtedly true if you're the sort of person who never leaves your own doorstep or who considers a day trip to France or a long weekend in Milan to be the height of sophistication, things quickly get rather more complicated as soon as you start wandering aim...

When you mention casually to a friend that you're thinking of dropping in on Bosnia and Herzegovina while you're in Eastern Europe, a very odd thing happens. First, they start to develop that curious faraway look which tells you that they're not altogether sure whether or not this is something they should be worried about, and then, having failed to receive a satisfactory reply back from the depths of their brain after a minute or so, they resort to asking if you...