If you live somewhere with a strong currency, such as the UK, then it's probably not worth spending too much time worrying about whether your trip to Eastern Europe will break the bank. As long as you book your hotels with any of the online operators who can sort local accommodation according to price rather than how much commission they make - I use easytobook myself - and don't choose to eat out at the poshest restaurant in town every night, then there really is no reason why you shouldn't be able to live comfortably in this part of the world for quite a few weeks on a fairly meagre budget. Naturally, it might also be a good idea to read the reviews on your favourite travel site prior to booking, just to make sure that you're not going to be sleeping in a cardboard box twelve miles from the town centre.

These days, unless I'm staying somewhere regularly featured on the evening news, I generally prefer to stay in local apartments rather than the big city centre hotels, and these are precisely the sort of places you won't see advertised in any of the holiday brochures. If you're the sort of person who prefers to stay in the Hotel Posh every night, and be waited on hand and foot by men with accents lifted straight from British fifties television programmes, then feel free to throw all your money at the nearest tour operator - otherwise, you'll usually find it much cheaper and far more satisfying to give your money to a friendly local who rents out a room and actually needs the money. To be honest, and I know this might not seem quite right to those of you who have always booked your holidays through the high street, I usually find that I feel much more wanted when staying with a local family in their spare room than I do when stuck on the seventeenth floor of a concrete monstrosity in the middle of town. Remember back in Dubrovnik, where my host greeted me with open arms and sat with me out on the verandah drinking juice and plying me with cakes for an hour even though neither of us spoke the other's language? You just don't get that in a big hotel, do you? The most you get from the big hotel chains these days is "Breakfast is between seven and five past seven, check out is at two in the morning and if you want us to actually change your bed every day then you have to throw your bathroom towels on the floor before you go out". Not that inspiring, is it?

The cost of travel within the countries of the former Yugoslavia, in particular, is likely to astound you - especially if, like me, you are used to paying the sometimes quite extortionate prices National Rail and the bus companies demand for even the simplest journeys back home. To put this in perspective, consider the intercity bus service from Dubrovnik to Split. This is a regular bus service which runs every two hours throughout the day using a fleet of air conditioned coaches of the type you would expect to see shunting tour groups around elsewhere in the world - none of those crowded hopper buses filled with sweaty commuters out here. The route along the coast to Split, on a good day, takes anything between three and a half and four hours, and yet for this monumental journey you're not expected to pay much more than twelve quid - which to a British person used to paying three times this amount to travel one hundred miles on a train from London to Ipswich, is just plain ridiculous. Presumably, they still have to pay for petrol and staff wages and maintaining their fleet of coaches, so it really is difficult to comprehend how we put up with the prices we pay in the UK. And before you say "Ah, but Simon, petrol prices are higher in the UK", I would ask you exactly why you think that is. The product is the same, it is supplied by the same people and it comes from the same place - at the end of the day, petrol is more expensive in the UK simply because we put up with it. Spread the word.

The cost of travel in Croatia doesn't even seem to be affected by the desirability of the route. In the UK, you can almost guarantee that any glimpse of the ocean along the way and the price of the ticket will instantly double. Here, it is often much cheaper to take the most scenic route simply because it takes a bit longer - but let's face it, who cares how long it takes if you're going to spend the entire journey staring in awe at beautiful islands rather than speed limit signs on the motorway. Apparently, the absolute best way of getting from Dubrovnik to Split is by taking the ferry - although this option wasn't available to me today, unfortunately, as the service only runs during high season. The voyage by sea doubles the journey time to Split from four to eight hours, but you get to spend this time actually weaving through the islands of the Dalmatian coast rather than looking at them in the distance from the coast road, and the ferry will cost you half of what the bus would. Why wouldn't you take this option, if it was available to you?

As you drive along the Dalmatian coast, squinting through the window against the constant glare of the Mediterranean sun and wondering why the designer sunglasses you bought from a bloke on the street back in Montenegro don't actually seem to do anything, you can't help but ask yourself what the rest of the world did in a previous life to deserve all of its best scenery being stolen and shipped out to the Adriatic. On the four hour drive from Dubrovnik to Split, there doesn't seem to be a single point at which the road isn't hugging the ocean as tightly as possible as though scared that, if it dares to deviate inland for a moment, the water will be gone when it gets back. Every few minutes, you pass through another delightful coastal village consisting of a group of seemingly unfinished Mediterranean style box houses overgrown with climbing plants and surrounded by a curious mixture of shrubbery and rubble discarded by the builder when he finally looked at what he'd done and decided it was enough. The architecture here actually reminds me of that of the Greek islands, which I suppose makes sense as Greece isn't a million miles away, but one striking difference is that everything seems calm here - you can wander the streets of half finished sun bleached homes in complete peace, able to look out at the ocean and enjoy the tranquility without worrying that a group of drunken revellers might come staggering around the corner at any moment singing obscene songs about their football team and promising to send you home in an ambulance. The unfinished nature of many houses around the Mediterranean, in case you ever wondered, is often a tax dodge - residents in some parts of Europe don't have to pay tax on incomplete houses, so they deliberately choose to leave the roof unfinished in order to avoid paying the sometimes extortionate rates. In other cases, they just haven't paid the builder and he's cleared off. Which is fair enough. In Croatia, there is apparently something of a trend for building houses without actually asking permission from the government first and then acting surprised when a nice man from the ministry turns up with a bulldozer to knock them down - so many of the unfinished houses in Croatia are simply the result of someone being caught in the act, so to speak. I suppose, if you do happen to end up with an incomplete house, you can always use the room with no roof as a spare bedroom for friends you don't really like that much, and hope it rains.

There aren't really many scenic routes in the world quite as scenic as the drive from Dubrovnik to Split. That is, as long as you discount the irritating wedge of coast at Neum where you pass briefly through Bosnia and find yourself driving through everyone's worst nightmare of a built up seaside resort. For some reason, in Neum, they seem to have inexplicably decided to staple all the buildings to the side of the cliff above a sandy beach filled to capacity with a million Bosnians. As part of Croatia's commitment to join the European Union, a giant modern bridge is currently being built between the two sections of Croatia so that people can get from Dubrovnik to the rest of the country without having to pass through Bosnian soil - and this isn't something Bosnia is particularly happy about because it will stop people spending their tourist dollars on the way through. Personally, I don't see the problem - our bus sailed quickly from one side to the other, being stopped twice at customs where a man got on board and walked the length of the bus glancing at our passports, but other than that we had no contact with Bosnia whatsoever. I don't really know where all these tourists are supposed to be spending all these tourist dollars, to be honest.

People seem to live a healthy life on the route from Dubrovnik to Split, unaffected by distant cities and content to tend their own personal vineyards - I'd like to have a house with my own vineyard, thank you very much - and extensive fruit and vegetable plots. Little stone houses nestle among the trees and vineyards, reminding me of Tuscany - the people who live here live simple lives, but in many ways have much more than the big city types up in Split could ever dream of. Beyond their gardens, perfectly clear water laps softly at a single wooden rowing boat moored at a makeshift landing stage, the surface an unbelievable shimmering green as the reflection of the surrounding trees combines with the bright Mediterranean sun. I cannot even begin to find the words to express how beautiful this region is - everywhere you look is lush orchards, vineyards, beaches and pure unpolluted ocean - and as long as you don't mind being boiled alive 24-7, you can't exactly fault the weather either.

One curiosity I found on the way to Split was that most of the villages seemed deserted. They aren't, of course - but I suppose there must come a point, inconceivable as it may be to anybody living in a concrete jungle such as London, when looking at the same scenery every day becomes mundane and you learn to stay indoors. In most of the villages we passed through, the only activity we saw was a single dog sitting on the end of a makeshift wooden pier, tongue hanging out, watching the fish. These little piers seemed to be everywhere all along the coast, nothing more than two planks nailed roughly together and somehow anchored to the ground by the sea in order to provide a place to sit and fish. I really wanted to tell the driver to stop the bus so that I could get out and take a photograph, as each of these little fishing spots seemed to be about as close to a perfect Kodak moment as I could imagine, but I suspected that he would've misunderstood and driven off without me. Instead, I spent much of the journey along the coastal highway watching these little beauty spots regularly shooting past and hoping that there would be one close enough to Split for me to hike to with my camera. As we approached the city and the little wooden piers started to be replaced with concrete blocks serving the same purpose, I realised that I'd missed my opportunity. This is what I've always hated about organised tours, and now scheduled bus journeys as well - unless you spend all your budget up front on hiring a car so you can do everything at your own pace, you're pretty much going to miss everything you want to see.

On the last leg of the journey, we were joined on the bus by an American woman who really didn't seem to understand the concept of foreign travel and was probably under the impression that she was still in Kansas. I really don't want to bring up any stereotypes here, so I'll just tell you the story and let you make your own judgements. When the bus inspector did his regular walk down the bus checking tickets and collecting fares, he stopped at the American woman and asked to see her ticket. This, because I happened to have the notepad app on my iPhone open at the time and was able to write it all down, is the conversation that followed - word for word.

"Sorry," she said, in an accent so strong I wondered briefly if it was for real, "I haven't got one. I just guess I'll sort of have to pay for it now."

The ticket inspector asked her where she was going and told her the price in Croatian Kuna, which seemed for some reason to confuse her: "This is what it is," she said, bending the English language to her own liking, "I don't have any Croatian money."

"Okay," the ticket inspector told her, putting on his most helpful face, "You can pay in Euro also"

"I have American Dollars." said the woman.

I've arrived in Split, as tends to happen anywhere along the coast of Croatia, with a pounding headache and bleached out vision, because it is quite impossible to tear your eyes away from the scenery whizzing past and you spend the entire journey staring through the window into the ridiculously bright Mediterranean sun. For this reason, you should probably arrange for somebody to meet you on arrival and lead you to your destination, and allow at least a couple of hours for the black and white spots in front of your eyes to clear before attempting to use any heavy machinery. Now I come to think about it, perhaps that's why they call this the Dalmatian coast.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.