The Balkans - May '13

The first long holiday with my girlfriend will take us to the Balkans, were we will spend a good 18 days travelling from Belgrade to Thessaloniki following basically the route as shown on the map. It is quite an ambitious route, visiting 12/15 cities in just 18 days, but since we are quite 'quick' tourists, the public transport is frequent and the distances are short, we think it's managable. And if we don't manage to do it, or we just like a particular place too much, we'll just skip something, as long as we can catch our flight back from Thessaloniki ;)

The basic outline will be something like this:

Day 1/3: Serbia (Belgrade/Novi Sad)
Day 4/6: Bosnia & Herzegovina (Sarajevo/Mostar)
Day 7/10: Croatia / Montenegro (Dubrovnik/Kotor/Budva/Ulcinj)
Day 11/12: Albania (Tirana/Berat)
Day 13/15: Macedonia: (Ohrid/Skopje)
Day 16/18: Greece (Thessaloniki)

If we don't make it, we'll skip Skopje, since besides Belgrado it's the only place in this route with a good lowcost-connection to the Netherlands. In that case we'll have from Ohrid to Greece, possibly via Bitola and we'll have to come back again to do a trip to visit Skopje, Pristina and Sofia.

As for the distances, most of them are relatively short,according to BalkanViator so leaving around 7/8/9 will mean we'll be checked into the new ho(s)tel before noon:

>1 hour: Kotor - Budva
1-2 hours: Belgrade - Novi Sad / Budva - Ulcinj
2-3 hours: Sarajevo - Mostar / Mostar - Dubrovnik / Dubrovnik - Kotor / Tirana - Berat
3-4 hours: Ulcinj - Tirana / Ohrid - Skopje
Longer distances: Belgrade - Sarajevo (nightbus) / Berat - Ohrid (probably 6 hours, 2 changeovers) / Skopje - Thessaloniki (4 hours, but leaving really early)