Help me get from Santiago to Serbia.

May 18, 2009 11:03 PM

What's the cheapest or best way to get from Santiago de Compostela, Spain, to Croatia/Serbia/Slovenia? Optional: a detour through the Netherlands.

I'm backpacking through Spain this summer and ending up in Santiago de Compostela or thereabouts. From there I have the option to go to the Netherlands for a month and then Croatia/Serbia/Slovenia etc for a little less than a month, then flying out of Prague, or going straight to central/eastern Europe and spending a bit more time there. Wherever I go I'll be WWOOFing for part of the time but also camping and couchsurfing in larger cities. I'm interested in:
- The best way to get out of Santiago, and
- Thoughts on spending a month in the Netherlands-- how expensive is it? For a young female traveling solo how does it compare to central/eastern Europe? Would it be worth it to skip the Netherlands and spend almost 2 months in Croatia/Serbia/Slovenia and other surrounding countries? Eventually I need to end up in Prague, although I don't plan to spend much time there at all.

Any additional advice regarding any of my destinations would be appreciated as well, of course! Previous threads about Dubrovnik and Ljubljana are what convinced me to head to that part of the world in the first place.

posted by acidic to travel & transportation (7 comments total)

AirNinja lists all low-cost flight routes from Santiago de Compostela. There are cheap, direct flights from Santiago to Graz, Austria via Air Berlin. (Graz is half an hour from Slovenia by car.) Vueling and Clickair (both discount airlines) fly from Santiago to Amsterdam.
posted by limon at 11:13 PM on May 18

Thank you! AirNinja is incredibly helpful.

The cheapest flight I can find for my timeframe from Santiago to Graz is around $270, which I guess isn't bad, but if there's a cheaper or more interesting route that would be great. (Poking around the RyanAir website I see I can fly from Santiago to London then to Zadar for something like $100, which I guess might be my best bet). Would Zadar work as a good starting-off point, if I want to travel both north and south in Croatia, and also to Sarajevo, Belgrade, Ljubljana and Bled? I think that amazing price expires soon (maybe tonight) so I need to figure out if I'm doing the Netherlands or not.
posted by acidic at 11:32 PM on May 18

Or I can fly from Santiago to Frankfurt to Osijek for around $65! But that requires an overnight stay in Frankfurt which might be pricey, unless it's possible to hang around the airport. Does Osijek make more sense? I'm thinking Osijek --> Belgrade (where I'll be farming) --> Sarajevo --> Dubrovnik --> Split and up Croatia and Istria --> Ljubljana and then somehow to Prague (perhaps walking part of the Czech greenways)? Will I miss a lot by skipping Zagreb and a lot of inland Croatia? Is it as easy and inexpensive to travel through Serbia/Bosnia/Croatia by bus and train as I think it is? Safe?

Thanks everyone!
posted by acidic at 11:45 PM on May 18

Skyscanner.net is simply the best air travel search engine, period. AirNinja doesn't have "month view", doesn't offer "countries" or "everywhere" as targets, lacks maps, etc. If you've never used cheap ass airlines like RyanAir, a cheap fair like $1 may not include the taxes, baggage fees, booking fees, etc. plus they love forcing you to buy a last min $300 ticket by first leaving your ass behind.

If you have two months, I'd say stick with trains whenever possible. Trains are already pretty cheap in Italy, Spain, and Eastern Europe, although they may be slow. You should *always* pay for a shared cabin when using sleeper trains in Italy or Eastern Europe, people are regularly robbed in the sleeper seats. You can easily get ferries between Croatia and Italy.

Eurail passes are a good deal in northern Europe, but not southern Europe. In France, Eurail plus cheap TGV reservations are saves a bundle, but reservations are reliably sold out, so you must be quite flexible. In Italy, Eurail reservations are enough that the pass plus the reservation always costs more than the ticket. I hear the reservations alone may cost more than the ticket in Spain.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:57 AM on May 19

Zagreb is the capital, a big, modern town, but there's also a lot of industrial architecture (think big blocks of concrete). You'll miss the little towns around Zagreb, with their Mittel-Europa charm (think Austro-Hungarian empire), some nature, lots of farms... I guess your definition of "missing out" depends on what you want to see and do. The nature could be stunning (don't miss Plitvicka jezera or the waterfalls of Krka), but northeastern Croatia is mostly farmland. (Ooops, I googled WWOOFing, maybe you'd be interested in farmland after all? :)) Croatian coast is not well connected by trains, but there are lots of regular bus lines. Keep an eye on your belongings, don't get drunk and pass out somewhere, if you see trouble brewing stay out of it and you'll be ok. I'm in Ljubljana, lived in Rijeka for some time, so mail me if you need more info. :)
posted by gakiko at 12:58 AM on May 19

In terms of expenses, they're worlds apart; I went from Serbia to northern Europe and the prices jumped by more than an order of magnitude (a bag of fruit or a sandwich that had cost less than $0.50 in Belgrade now cost $5.00). I both travel and live day-to-day on very tight budget, and the feeling of Plenty I experienced in Serbia was remarkable.

I'm also a young solo American female and I felt absolutely welcomed, safe and respected in Serbia (I was in the northern region, in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Sombor and Zrenjanin) -- whereas central Amsterdam at night was the worst gropefest/harassmentfest I've experienced in any city. Utrecht, just a short ride east of Amsterdam, was entirely different: mellow, friendly and totally free of drunk gropey tourists. I hope you can experience lots of different cities in the Netherlands because certainly the nighttime issues in Amsterdam are from asshole tourists rather than natives.

The 'pace' of both regions feels slow, mellow and healthy to me (possibly because my normal environment is NYC :)). I will say Novi Sad, Serbia, is both a gorgeous and fascinating city and the safest I've EVER felt on the streets after midnight in any city -- it has a unique (in my experience) "family nightlife" culture where whole families are still out very late at night, kids still just playing happily in the streets.

For getting to your WWOOFing locations, the ground transportation is dirt cheap bus/train in Eastern Europe and relatively pricey train in the Netherlands.
posted by kalapierson at 11:12 PM on May 22

And here's a 20-second video of the city center in Novi Sad at midnight :)
posted by kalapierson at 11:16 PM on May 22