I love to travel and as a destination Europe provides with the perfect opportunities for travel.

Last year in August, me and my friends were looking at similar options and we decided to do a trip of Eastern part of Europe - Poland, Czech, Hungary and Romania.

However, due to the requirement of a separate visa for Romania and the long processing time for the same, we dropped Romania and included Croatia and Turkey in our itinerary.

We flew Turkish airways from Mumbai to Vienna (with a stopover at Istanbul). Initially, we did not relate Turkish airways to comfortable travel - but we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the flights.

We landed in Vienna and as we had no plans to spend any time in the city, took a night train from Vienna to Krakow - the cultural capital of Poland and had 2 days to spend there. The train arrived a couple of hours late (which we learnt later was not too unusual for Eastern part of Europe)

We spend one day going around the city - visiting the city center and the various historical monuments (missed Schindler's factory though). The city center of Krakow was amazingly nice with its cafes and pubs in addition to street performances that we heard was commonplace in older European cities.


The next day was reserved for Auschwitz, the only surviving and the oldest concentration camp of Nazi times. The place is situated at a one-hour train ride from Krakow. We visited both the original camp, which ran for most part of the 6-year German occupation of the city as well as the later made, but much larger Bilkeneau camp, which was the place where the largest number of Jews were murdered.


It was an overwhelming experience and the gloomy weather on the day also reflected the mood that came onto us when we heard about the atrocities at the place.

We thoroughly enjoyed our experience in Poland. A more detailed trip report can be found at : http://wanderer-abhijit.blogspot.in/...auschwitz.html

Will post reports of the other legs of the trip soon.