Prague is just a hop, skip and a jump away from Vienna so the sister and I decided to give it a bash.

After hitting the snooze button no less than four times, we finally made it to the train station in Vienna from which we THOUGHT we were leaving for Prague. In fact, we made it with time to spare - only to stand in the ticket queue behind a tiresome old woman who spent twenty minutes showing the ticket guy photos of her grandkids before actually buying her ticket. Then we discovered we were at the wrong station anyway – we were leaving from Vienna South, not Vienna West - so one mad cross-city dash later we finally made it to our (already overflowing) train.

There was more security on this train than I’ve seen anywhere outside of London the day of the bombings. No sooner had we settled back to enjoy our chocolate croissants when the Austrian passport controllers swept through, followed by the Czech customs officials hot on the heels of the ticket conductor. On the upside, this doubled my passport stamps to a hefty grand total of four (one Austrian, one Czech, one Croatian and one from Sydney airport).

We knew we’d crossed the border into the Czech Republic when we lost sight of vowels. We passed many a train station with 25 letters plus in the name, and all of them consonants. It was also a return to the post-war shabby-chic theme of Croatia, only this time with an added twist – let’s call it post-communism shabby chic. Ugly brown apartment buildings with smashed windows, peeling paint and crumbling chimneys, wrecked car yards and dirty, dirty rivers.