Backpacking Slovakia: Country #10 in My Journey Around the World

I didn’t go to Slovakia because it was high on my bucket list. Actually, I barely knew anything about Bratislava before I went.

I was in the middle of my first big solo backpacking trip around Europe: 80 days, entirely overland, moving from country to country and figuring everything out as I went. I had just been in Budapest when I realized that going through Bratislava before Vienna was cheaper than heading straight to Austria, so that was basically the entire decision-making process.

I booked one night.

That turned out to be a terrible decision, because within a few hours of finally making it into Bratislava’s Old Town, I was already annoyed that I had to leave the next morning.

I ended up going back.

And looking back now, backpacking Slovakia is still one of the best examples I have of why some of my favorite travel experiences have happened in places I knew absolutely nothing about before arriving.

I had absolutely no expectations for backpacking Slovakia

At that point in my trip, arriving alone in a new country could still be equal parts exciting and terrifying. I was doing the whole solo backpacking thing, but that didn’t mean I magically felt confident all the time.

Bratislava definitely fell into the terrifying category at first.

Before going, I’d mostly heard that it was small, boring, and something people skipped between Budapest, Prague and Vienna. Which obviously made me curious, because I’ve never been particularly good at liking places just because everybody else likes them.

People love Paris. I don’t.

People told me Bratislava was boring. I loved Bratislava.

That apparently tells you everything you need to know about me.

I managed to mess up the journey before I even arrived

I was supposed to leave Budapest relatively early, but my hostel there was way too much fun. I stayed for breakfast, ate until I could barely move, and ended up talking for ages to a Canadian guy I’d met there.

Obviously, I missed my train.

The funny thing is that the conversation was probably more important to me at the time than arriving in Bratislava a few hours earlier. Solo travel was still difficult for me then, and he could obviously tell. He reminded me that even though things had gone wrong, I was still there, still traveling, and still refusing to give up.

That meant a lot to me at the time.

Eventually I said goodbye, got on another train and headed toward Slovakia. I remember sitting by the window watching everything go past and having that feeling I used to get every time I crossed into another country by train: excitement, fear, and absolutely no idea what was waiting for me when I got off.

Arriving in Bratislava scared me more than I expected

My first impression of Bratislava was not particularly promising.

I remember the train approaching the city and seeing an ugly-looking area outside the window while thinking, please don’t let this be Bratislava.

It wasn’t.

Then I eventually arrived, saw the big Welcome to Slovakia sign and immediately switched from panic to being ridiculously proud of myself. That feeling meant a lot more to me back then. I had seen other travelers posting photos from Slovakia online, and suddenly I was the one standing there.

I had actually made it.

That first solo trip was full of moments like that. Places that seem completely normal to me now felt almost unbelievable because I was still proving to myself that I could actually do this.

And then Slovakia immediately brought me back down to earth because I couldn’t even successfully buy a kebab.

The woman didn’t speak English, apparently my improvised sign language wasn’t doing the job either, and I eventually gave up and bought a hot dog outside the station instead.

It cost 0.70€ in 2015, which was so cheap that for a second I genuinely wondered whether Slovakia even used euros.

Excellent start.

Then I got lost for almost two hours

This part is probably the most 2015 travel story imaginable.

I didn’t have directions conveniently saved on my phone. I had looked up how to get to my hostel on my laptop, which made perfect sense until the laptop died.

I had also apparently not considered memorizing either the directions or the actual name of my hostel.

So there I was, alone in Bratislava, carrying around 20 kg, in the rain, with no idea where I was going.

I wandered around for almost two hours before eventually finding the place.

Whenever people assume I became good at traveling because I’ve now been doing it for years, I would like to submit this story as evidence that there was a learning curve.

A very large learning curve.

And then I walked into the Old Town

This was the moment everything changed.

I dropped my backpack at the hostel, got myself together and walked toward Bratislava’s Old Town. And I loved it almost immediately.

The little streets, colorful buildings and almost complete lack of crowds compared with the bigger European cities I’d been visiting were exactly my kind of thing.

Even back then, that was what I liked.

Give me small streets, old colorful buildings and somewhere I can wander around with absolutely no plan, and I’m happy.

Bratislava was small, yes, but that was part of why I liked it. Could you technically see the main sights in one afternoon? Probably. But there’s a difference between being able to physically walk past everything and actually enjoying being somewhere.

Within a few hours, I already knew that booking only one night had been stupid.

My first night also confirmed that I should never cook

Some things have changed dramatically since 2015.

This has not.

I decided I should save money by going to the supermarket and cooking dinner at the hostel. That was mistake number one.

I couldn’t find some of the ingredients I wanted, there were language barriers, I apparently bought things I wasn’t entirely sure about, and eventually produced something so bad that even I couldn’t really identify it.

Then I burned it.

The guys hanging around the hostel tried to be encouraging and told me it smelled good, but they were also drunk, so their opinions cannot be considered reliable.

I barely ate the thing.

More than ten years later, my opinion remains that sometimes paying somebody else to cook your food is simply responsible financial planning.

I left Bratislava already wanting to come back

The next morning, I had to leave, and I was genuinely annoyed with myself.

I’d listened to people saying Bratislava only needed a few hours, booked almost no time there, and then discovered that I actually wanted to stay.

So I fixed the problem.

A couple of weeks later, my route brought me toward Vienna again, and instead of skipping Slovakia this time, I returned to Bratislava for another couple of days.

That second stay became an entirely different experience.

I found half of Portugal in a Bratislava hostel

On my first night back, I was in my dorm when two guys and a girl walked in making loads of noise.

Then they started speaking Portuguese.

Of all the hostel rooms in Slovakia, I had somehow ended up sharing mine with three other Portuguese people.

We started talking immediately, and suddenly I had a little Bratislava group. We explored together, went up toward the castle, tried Slovak food and went out for drinks.

Because I’d already been there, I even got to pretend I knew what I was doing and play tour guide for approximately five minutes.

There was also a Brazilian guy staying at the hostel, so somehow there were five Portuguese speakers in the same hostel in Bratislava.

Completely normal.

But one of my favorite parts of that story actually happened later. One of the Portuguese girls I randomly met in that dorm later welcomed me into her home in Warsaw, and we ended up traveling together through the Baltic countries.

At the time, I obviously had no idea that walking into one random hostel room in Slovakia would affect the rest of my trip.

That’s probably one of the things I miss most about that type of backpacking. You couldn’t plan those moments if you tried.

Backpacking Slovakia taught me not to trust everybody else’s opinion of a place

Bratislava wasn’t the biggest city I visited on that trip. It didn’t have the famous attractions of Paris or Rome, and there wasn’t some enormous list of things I felt I needed to tick off.

None of that mattered.

I liked being there.

I liked wandering around. I liked that it wasn’t packed with tourists. I liked the Old Town. I liked that I had arrived expecting practically nothing and found somewhere I genuinely wanted to return to.

And that lesson has followed me through a ridiculous number of countries since.

Someone else’s boring place can be your favorite place, and someone else’s must-see destination can leave you wondering what all the fuss was about.

Travel gets much more interesting when you stop assuming you’re supposed to like the same places as everybody else.

Would I recommend backpacking Slovakia solo?

Based on my own experience in Bratislava, yes.

And what’s funny is that I was genuinely nervous about going there in the beginning. The train station intimidated me, the language barrier threw me off, I managed to get completely lost, and I was still inexperienced enough with solo travel that every small problem felt enormous.

But I never actually felt unsafe there.

Once I settled in, Bratislava became one of the places where I felt most comfortable during that part of the trip.

Of course, my trip happened years ago, so I wouldn’t use my 2015 experience to tell you current prices or pretend nothing has changed. But the experience itself is still one I’d happily repeat.

Looking back at my Slovakia trip now

It’s funny reading what I wrote about Bratislava while I was actually there.

I was so new to all of this.

Getting to another country felt like an enormous achievement. Missing a train was a crisis. Finding a 0.70€ hot dog was headline news. And getting lost without knowing the name of my hostel was somehow a problem I had allowed myself to create.

But that version of me also had something I sometimes have to remind myself not to lose after years of traveling.

Everything felt new.

I didn’t need some extraordinary activity to make a place interesting. Sometimes arriving somewhere I’d never expected to visit, wandering around streets I’d never seen before and meeting people I hadn’t known existed that morning was enough.

That’s what Slovakia was for me.

I went because it happened to make sense between Budapest and Vienna. I left wondering why I’d only booked one night.

Then I came back.

And more than a decade later, Bratislava is still one of the places I remember most clearly from that first solo backpacking trip.

Not bad for a city everybody told me was boring.