On Apr 25, 2006, at 10:23 PM, Klaus W. Eisenlohr wrote:

Dear Kyong Park,
Thank you very much for sending infos on the Lost Highway Expedition.
It all looks very interesting, I just have some more questions:
Marjetica Potrc told me about an organized trip in Balkan and inbetween the cities. All I can find on the internet so far is a series of exhibitions and projects in the mentioned cities, but no trip.
Do you organize a travel, too? Or does everybody have to travel independently? Do you know about costs for travel?
I would be really really interested, especially as I have been working on public space and have curated video work concerned with Urban Research in Berlin. However, and sadly, I am very low on money, and I will not be able to just take a car (I do not own one) or the train for all the sections of LHE.

Thank you so much for your time and good luck with the project preparations. I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Klaus
--
Klaus W. Eisenlohr, Berlin

On Apr 28, 2006, at 12:57 PM, Kyong Park wrote:

Dear Klaus

Thanks for your interest on LHE. Everyone is to self organize their trip. This is because we do not want to become a travel agent and LHE becomes a tourist festival. This way, people will really have full impact on the isolation of WB, and that becomes their own experience to share, in the web and LHE meetings. But of course we will help you, and we are currently organizing on such matter, to find a balance between self-organization and coordination between people and places. By the end of MAY, our web site will have much more info on these practical matters, that is on the menus of MOVING, EATING and SLEEPING. We also hope that each of participants would self suggest such info, and share among other participants, by uploading their previous experiences and new info into our web, thereby, initiating relations between participants that would bring successful and cooperative LHE 'society' during the events through the cities in August. Our web, currently is disorganized intentionally, so that we can respond to your actions. However, it will have its first structural organization by the end of next week, and hopefully it will be much more friendly, inviting and navigational.

Now as far as traveling cost is concerned, we expect that people will travel in all kinds of transportation forms. By air, train, cars, buses and who knows? We will promote, transportation sharing, especially cars and trains and buses, to have shared experiences and costs. This will soon be promoted in our web. Our intention of movement of participants should be pixelized and unplanned mostly. This is so that LHE participants will cover wide areas of territories and gain different experiences during LHE, meaning that we never thought of organizing a caravan of buses for instance, that would make us a expedition of pensioners. This open minded travel concept is also for the participants to experience the difficulty of moving from one city to another in WB, which in post-Yugoslavia, the disconnection of transportation infrastructure reflects the break up of political union, as well as, the emergence of independent, of course, nationalistic tendencies. This is all part of Balkanization, and we should all experience this first hand.

In general, from the experience of myself and Marjetica's joint travel through all of these cities, with the exception of Podgorica, slightly more than a year ago, that inspired this project, is the following

Train connections are general available between cities of
Ljubljana, Zagreb, Novi Sad, Belgrade
The cost are very minor. For instance from Ljubljana to Belgrade is only 30 Euros in 2nd class and there are 4 trains between them daily, but takes almost 10 hours.
http://www.slovenia-tourism.si/?rail_travel=0&lng=2
There are trains from Belgrade to Skopje but takes 10 hours also
So you can see that things are different here in WB
There are trains from Graz, Vienna, Venice to Ljubljana.

Buses are good options, and usually faster. and they are available and is the most popular forms of transportation between WB cities.

Taxis are used between southern cities. We used them between Pristina, Skopje, Tirana for instance. It usually is about 30 euros to each borders, then there are taxis on the other side of border that you can hire. Its very common there.

There are flights available between cities, the best is to check JAT air [Yugolslvia Air], and recently they started low fare flights between major WB cities. Or Adria Air, the Slovenian airline. For instance roundtrip between Rotterdam and Ljubljana can be under 300 euros. EasyJet has flights from Berlin and London to Ljubljana.

However, only Ljubljana and Zagreb has cheap air flights with Europe, Ryan Air for Zagreb. Best to check this site for such cheap flights between EU and WB.
http://www.flycheapo.com/
This site gives info to the availability of cheap air in all major European cities.

SLEEPING
We need to further develop this, but here are our future strategy.
1. Coordinate with our LHE cities to create stays at homes of local people, and make this available in our web site.
2 Coordinate between LHE travelers so that they can share SLEEPING, or make group bookings.

For now, I hope this helps. I hope you don't mind that I 'upload' this communication to our web site so that others can read this information.

Kyong Park