When I arrived in Montenegro three months ago, one of the things that struck me first was how safe things felt.

What was I expecting?

Well, not a lot of armed thugs or anything. But I'd traveled enough in the former communist corners of Europe -- including past trips into the Balkans -- to notice a slightly different atmosphere than you feel in more staid places like the Netherlands or Germany. There isn't the sense of order you find in those places, and that absence piques your alertness. It's not that you are in danger at all, but you are certainly a little more aware of your surroundings.

Before coming to Montenegro, I'd last been in the Balkans -- specifically Croatia and Bosnia -- four years before. These recent months of traveling in the region has had a decidedly different feel -- Albania being a noteworthy exception.

Turns out that the United Nations is feeling pretty bullish on the Balkans as well.

The UN released a surprising report yesterday that called the Balkans perhaps Europe's safest region, saying countries like Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia boast lower numbers of murders, rapes and petty crime than western Europe.

"The Balkans is departing from an era when demagogues, secret police and thugs profited from sanctions-busting and the smuggling of people, arms, cigarettes and drugs," the report said.

The report surveyed nine countries: Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Albania, Moldova, Bulgaria and Romania.

The report still notes the pervasiveness of corruption and organized crime activities, however.

Of course, a fair question to ask about this report in general is: Compared to what?

After all, the UN notes -- in a major nod to the obvious, it seems to me -- that regular crimes, including homicides and rapes, "across the region are by far lower than they used to be, particularly in the beginning of the 1990s." Well duh. At the beginning of the 1990s, didn't you have widespread instability and lawlessness in places like Romania, Bulgaria and Albania as they emerged out of communism? Didn't you have a regional war that engulfed Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro in an orgy of killing and destruction that lasted nearly five years?

To compare crime rates in some of these countries now to a time when crime was the only thing that counted doesn't seem to say much. It would have been more useful for the UN to note how things have changed in, say, the last five years.

There is nothing more bucolic when traveling in far off lands than to share the roadway with a horse and cart. When I first came across this scene somewhere in Romania in the early 1990s, it was as though I had traveled back in time. I had no idea that people in Europe still traveled in such a style in the 20th century.

Truth be told, they still do today--but at least not in Romania anymore. A new law prohibits horses and carts from the country's main arteries. The reason is that they are responsible for 10% of the nation's auto accidents.

I witnessed this firsthand when I was hitchhiking through Romania in 1991. A Hungarian family that picked me up had hit a horse just a few miles earlier. They would hit another one a week later when leaving the country.

The problem with the new law, however, is that the horse and cart are still a primary form of transport for the country folk who live outside of the larger cities. In fact, for many Romanians it's their only form of transport. That explains why there are 740,000 horse carts registered in Romania according to a recent BBC article.

While such a law will certainly decrease the amount of accidents on the road, it's going to make life a whole lot harder for the struggling populace. And, more selfishly from a travel perspective, I will be sad to see the anachronistic horse-cart-and-Mercedes spectacle disappear from the roadways of Romania.

Related: My Bloody Romania

(Photo by cashewnuts via Flickr)

With all due respect to my generous client Lonely Planet, without whom I'd still be an obscure, broke, moonshine junkie in a forlorn corner of Romania, guidebook authors wallowing below the Sushi Line are increasingly probing new "Screw the Man" applications for their hard-won expertise - namely their very own online travel guides.

There's certainly something to be said for a trusted brand name guidebook, but equally independently produced, digital travel guides allow authors to toss in all kinds of wacky content in addition to the usual sights/eating/sleeping content, uncorrupted by editors, guidelines, house styles and meddling lawyers.

A 2,000 word, absurdly detailed walking guide to Tijuana? Why not? A sidebar entitled "Top Ten Curse Words You Should Know Before Attending an Italian Football (Soccer) Match"? Bring it on! Why [insert your least favorite German city] sucks? I'm all ears.

This developing genre was recently augmented by the completion of Robert Reid's online guide to Vietnam. As Reid rightly points out, the advantages of an independent online travel guide are numerous:

• It's free - Guidebooks cost $25. Why pay?
• It's fresher. Unlike a guidebook, turn-around time is immediate.
• You can customize it. The most common complaint guidebook users have is having to tote around 400 pages they'll never use.
• It's more direct, personalized. With my site I can 'tell it like it is'.
• Anyone can talk with the author. [Just] hit 'contact'.

In addition to this excellent resource, other free sites serving the online travel community include Croatia Traveller, Kabul Caravan, Turkey Travel Planner, Broke-Ass Stewart's Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco, and (cough), the Romania and Moldova Travel Guide (now with extra moonshine).

For the time being, these independent travel guides are usually not money-making ventures (and boy do they take a lot of time to put together!), thus the current scarcity. However, as print media gasps to its inevitable conclusion – one decade, mark my words - the online stage is set for authors to leverage their expertise and provide autonomous, interactive, up-to-the-minute travel information for anyone with an internet connection.

I've never watched a horror movie from start to finish and I'm not a fan of haunted houses. Needless to say, I didn't have high hopes that I would make it through Eric Nuzum's new book about stalking vampires. But the title intrigued me enough to start it, and then, well -- when a book begins with someone attempting to drink their own blood, you just can't help but get sucked in.

For Nuzum, it all started over breakfast one day when he noticed several vampire references pop up during the course of his morning meal. His curiosity at the ubiquity of vampires eventually grew into an all-out quest to discover what makes these fanged bloodsuckers so darn popular. The results of his research are gathered in The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula, an intelligent and thoroughly entertaining look at the world's fascination with these mysterious creatures.

Tracking the history of vampires took Eric from his home in D.C. to a handful of U.S. cities, as well Romania and England. Along the way he made friends with a countess, spent time in a coffin, almost lost his lunch on a road trip through Transylvania, conducted crucial investigative research at the Las Vegas topless revue Bite, and watched a ton of horrible vampire movies (216 out of a possible 605 films that exist.)

Kelly's post on haunted hotels reminded me of when I was a kid. There was an abandoned house on my grandparents' street that was too hard to ignore. One Halloween my cousins and I dared each other to run across the front porch and knock on the front door after dark. Imagine my surprise when, instead of my fist meeting the glass of the door's window as I expected, my fist kept going. There wasn't any glass. Yep, I screamed and ran like hell. For years, each time I visited my grandparents and passed the house, even after a family moved in and fixed it up, I remembered the delicious feeling of being spooked.

That house was small potatoes compared to the list of 13 of the world's most creepy places that Ralph Martin at Concierge.com has cooked up. I could almost feel that tickle of a breath on the back of my neck when I read about them. Just look at the photo of Bhangharh, India, a town where people haven't lived since 1640 because, possibly, a bunch of people who lived there were massacred, and the rest fled never to return. Notice those monkeys? See how they are just sitting there watching the tourists who come by day and leave by night? Images of Hitchcock's horror flick, "The Birds," come to mind.

Here are more of the 13.

How exactly does one pick just five posts to highlight out of a week's worth of post bounty? Impossible, I say. Particularly since we have one more blogger on our team who has been a writing fiend ever since he started posting on Monday. Blogger Grant Martin has an eye and ear out for cheap travel and the bizarre story like Delta Requires Two Seats for Conjoined Twins.

Then there is Leif Pettersen's last post on his hilarious series My Bloody Romania. He's back in Minnesota thinking that everywhere he goes smells like french fries. I'll miss Leif's missives here, but more can be found at his blog Killing Batteries.

Does anyone else have perma-smell associations for whole countries? One scent that transports your brain to a specific country, drops you on a random street and makes you dreamily reminisce about the life you could have had with the achingly cute girl that worked at the local travel agency that not so subtly offered to give you a 'private tour' (nudge-nudge) and you distractedly turned her down because you had to go review three hotels and two restaurants that afternoon and you then decide that you're a thick-skulled jackass for not noticing the palpable flirty signs until you thought about it two days later while sitting on the train to the next city and then you wonder how the hell anyone that is so painfully unobservant could possibly be trusted to be a travel writer? Show of hands?

Some countrywide perma-smell association examples: France smells like butter. Italy smells like garlic. Romania smells like a mix of pălincă and grass (with a hint of manure).

So what's the overriding smell I associate with the US? French fry grease. It's everywhere. If you're saying to yourself "Well it doesn't smell like French fry grease at my house!", you're wrong grandma. It most certainly does, you've just gotten used to it.

People are often taken off guard when I tell them that I've spent about 17 cumulative months in Romania. Inevitably, wooden stake at the ready, they start digging about what the hell kept me here so long.

Is it the low cost of living? Initially yes, but with the US dollar tanking and the Romanian lei gaining, I could almost live cheaper in Miami these days.

Is it the scantly clad girls? Well, duh.

Is it the orgy of high-speed file sharing going on that's better than any software store, CD shop and on-demand satellite service combined? I don't know what you mean detective.

But, there's a bunch of non-financial, non-depraved and non-somewhat illegal reasons as well. Though hardly pious, a primary incentive to get good and comfortable here for a while is the availability and shocking low price of decent alcohol, namely wine.

Before you read another word, click over to yellowpages.com and locate the Romanian restaurant nearest to your home (if you are actually in Romania, you are not eligible for this exercise).

So, how far away is the restaurant? Depending on your continent, it's anywhere from 1,000 to 12,000 miles away, right? With the rare, screwball exception (Los Gatos, California comes to mind), you just don't see Romanian restaurants abroad. Why is that? Some might be tempted to wryly reply "Because if I wanted to eat cabbage, potatoes and cornmeal mush, I'd go back to summer camp in Alabama."

Certainly, Romanians love their cornmeal mush like few other sentient beings in the known universe, but Romanian cuisine is far more complex and surprisingly savory than most people know.

Dateline: A mud puddle the size of Delaware in Southern Bucovina

There's a hardcore subset of people wandering around Southern Bucovina visiting all the monasteries by foot - backpacks piled high with camping gear, all-weather clothing, muesli and vampire bat spray. I'm not one of those people. I retired from carrying all my crap on my back in 1994 when a chronic back injury combined with a Dr. Seuss caliber over-stuffed backpack aged my spine about 50 years in four months.

I'm a wheelie bag guy now and proud of it. Some backpacker purists feel that wheelie bags are a cop out. These people are dough heads. Furthermore, at the end of the day of wheelie bagging I feel great and I smell divine. At the end of a day of backpacking, most people look like refugees in need of an industrial jet-wash with a mixture of bleach and tomato juice.

The only downside to wheelie bagging (well, some call it a 'down side', I call it 'the best part') is that you are limited to day trips, like the one I'm taking now: the 'Prince Charles Walk' from Putna Monastery to Suceviţa Monastery.