ROB CAMERON

“Could you,” I once asked a train-mad friend “travel right across the Czech Republic using only the slow, stopping trains?” The answer was yes, as I and another friend proved in 2007. We spent 19 days covering 2,000 kilometres, setting foot in over 80 towns and villages, and crossing the border into Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Austria. This is an audio diary of that journey.

When the EU’s Schengen zone expanded in 2007 to include much of Central and Eastern Europe, one of the least enthusiastic countries was Austria, where fear of foreigners has long dominated the national debate. But in the far east of Austria, along the River Danube that forms the border with Slovakia, the reality of Schengen has changed both attitudes and lives.

A brown bear that injured five people during a rampage in a Slovak town has been shot dead, Environment Minister Tomas Taraba says. However, opposition politicians believe hunters may have shot a different bear, and are calling for answers. Controlling Slovakia’s bear population has become a highly politicised issue under the new populist-nationalist government.

The Czech police force has come under fire for writing numbers on the arms of migrants at Breclav railway station. Some said the images were reminiscent of the Holocaust, when prisoners at Auschwitz were systematically tattooed with serial numbers. But the Czech authorities appeared unaware of the visual connotations, and said they were simply administrative.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico is defying EU officials in the migrant crisis – and may win re-election on Saturday. Slovak voters will decide whether to give his Smer party another four years in office. Fico told a crowd of supporters in a packed sports hall in Bratislava he would not “bring one single Muslim to Slovakia’ as part of an EU quota system.

When communism collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe, previously unobtainable goods flooded the market. Today, shops and supermarkets offer broadly the same food and drink as in the West – a tangible result of global capitalism. But something is dawning on Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians: the labels are the same, but the contents might not be.

Czech voters are likely to hand power to controversial billionaire Andrej Babiš, the country’s second-richest man who ran on an anti-corruption platform but is himself under investigation. The campaign has been dominated by big themes including euro adoption, immigration and the relationship with Russia, but also some more obscure ones, such as the price of butter.

The Slovak government has approved a plan to shoot around a quarter of the country’s brown bears, after a man was mauled to death while walking in a forest. A total of 350 out of an estimated 1,300 animals will be culled under the plan. “We can’t live in a country where people are afraid to go into the woods,” Prime Minister Robert Fico told reporters after a cabinet meeting.