Serbia in Photos
DJ Lazar keeps the music flowing while the local rakija brewer presents us with his ambrosia.
The next day, I make merry with the town poets...
...and say goodbye to my Serbian family
2000km clocked up, all good so far
And a beautiful sunset backlights the Orthodox church as I cross into Bulgaria
Border to Belgrade
I cross into Serbia by night, passing Slobomir City – billed “The City of Freedom and Peace” – that looked like a bit of an US and EU funded reconciliation project cum white elephant. It’s a crystal clear night and I stop a while to watch the stars over a bite to eat. I’ve squeezed over a hundred and twenty kilometres out of my legs in a nasty headwind and I am afraid that they’ll refuse to budge tomorrow, my last day before Belgrade – I even briefly consider cycling through the night while they are still warm.
I knock on a door to discover a mini-fiesta celebrating the the birth of the owner’s first child and I enjoy a few beers before sleeping in his absent sister’s chalet, decorated with life drawings.
The headwind continues unabated the next day and I can only manage a paltry fifteen km/h average speed. Sometimes I wonder whether it is better to be going downhill where you struggle against the wind or uphill where you struggle against the slope but the wind is blocked! The slipstream caused by passing trucks also causes some frustrations as you are suddenly jerked forward and then blown back when the truck passes.
The Serbian countryside is quite pleasant when not passing industrial areas and I pick up the trail of Sava river again. After some minor chaos entering Belgrade, I find myself relaxing with fellow travellers at the Three Katz Inn, where I enjoy the rest and city for three nights. I have started using a website called
http://www.couchsurfing.com/ to meet local people (and possibly a place to stay) and my first experience of it is
meeting Marko for a coffee, football match on TV and a chat about Irish and Serbian politics and history. Even for Serbian university graduates it's a struggle to find a decently paid job and even harder to get a foreign work visa.
In Belgrade I get some bad news, I need to be in England for a training course on the 8th of July - this
means that part of the journey will have to be done by train and I have to pick up my pace on the road to Istanbul. With this in mind I take up my struggle against the wind which seems to be following my direction, during my rest in Belgrade it has changed from Easterly to South Easterly. Having enquired about the enforcement of Serbian motorway law I decide to go for it, and before the toll plaza I slip off my bike, walk through looking unconcerned and use the trucks to block the line of sight between me and the police.
P.S. I'm hoping to do a big update now am going to switch the format to photo based with a few lines for context. Hopefully that will mean it will not only be quicker for you to read but quicker for me to write!
Detour through Bosnia
In the hazy morning, I pause to warm up at a café - a working man’s place with the typical calendar posters of topless women straddling motorbikes. I ask for some information about the road ahead since there is a gap in my maps and they kindly give me a map of the area. I notice Srbenik in Bosnia Herzegovina, the place of the massacre in 1995 and decide to reroute from the direct road to Serbia, crossing at a border post one hour’s cycle away.
The roads in Bosnia are terrible and, again, remnants of the recent war are omnipresent. People are very friendly and each time I stop to rest, people offer me their house to sleep in. One man asks me to take a photo of his family outside his destroyed house and to give it to newspapers in Ireland so that people will send him money. The conversation goes like this: “Serbians (Over arm throwing motion), Grenade, Boom!” to which I reply with “In Irlanski, Ingliski (Over arm throwing motion), Grenade, Boom!” which reduced them to tears of laughter.
The call to prayers informs me of dusk and I keep cycling for an hour in the dark before pulling up to a farmer’s house and asking to sleep in the garden. They understand what I am saying but put me on the phone to their English-speaking niece just to double check. Tomic, a brother, arrives and we discover that we both speak French and have much to talk about, he having lived in Nice for eight years and having served on peacekeeping missions with the Yugoslav army in francophone D.R. Congo, both places I have spent time in the last six months. They cook me a lovely dinner and the whole family assembles to watch me eat it.
The next day I realise that Srbenik is unfortunately not Srebrenica (which is 200km further south) as I thought and I decide to take the most direct route to Serbia. I have coffee and rakija, a locally brewed whisky, for breakfast and head off. The rakija goes almost immediately to my head and I have to stop after 20 minutes to eat some cereal to dilute the effects. The day is tough going, and I have now accepted the Slavic translation of the English word flat to mean not extremely mountainous rather than the more commonly accepted definition. At a town approaching the border with Serbia, I ask some police for directions to the crossing and after some consultation they give me an escourt for about 5 kilometres, bringing traffic to a crawling pace, before stopping at a fast food restaurant off the road in the direction of the post.
P.S. Just to give you the quick update (as in to this date!), I am actually in Tehran at the minute and, contrary to what the lack of blog updates might suggest, I am still alive! Unfortunately, due to some work commitments, I had to speed up my trip by taking a train from Istanbul to Tehran in order to make it to Central Asia and will be flying back to London on the 5th of July.
Some of the highlights, which will be soon described, include a 21st birthday party in Southern Serbia, tailwinds through Bulgaria, being chased by a pack of dogs (my arch-enemies), a mayoral meeting in small town Turkey, a three day train ride and an unexpected drinking party in the mountains overlooking Tehran.
