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  • George Hardwick

balkans2024

A 69-day adventure by George Read more
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  • Trip start
    April 12, 2024
    George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Belgrade

    April 12, 2024 in Serbia ⋅ ☀️ 24 °C

    Where have I been all this time,
    since I first stood on these cobbles
    nestled in the elbow of great rivers?

    Musicians rove and spill country tunes
    up into the cool night air
    and voices raise in drunken song.

    We celebrate a summer promised,
    good to come flowing to us
    on the waters, meandering under the fort.

    **

    Moonlight pools on the calm and protected oasis. The brutal block building stands as a bulwark against the musical human chaos of the street beyond. I lean against the brick wall of the courtyard, beer on the table, and gear up, get ready to launch out from the peace into the wild world out there.

    **
    An unseasonably golden sun hangs over the confluence of the two rivers, casting bugs and birds in a glow of amber. Tennis balls thwump on clay.

    **

    Gunshots rang out one day inside this school,
    (renewed echoes of the bombs that fell - 1862, 1914, 1941, 1944, 1999) killing nine children and one man. How many more times can a city rebuild itself without losing its heart?

    **
    Lightning crackles from the atop the hulking coil, illuminating the lamp-sticks held aloft in electric ceremony. Can you picture them, worshippers of the great mechanical thunder, huddled around their snapping copper altar?

    **    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Belgrade -> Sarajevo

    Apr 16–17, 2024 in Bosnia and Herzegovina ⋅ ⛅ 14 °C

    "Them big ideas, are buried here."

    The bus driver chain-smokes out the window all night. He stops to fill his dashboard fridge with orange-pink jumbo bottles of juice. For his passengers? For hospitality?

    Apparently not.

    Before the border, the bus pulls up to a random police checkpoint. The officers get a juice. It's a country town, and it feels like a tumbleweed might just chase the stray dogs across the street; the street's a straight line, dusty, lined with aggrandized farmhouses. The bus is a horse, riding the backroads, somewhere in some deep south of this not-America. The country this is, its details, blur into the thick night - the only specific is the illuminated church cupolas perching between bends on the flat land - until the border comes sharply into focus.

    There's no mistaking where you've arrived at. A flag flutters, a blue and a yellow field cut diagonally across, a parade of white stars on the blue following the incline. The Bosnian border guards get a juice.

    The crescent moon dips behind the treeline by the roadside. Waiting for all our documents to be checked at the border bridge. Midnight birds chirp and sing by the riverside, and human song echoes off the water, from a small-town nightclub. A friendly dog with a wagging stub-tail mingles with us huddled border-crossers, looking for our snacks.

    We hop back onto the bus. Someone gets dropped off at a random bus station. The attendant there gets a juice, and a joke. Sarajevo glitters into sight, chalet lights glowing on the hillsides. Arrival, a chill wind and lazily rising sun.

    "Can we stand for somethin'?
    Now is the time to face the wind"
    ~ American Requiem, B    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Sarajevo I

    Apr 16–22, 2024 in Bosnia and Herzegovina ⋅ ⛅ 15 °C

    Olympics:

    Concrete snakes writhe down the steep mountainside, dropping away, extreme, into the mystery of heavy cloud, emerging again when it clears. We move slow, slower than the design encouraged, so much slower than the bullet vessels that raced to the bottom. It's slow enough to see the pine trees we pass. The branches steam and fizz with rising vapour, yesterday's snow heading back to the sky, like the aroma of a cup of coffee, floating up.

    We splash in slushy puddles on the hard track, and laugh about taking pictures of ourselves here - for our mothers' benefits, of course - not our own. The graffiti backdrop to our poses reclaims these abandoned grey superstructures, like colourful flowers growing through the cracks of abandoned houses. You wonder if it was worth it, to build all of this edifice, imprint it upon your landscape forever, for the sake of a day or two of spectacle - when it didn't stop hell from raining down. didn't hold together a brittle peace when it needed to the most? These tracks lie in testament to a particular piece of the past - structures, and a past, that we don't know what do with. It all just sits on the mountainsides and in the valley, remembering and waiting, existing yet hidden, brimming with overcoats of new life, yet statically and monolithically future-less.    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Sarajevo II

    Apr 16–22, 2024 in Bosnia and Herzegovina ⋅ ⛅ 15 °C

    Roses:

    He kneels on the flagstones. His joints creak in the cold. Winter has made another vengeful comeback, a knife of ice through the string of warming spring days up to now. It's cold, he thinks, just like in that basement, especially when it was just him and Esma there, when everyone else was out looking for a potato, an egg, a life, dodging bullets from beyond.

    *like a child's scrawling of a red sun, and its striated(?) radiating rays*    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Mostar

    Apr 22–24, 2024 in Bosnia and Herzegovina ⋅ ⛅ 15 °C

    From foggy valley to bright highlands,
    babbling shallow river to one deep and fast,
    meeting, crossing, advancing
    By bridges upon bridges upon bridges.
    Bodies of water made liminal,
    no one's land (no land at all, in truth).
    This is the domain of swifts and ducks,
    unknowing and unfeeling of the worlds
    people make on either bank of their river.

    And when the bridges come crashing down,
    or provide target practice for snipers,
    they become wild things of rock, again,
    become strange formations to be navigated,
    or nested upon, or yearned for, or ignored,
    by bird, fish,butterfly, or person
    (humans another animal in the landscape).
    That's what war reminds us, that we are
    all just scuttling creatures, predators and prey.    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Budva, Montenegro

    Apr 24–27, 2024 in Montenegro ⋅ ⛅ 15 °C

    hike~

    Take it to the mountain. Walk it off, walk it out. Follow a thin green line on your phone screen, walk and taxi and walk again, not sure quite where the line leads. But it's somewhere, somewhere to be.

    Your feel your feet on the gravelly ground. Lizards with no legs skitter pasty, and furballs with no heads scratch in the bushes, and your journey becomes intertwined with theirs, counted no more in cities and borders, but in trees and stones. The scale of your A-B becomes infinitely smaller, and yet vastly more epic. Nothing could be more totemic and ancient than pressing on, through whip-crack branches and humming undergrowth, from the sandy beach to rocky outcrops high above.

    You clamber over dry-stone walls - or are they the exposed stone of the mountainside, tumbled and piled up without the aid of a human hand at all? Tadpoles sit in the mud, waiting for metamorphosis. You trek up behind the empty farmhouse, the abandoned millstone leaning in disrepair. A marvellous friend crosses your path, totally unexpectedly - a wild tortoise. You try to feed her a nearby fuzzy caterpillar, but she isn't hungry. Maybe that's her friend. She hurries to hide from me under a bush (taking her two minutes to travel approximately zero metres, of course). You leave her be.

    The Adriatic pops up through the treeline, sapphire and light. You found somewhere to be. You were there.

    ~ from water...

    The water has gone, disconnected:
    the pristine enclave runs dry,
    cut off from showers,
    cappuccinos, everything.
    You wash and drink from a bottle,
    in a walled desert island unto itself,
    while luxury tourism consumes,
    metres away, unabashed,
    with boats bobbing in the marina.

    "The thing is, having no water really is a bit of a bummer, isn't it?" - plummy British tourist

    ...to wine ~

    The drought breaks -
    glorious flow restored.
    An apology in red appears,
    "Sorry for the disruption"
    "Enjoy this free wine on us."
    Suddenly the lack of water
    Is forgotten - click, pour.    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Kotor, Montenegro

    Apr 27–30, 2024 in Montenegro ⋅ ☀️ 18 °C

    Ladders~

    Rung by rung, focus on the climb, don't look up or down...

    -

    The hulking, shadowy structure is abandoned, almost by all - there is no graffiti or signs of inhabitance. You might be the only ones to come here since its last life ended and this new, shady one began. The decommissioned, cavernous rooms brood in pure darkness, their air thick with lost memories. The setting sun can't touch them. Empty shafts drop down to basements, who knows how far into the mountain rock.

    You scramble past wooden beams and up a ladder, out a hatch and onto the roof, reborn into the golden light. The beauty all around - does it heighten this ruin, elevate it to beauty too, by dint of its adjacency? Or is it an ugly scar of men on a pristine landscape?

    -

    Another (alleged) ladder, at an older fort, this one scorched in the sun. It's a rusty frame, leaning against the back wall of the castle, barely half the height of the window hole you must scooch through, if you want to slip in the back way and avoid the entrance fee. You wound your way up an hour of hairpin turn-slopes, loose stones underfoot - this ladder won't stop you getting up into this fort. You boost yourself up onto the window ledge and pull yourself in the back way. When you stand up and take a step forward, the town and fjord unfold below you.

    -

    Divebomb splash into cool lake waters, white wine bottle resting on the table behind you. Bodies plop in all around you, music blasts and laughter rings out. You paddle over and grip the shiny silver rungs of the boat's ladder, pulling yourself up out of the water, water washing away all your cares and concerns. You just hold onto the ladder, try not to slip and horrifically bruise your belly like that one time nine years ago in waters clearer and deeper than these...    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Niš, Serbia

    May 1–2, 2024 in Serbia ⋅ ☀️ 13 °C

    On the bus, you open your eyes to a glorious sunrise over the rolling vineyard hills of southern Serbia. A toddler pokes her head over the seat in front of you, and gives you a cherubic smile, the sun behind her giving her a glowing halo. It's early morning on the holiday May 1st, a new day, a new month. The streets of Niš are silent and wake slowly and gently on their day off.

    -

    These little stopovers, rough diamonds, can be real gems. I hang here, between Montenegro and Bulgaria, quite charmed. The wide streets are dappled by the sun shining through the thick leaves overhead. Birds rustle in the branches. You walk and walk and walk, and drink the fine wine make a real connection. Colourful street art blooms everywhere and the city luxuriates in the holiday atmosphere.

    -

    Broken stone walls display a terrible message, that still haunts and stalks this land, through the centuries to today - a monument to evil. Cracked skulls stare out of the walls, through you, beyond you, back into the void of time, staring at a liberty lost, regained, lost, cycled over and over. They were killed, mounted as a warning - don't try to liberate yourselves again...

    -

    Grey morning light touches the edges of the window, and the trees outside by the river sway in the wind. You were just passing through.    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Sofia

    May 2–5, 2024 in Bulgaria ⋅ ☁️ 14 °C

    Something catches in the air - herbs and spices, wafting through the overcast, murky night. Scents of Easter cooking whisper out across the cobbled streets.

    Roman ruins litter the squares and boulevards, recessed into craters, like fragments of ancient meteors crash-landed from another time and space. Walking up and down staircases from level to level, you rise and fall through layers of a kingdom's history.

    White and pink blossoms flurry across the street, spring snow from the trees, and the grey mountain looms beyond the end of the street, the city's custodian, behind flapping white-green-red (like the ubiquitous salad) and gold-stars-on-blue flags.

    ~

    "Bulgaria on three seas":
    - the swaggering, chest-thumping throwback to the one-time kingdom stretching from the Adriatic, to the Black and to the White Seas. Some repeat this phrase, our country on three seas, to revive a former glory, short-lived and centuries ago, and for what? To dream of restoring themselves to a regional dominance their ancestors once tenuously held? Or to retreat under a safety blanket, safe from a nagging inferiority complex?

    ~

    Trams glide along their grooves, ferrying calm holiday traffic from square to square. A classical statue holds up an unassuming first-floor balcony, someone's whole world, encapsulated there, supported by Atlas himself.

    ~

    You eat little flat doughnuts, which remind you of the Sunday morning butteries of home, with a pot of cow-fresh yogurt. Rain falls heavily on the umbrella overhead and the stones of the monastery plaza, and clouds disguise the pure snow creating the towering peaks.

    ~

    These gigantic boulders were tossed by the forces of time, colossal beyond our reckoning, down an ancient gully, a rock slide that could raze a city. They are called 'moraines'. Immense power hums from them, and you feel too the power of this land's culture and history, asserting itself upon you.

    ~

    A yellow and black salamander revels in the deluge crashing upon the hillside, skin glistening. Your clothes are soaked through, not made for this like this little reptile is.

    ~

    You walk past an abandoned structure, and stop at an outcrop, under the defunct cables that once carried a car up the slope of this mighty Vitosha mountain. The western flank of Sofia city unfolds below. Here also, like the bobsled runs in Sarajevo, is a forgotten and unused conveyance, and yet we continue to come - to travel up and down these mountainsides.

    ~

    You sit in a little courtyard cafe, through a portal from a cobbled walking street. A group of friends are having cake and croissants across from you. Sardinian, French and Albanian, they discuss music together in English - how they compose and play it. They dip into German here and there, perhaps to describe something classical that English can't quite capture. The Sardinian's big hound yawns lazily.

    After coffee, you walk through the Women's Market, today on Easter Sunday, alive with flower sales, customers buzzing from bud to bud like bees. And you keep walking, laden with your bags, to the train station - onwards, further into the heart of Bulgaria, deeper into the curls of the rose.    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Plovdiv & Veliko Tarnovo

    May 5–10, 2024 in Bulgaria ⋅ 🌙 15 °C

    Platform и - you need Platform и. The stands for източен ('northern'). Cool.

    You walk up and down the underground concourse and buy a sandwich. Where is it? Oh, there.
    A once-maroon set of carriages waits there, wrapped in a weathered coat of tags and marks. It looks like a kid scribbled all over their toy trains in colourful permanent markers, then left them out in the rain for twelve years. The door is open. You wobble onboard, your heavy tortoise shell threatening to tilt you back, sprawling, onto Platform и. You shuffle, bag-laden, along the corridor to an unoccupied compartment. Barely any passengers around - slow travel day, or ominous sign that a bus might have been wiser?

    The stuffing of the seats is lumpy and the covers are stained. Even the weakest of ScotRail's offerings look better. Yet, in a win for Bulgaria here, this train leaves bang on time, under blue Sofia skies. It rattles away from the capital and the postcard-ready Vitosha mountain vista, through decaying industrial zones, overgrowing with new weeds to cover the past.

    A mother and daughter pair slip into the compartment. Their grey shih-tzu hops onto the middle seat between them. They lift her up and place a mat over the already-rather-soiled seat. The countryside rolls by, at no great speed and in no great style. You eat your apple. Have to remember to eat at least a token piece of fruit now and then.

    ¬

    In Plovdiv - you find yourself standing atop the ancient theater, from when this place was Philippopolis, taking a Turkish family's photo for them. The stunning architecture is nowhere in frame - there's too many of them, blocking it out. The grown-ups say 'thank you', and the little girl, practicing her English phrases, 'thank you, happy birthday'. Not quite my birthday, but today is actually St. George's Day, by the Gregorian calendar. He's the patron saint of the Bulgarian army, and kind of a big deal. The guy who checked me in to the hostel was also called George. Well, Джордж.

    ¬

    The hostel's a house, cavernous, nineteenth-century, with dark wooden closets and panels receding into the gloom of the early morning bedroom. The stairs creak under the weight of another century of feet - no robber or interloper would make it far in this house. Only a ghost could pass undetected over these boards. History's specters are encased in these walls, and at night drift up and down the levels, in and out of the edges of your vision.

    You eat breakfast alone in the breakfast room of the hostel. It's in a semi-basement room, where the depth of the house's history is laid bare. Crumbling Roman walls stand right there on the floor, remnants of a house placed here hundreds upon hundreds of years ago. How many others have sat here and eaten breakfast over the centuries? The morning sun is glowing out there above the high window.

    ¬

    You step inside the monumental, and now largely defunct, Socialist-era post office. It is adorned inside with carved blonde wooden panels, depicting a sun (your overlords) and an eye (are always watching you).
    You wonder if a child once carved some similar arcana into the wood of the house where you are sleeping.

    ¬

    You realize that some kind of beauty, that you had never really considered, can lend itself to Brutalist monstrosities like this, the House of Science & Technology, now a cinema and movie-themed bar, where you sit now on a balcony drinking cocktails, and looking over into the swaying trees of the adjacent park. There's an interplay between the open terrace of the structure, and the branches hanging over it and rustling just out of earshot. You talk about literature, and pop music, and feel the cultures of the world running together through this town.

    ¬

    You share a bottle of red wine on the patio behind the house. A black-and-white cat hops onto your new friend's lap to sleep. Then you three take an evening walk, just as the sun slips below the roofs.

    The spotlight illuminations from below only come on as leave the ruins of the Roman forum. Up on the modern street level, shops and stalls still sell their wares, right where the ancients did, and you wonder if eventually they too will be buried with detritus, and another, futuristic, shopping esplanade will pave over this era, too.

    Will another of Plovdiv's totemic hills be blown up for its stone - will the statue of Alyosha be lost in the rubble, his hand or nose discovered in some tip in the year 2724? The city will forever be getting pieced together, rebuilt and rediscovered.

    ¬

    Rose bushes grow in fields, farms - the most emblematic of Bulgarian crops, here in the Thrace valley. Veliko Tarnovo, on a recommendation, is your next and final stop in this country.

    They say there are four directions of movement possible in VT - left, right, up and down. Its abundance of Ottoman-era homes huddle on the steep hillsides, tumbling down to the winding river that snakes around the boundaries of the historical town. Screechy, slow trains rumble across a bridge, and right under the town's hill, to pop out on another bridge on the opposite side. A fortress just outside town, overlooking it, is an illusion - reconstructed by the Communists, as great and old as it looks, it was only built into this state a few decades ago. One day the Communist rulers of this country will be ancient history, too, and what they leave behind will be historical in a way it just can't be yet.

    It rains most of your time in VT. It's just barely touristic - not without interest, just without many visitors. You are the only guest on your walking tour, and you agonize inside about having to provide 100% of the audience participation your excitable, wet-behind-the-ears guide needs to keep the momentum going. You indulge yourself in linguistic and food-related questions that you'd normally keep to yourself in a group. It's cool. She theorizes that 'Tarnovo' refers to a thorny bush endemic to the region. 'Veliko' means 'great'. And such. Solo travelling has never been much more solo than this, solo on the walking tour.

    That night, you get talking to people sitting in the hostel. A Korean mother and daughter are floored when you reveal that you are not only Scottish (they're travelling to Scotland soon!) and that you lived in Korea before, and thus know expression and niche cultural references from their country. It's heartwarming to see mom's face light up when you recognize what she's saying. The host delivers some dyed eggs and sweet slices of bread leftover from the Easter celebrations just past. You snack upon them, and save some for your breakfast early next day. The Koreans leave just before you do, heading somewhere else. You have to take a taxi, the only way to reach your bus later this morning across the next border. You wonder quite how you ended up in this city, seemingly unable to easily get out and go anywhere you want to go. It wouldn't be the worst place to get stuck in for a while, though, you think, heading north, waving Bulgaria goodbye, for now.    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Bucharest

    May 10–13, 2024 in Romania ⋅ ☁️ 21 °C

    The border bridge is a gentle arch over that epic waterway, the Danube, on the banks of which some of the world's greatest cities were built. And Ruse, too, that industrial riverside city where you boarded the bus across the water, and into another world again - a Latinate world, saying farewell for now to the Cyrillic and Slavic. And yet, the two worlds collide and intermingle infinitely, on the streets as much as in our minds.

    You carry north with you one very much Latinate word, from that great Slavic kingdom to the south - 'merci'. The French greeting is also, surprisingly, the standard in Bulgaria. Somehow, France rubbed off on Bulgaria enough to implant this one key word deep in the culture, if little else (that I could detect). Your pockets rustle with these little words you've been collecting, like little sweet wrappers accumulating. When you're back home, you'll dig them out of your pockets, crumpled and faded, and throw them away, but won't forget all of them; you'll remember the taste of a Bulgarian 'merci', a Romanian 'buna', a 'zdravo' in Bosnia, sweet and sour on your tongue.

    ~

    The bus keeps pace with a tram, gliding effortlessly into the centre of the capital. It, too, is covered in spray painted tags, and is devoid of passengers. A guy sits in the cab, flirting and joking with the female driver. Without much fanfare, the bus pulls into a small car park in the central reservation of a multi-lane road, and it appears this is your stop. There's no pedestrian crossing to the pavement on either side, so you wait for a red light for the traffic and run across. You're right outside a grand hotel, facing a beautiful plaza of high fountains. There is a huge Pepsi can affixed to the roof, a garish ad. You will be able to see it, softly lit, from your balcony at night, a kilometer or so away.

    You have a great time exploring here with your friends, who flew out specially. You barely get any sleep because of the thumping music from the bars downstairs. That (and wine?) might be why Bucharest is a bit of haze in your memory, grand and stunning at some turns, forgettable and character-less others. They say it's a 'Little Paris', which doesn't really make the case for you to visit Big Paris. There's a lot of places you'd rather go first, by this measure...    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Cluj-Napoca, Timisoara

    May 13–17, 2024 in Romania ⋅ 🌙 12 °C

    The blazing tangelo sun burns across the airport tarmac and through the windows, taunting your tired eyes. RISE AND SHINE EVEN THOUGH YOU'VE BARELY SLEPT! IT'S CLUJ TIME!

    The flight from Bucharest to Cluj-Napoca is, thankfully, under an hour long, an easy hop over the Carpathians; it would be an arduously long drive through them. You're surrounded by businesspeople on the plane, commuting for meetings, on this 8AM itinerary. It's oddly comforting to be around people going to work, acting out normal routines, and you get a weird pang for working life. You close your eyes to get some rest, but all you get is a headache.

    The accents of people around you, as the businesspeople whisk away to their meetings and you shuffle towards the city shuttle bus, are Dracula-reminiscent, there's no way around it, they just are. You went there, a couple of days ago - to Dracula's alleged castle, here in Transylvania. Deep in bear country, it's not alone - there are plenty of castles and palaces with ornate spires and haunted rooms nestling in the thick woods. Legends and terrors, stoked and incubated in the dark forest, stalk the mountains and valleys. The trees themselves are medieval, arcane, and they watch centuries drift by and myths transform like fossils, into tourist totems on shelves. Everything becomes a product, eventually. Even the trees, probably.

    ~

    In Cluj, you have a taxi death ride to visit the famous salt mines. Travelsick and pissed off, you lurch into the tunnels and find a monochrome wonder underground, You row boats around a lake in the moody gloom and ride a ferris wheel. Underground.

    Back in the city, rain begins to crash down on the cobbles. Belatedly, with Dracula-land already behind you, you find safety from the vampires (which is really just safety from the rain) in a garlic-centred restaurant.

    When the deluge is over, you head back out into the streets, past yellow, orange and blue walls, and find a red bar. Red, as in Soviet, as in Soviet-parody. You drink cocktails called 'Chernobyl' and 'Free Europe'. The wall behind your seat is wallpapered in a repeating pattern of matroyshka dolls, kitsch as hell, but you also want it for your own house.

    ~

    On to Timisoara, by yourself again, friends jetting off in the sky above back to Scotland. To get there, your bus skirts along the Hungarian border for miles and miles. Hungary is tangible here, their language covering signage, and often totally displacing Romanian. It's a land of wide, flat plains, monotony and madness. There are no features, no contours, just quiet town after town, in suspended animation like models on a hobbyist's tabletop.

    In Timisoara, you walk through the Austro-Hun streets, every shop a gelato shop, under a thousand suspended umbrellas in every colour, like the displays of sweet flavours, into a plaza, the Piata Unirii. On the scrubby grass in the centre sits an old piano with pink and purple flowers spilling out of its soundboard, hanging over its line of crooked teeth. The instrument of art becomes installation of art.

    By the canalized river, a hundred different types of rose waft their heavenly scents through the garden. Piles of crimson cherries shine in the market, bursting with vitality. You sit and eat some, watching a shaggy dog splashing in the river, and lithe rowers and boat-taxis gliding past in smooth straight lines.    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Timisoara > Novi Sad

    May 18, 2024 in Romania ⋅ ☀️ 17 °C

    You receive a text at 7AM. It's from Dejan. He says he's your driver, and that he'll be picking you up a bit later than expected. You've never received a text from your bus driver before. You did book a bus. But there's a first time for everything, and why not here, in this place that although nestling into the heart of Europe, feels like it's thousands of miles away across flat green plains under a oil-painting sky.

    His name is Dejan, he says. Not quite knowing what to expect from your *alleged* upcoming bus journey back into Serbia (againnn), you turn up to the *alleged* bus station on time anyway, just in case. You walk there, across the canal and along a fully shaded side street, the sun barely poking over any roofs yet.

    The 'bus station' is an barren lot, with cars parked round the edges and one abandoned coach. A yellow chain ropes off half of the lot, for the use of some kind of motorcycle clubhouse hangout area. An obese man walks up to a parked car and you wouldn't be surprised if it was to buy drugs.

    You sit on a rickety bench and eat dry breadsticks, the only vaguely breakfast-like thing you could find in the only nearby, and woeful, mart. You begin to wonder if you might have somehow taken yourself to the end of the world, that the only way out is going all the way back to Bucharest, getting on a plane. The plains could stretch on and on forever into oblivion, it seems, Serbia and Hungary fallen over the edge and lost forever.

    Dejan sends another text. Your bus has transmutated into a car, it would appear - he's a private driver, he says, and you make peace with the immediate assumption that you're probably about to get kidnapped, and this really will be the end of your world. The sun shines down on the weeds shaking in the breeze and the lightly rippling puddles from last night's thunderstorm. Your backpack gathers dust on a patch of dry ground.

    You consider if you enjoy doing this any more, getting yourself stuck in weird situations in the middle of nowhere, not knowing what's going on, if this is for you any more.

    Dejan, finally, texts again, an hour later, to say he's nearby, after having to drive all over the city to drop off his previous passengers. When his sedan eventually glides into the crunchy parking lot, all is explained. His private transfer company operates this route, not any bus company, but he sells tickets through the bus booking app you use. The app also refuses to advertise accurate timings for the journey. It always takes longer. He drives all the way here from his home, Belgrade, and back, every day.

    It's all above board, if a little alarming and confusing initially. He is one of the most interesting people you've met on the trip so far. He use to work for the US Embassy doing logistics. You pass through yet another nothingy, lost plains town, and he points out how polluted the river is, which may or may not have something to do with the shiny new Chinese factory by the roadside. He tells me about all the different passengers from around the world and their different views, and his, and mine.

    His teenage daughter calls him a couple of times. Back in Belgrade, she is waiting to pick up her little brother from coding school. She complains that she can't find a coffee shop. He directs her to one, and suggests a protein shake she might like. She calls back half an hour later, unhappy with the shake she got.

    You reach the border, marked by nothing in the landscape, except a tiny guard station. The chubby young officer in the booth sees Dejan's plastic bag in the front seat, and asks him to give an inventory of what's inside. The woman officer behind him chuckles at his overzealousness. She calls to Dejan, who she sees almost every day, that the guy is new to the job, and following the rulebook a little too closely. They wave us through, and you're in Serbia once again.

    Novi Sad is not far away. As you pull into the city, Dejan tells you to text him if you're in Belgrade and need a ride. What a class act. You didn't get kidnapped. You made a friend.    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Novi Sad - Belgrade - Skopje

    May 18–19, 2024 in Serbia ⋅ ☁️ 20 °C

    You eat a homecooked meal, and walk through a leafy socialist neighbourhood at dusk.

    Later, you eat ice cream and drink Coca Cola across the river from the Novi Sad fortress, under a waxing moon. The fort is imposing, yet languid, next to the river; a gliding Danube cruise ship sweeps into town, clipping along in the night breeze and swinging into port beyond the tall bridge.
    Young students standing in a circle kick a football between them, playing classic Serbian pop and folk tunes on a stereo.

    ¬

    The next morning, you continue onwards, on this nonsensical roundabout trip of the north Balkans that you've been taking, first on the nicest train you've ever boarded, just to Belgrade. A thirty minute journey, a rare taste of the transportation high life. Glammed out Novi Sad girls surround you, on the way to the capital for a sunny Sunday afternoon.

    Arriving at Belgrade station, you head out on foot, with hours to spare, to make your way towards the bus station for your connection through to Macedonia. The lampposts all display rigid Serbian flags, right alongside the Chinese, for an upcoming visit of Xi Jinping, apparently.

    Your transport luck continues - something you can say for sure Serbia does better than its neighbours to the east, west and south - with a comfortable, punctual coach for the six hour journey down to Skopje. Not quite believing that yesterday you woke up in Romania, the Macedonian border finally appears. The bus disembarks for the passport check. You line up behind a scruffy guy smoking a suspicious looking rollup right in the border guard's face. He is sent to another booth for some light questioning, a rummage in his rucksack. No drugs across this border, no sir.

    You step forward for your turn and hand your passport over. The guard takes one look at the coffee-stained page, looks you in the eye and proclaims it a 'katastrofa'. Yes, I know, it's pretty bad that I spilled coffee all over my passport within weeks of being issued it. But hey, what else do the Balkans live for, if not coffee and cigarettes?    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Skopje

    May 19–21, 2024 in North Macedonia ⋅ ⛅ 24 °C

    The prompt in this textbox says 'What's up here?'

    Indeed. What the heck is up here? Skopje you're wEiRd.

    Alexander the Gr- I mean, 'warrior on horse', towers over the centre of town on his epic plinth. He can't even bear his real title, titanic as it is, and the puzzle of his alias is reflected by every surface you can see, a strange hall of mirrors, a distortion of a city. Nothing is quite what it seems, or is labelled as.

    Marble columns, aspiring to the Acropolis, reveal themselves up close to be mouldering, decaying paeans to corrupt misappropriation of funds, fake monuments to a history claimed, yet not allowed to be owned. The country's magnificent endemic marble is sold off, and cheap knock-off stone is used here instead, so that N.Macedonia's own capital's monuments are rendered hollow, vacuous.

    From a distance breathtaking; up close rotting. The bases of the columns are cracking and subsiding into the sandy riverbanks they were plonked down upon. A blonde middle-aged woman passes by you on your walking tour, and her figure casts the shadow of artifice and falsehoods. She heckles, insisting that everything your guide is saying is 'lies'. Who is she? A government worker, someone on the take from the ridiculous, brazen money laundering rackets all around our heads? Hers is an empty facade of power, like the stuccos of the casino, the museum. She implores you to believe not your own eyes, and what is clearly going wrong in the urban design of this place, and instead, believe that all of this is genuine, placed delicately and with historical accuracy. What? She and her kind cast themselves as the custodians of a long and glorious history, rather than the cynical architects of a kitsch anachronistic city. This is Skopje, real, because she says so.

    It all reaches a zenith of absurdity with the caravels. In the capital of this landlocked tiny country, great fake pirate ships like alien spaceships fallen from the stars perch on stacks in the shallow river. No such ship could ever actually sail here.

    But you'll thank Skopje soon, for giving you a shot in the arm, a baffling puzzle to ignite your intellect, when things on your trip were starting to become flat, stretched out, drained of colour, like the endless plains of Serbia-Hungary-Romania. This madness falls on you like the lyrical, dancing words of a fairytale, all the more so when your tour guide describes the Macedonian people as 'the Hobbits of the Balkans' - peace-loving, wanting to be left alone to vibe in their mountains. Some reading this might think that self-identification is a fairytale, a lie, in and of itself. But aren't we all self-constructing, lying, to each other all the time anyway?    Read more

  • George Hardwickbalkans2024Traveler

    Ohrid

    May 21–24, 2024 in North Macedonia ⋅ ⛅ 24 °C

    In these remote mountain valleys, it's no secret who lives here - their flag, and that of the country just over the western border flutters above almost every house. The double-headed black eagle on red of Albania replaces the glorious golden sun of Macedonia. Just another Balkan mismatch of homelands and officially delineated territories.

    The bus stops at a rest area in a high mountain pass. Through the trees, you can see back in the direction of Skopje, although the city is hidden behind a range. The space between is almost-uninhabited, undisturbed mountain forest for miles and miles. Fat clouds hang low over the peaceful alpine scene.

    Rolling down from the mountains later, you pull into Ohrid. The lake is just out of sight, but you get a gorgeous first view when you arrive at your room. A large Macedonian flag is catching the breeze down by the water's edge, and you can see the placid blue water rippling beyond, and the mountains of Albania itself just a few miles away, across the lake. Once again, you are so close to that fabled country, but it eludes you still - for a little longer.

    ~

    A statue of a lynx greets you at the entrance to the national park. You imagine spottingone stalking through the thick undergrowth, and a shiver runs up your spine. You set off from the base of the mountain, to go up and up and see the city and water from on high.

    The thought of another predator of these slopes preoccupies you, though. You've read that, because their numbers are growing and they are needing to spread out into new territories, bears are increasingly terrorizing Macedonian villagers. Raiding bins and being a general menace. Bear stuff. What if you saw one up here, wild and free?

    ~

    The lake glitters in sapphire jewel tones below, and from here you can see the strategically-advantageous position Ohrid holds in the landscape. It's surrounded by water, and wooded hills. You turn back to the road, and you freeze. Something is crashing and rustling around in the trees just off the roadside. You only just started hiking, ten minutes ago, but it's happening already. It's a bear.

    You can see its shadowy shape pawing at the branches, tearing them down under the canopy. Your heart is in your mouth as you inch forward, trying to catch a glimpse of the beast, just one view, so you can scuttle away undetected but with that image seared into your mind forever. You get a little closer. You realize that you don't actually know what the safe thing to do is if a bear sees you - play dead? Or shout and scream, scare it off? Your feet are just telling you to run back down the hill.

    But wait. Bears can't use tools. As far as you know. Yet this one is - cutting down branches for firewood, perhaps. You shake your head, leave the man to his woodwork, and keep hiking. You wonder if a man with a saw is actually more of a danger to you than a bear.

    ~

    Later on, you carefully step along a stony trail hugging a ridge and come upon a pleasantly alpine spot. In the shadow of a stark outcrop, poppies and other little purple and yellow flowers bloom in through the flint. You follow signs for the remote church you want to find. You duck under low trees, and a silvery snake wriggles across your path, glinting in the sunlight. A few minutes later, through a gap in the canopy you see the terracotta roof of the church poking out across the valley.

    You loop back on yourself, climbing up and up to the sleepy village, before flying back down the slopes, the cleanest of air filling your lungs with euphoria. After all the cities, a green and blue oasis.    Read more

    Trip end
    June 19, 2024
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