Camp Plum
May 16, 2025 in Serbia ⋅ ☁️ 11 °C
"Putting the plum into plum brandy".
We are at Camp Plum in Serbia after a longish 5 hour drive today.
It was pouring with rain when we got up. More annoyingly, the electricity was off, presumably because of the rain. No morning cup of tea for us!
The rain turned to snow as we climbed out of Montenegro, with visibility often down to next to nothing. Then, after a relatively easy border crossing into Serbia we dropped in altitude a little and the snow turned back to rain which has stayed with us all day pretty much.
The roads have been fair to middling, the driving awful - so many near misses with overtaking on blind corners (not by us!)
We stopped for coffee twice. The first place literally just said "No" quite aggressively (three times) when I asked for coffee. Mind you, the place was populated by 5 burly men all smoking so I don't think we would have wanted to stay anyway. It felt a bit intimidating though. The second was a motel with a resturant that wouldn't have looked out of place in Crossroads. But at least they were willing to give us coffee and let us pay by card.
A stop at Lidl felt a bit more like home.
We managed to get some local currency at a petrol station exchange bureau. Apparently, this is the best way to do it - just hand over Euros and get back whatever money it isvthey use here!
This site is crazy busy - empty when we arrived but steadily filling up ever since. We are just off the main north/south main road thru Serbia so I think it gets used as a bit of a transit stop.
An early evening cycle ride to get some exercise was a bit of a waste of time - the roads aren't great for cycling on, the bars don't look inviting and there are stray dogs roaming around in packs!
We definitely need to do something tomorrow to improve our Serbia experience - it feels like a real low point of the trip at the moment. Not really enjoying it at all tbh.
On the plus side... the campsite owner seems very nice. He gave us (and everyone else on the site) a couple of shots of his homemade plum brandy (slivovitz), which was really nice, to have with our meal. Yum.Read more