2 days in Belgrade

MADE IT TO serbia (just). I've purposely stayed off toL roads and motorways just so I could see more of the country, villages, people etc. It often takes twice as long to go from place to place because your constantly slowing down for villages, the roads are as good, you have to do more distance,and there is any manner of farm machinery and animals on the road. Country roads in Romania are country roads!!!!I I passed through villages where families spend their Sunday drying and husking hand picked corn cobs, manually cutting and stacking hay and moving it all around with a horse and dray.

Something that is exciting is coming around a corner, at reasonable speed, to find a slow moving horse cart on your side of the road and 2 or 3 of the biggest softest freshest cow pads you have ever seen on the other side. I now know for a fact that fresh cow shit is slippperier than oil on a road. I went around the dray more than slightly sideways when the rear wheel let go. The farmer's surprised look was nothing compared to mine. For the next 2 or 3 kms all I could smell was fresh shit, I didn't want to stop and check under the bike in case it was clean and the smell was coming from somewhere else 😨.

Crossing into Serbia was something else. Bridge across the DANUBE, through the border check post ("welcome to Serbia, we don't get many Australians coming through on a motorbike - good luck!!!, hey, what's that smell?"). Then follow the Daube for about 40 kms of absolutely beautiful motorbike roads. The river cuts deep through valleys and the road follows it, sometime at river level, sometimes what seems a coiple of hundred meters higher. Best bit of road so far.....

I had put the hotel address into my GPS and was expecting to get to Belgrade around 3.30pm. Was staying in the middle of the city so wanted to miss the rush hour. My navigation skills have always been a bit suspect and I ended up 65 kms from Belgrade in a small broken down village in front of a dilapidated hay shed - about $75 a night, you gotta be kidding. As I was riding in I kept thinking, Belgrade pretty small for the capital of Serbia.

Got to the hotel at 5.30 pm in the middle of rush hour (and there is no rush hour like a Serbian rush hour!!!) To find the hotel was on a one way street and it and all the surrounding streets had been blocked of by police (had the farmer rung ahead to say that an idiot on a motorbike had killed his horse by scaring it to death?). After an hour of trying to get to the hotel I did what L the Serb drivers were doing - I rode around the barricade, upon to the footpath and then the wrong way down a one way street. I checked into the hotel (receptionist asked how I got through as no one had been able to book in for the last 3 hours) and asked if there was somewhere I could hide my motorbike - mission accomplished.

Belgrade is a big fairly Industrial town with a bit of greenery - I saw a chipmunk, or rat..one or the other.

Ok, had a rest, I'm off to CroatiaRead more