Serbia - Belgrade and Nis

There are two things that will always remind me of the Serbian countryside. One is huge plains with fields and fields of sunflowers which have bloomed and dried up, so there are all these drooping heads crammed into each field. The other is the total opposite – gorges with sheer grey stone cliffs. The sunflowers were the north and the gorges were the south, and both were really beautiful.

Belgrade was pretty chilled. We’d been told by someone in Novy Sad that Belgrade wasn’t as nice as Novy Sad because it was much busier and had lots more people. Which was partly true, it was certainly busier and had more people. However, I quite liked it.

It’s much hillier than anywhere else we’ve been so far. It wasn’t actually very far from the train station to our hotel, but we got taxis because it was so hilly and the roads are so busy. There are also a lot more stray dogs than what I’m used to. There was one in particular that latched onto us at the railway station. It was a reasonably big dog. There was one taxi leaving, and Cameron was in the front seat talking out the window to this dog (hello doggy! Who’s a good boy?!), and I believe the dog was trying to get in his window. It was up on its hind legs with its front legs on the windowsill, even as the taxi drove off. When its back legs couldn’t keep up it dropped down and started running along behind the car. We completely expected to see the dog at the hotel when we got there, but evidently they lost it in the traffic.

The driving in this part of the world is… interesting. They don’t seem to be that fussed on road rules, not like we are in NZ where there’s a clear rule for every situation. They also don’t appear to be very patient. We were behind an old car that I think had stalled trying to do a hill start on this huge angle, and everybody was tooting and gesticulating out the windows and yelling and cutting around them, across whatever lane they feel like.

However, we made it to the hotel with all our limbs and baggage and without the dog.

That evening all we did was go into town and have dinner. Again, there’s a great big pedestrian mall in the centre of town, with pavement cafes all along it. I had dinner at one of them with Kat and Cameron and Marsha. Dinner was very relaxed, and Kat definitely won the competition for picking the best thing on the menu, although I don’t remember what she had, I just remember all of us being jealous of it. I think all we did after that was wander back along the pedestrian mall to the hotel.

The next morning, we went to the fortress (hmm, sounds familiar). We had a wander around the grounds which are quite large and park-like and have nice views over town, and through the military museum. Kat and I walked in one door, straight through and out the other; we’d had enough war stuff in the previous few countries. Some of the others on the tour thought it was very good though. They had a huge collection of weapons, including a bomb that was taller than me (and I’m no shorty).

  

I don’t think we did much for the afternoon. Sara took us on a city walk, and showed us the important churches and the site of the old public library which had been bombed and then fenced off without any rebuilding.

I went off with Kat to see a huge church that they’re in the middle of building, which is beautiful. The bits they have done are all draped in sheets so they don’t get damaged, which I had a great time taking photos of.

  

I believe that we then wandered over to have a look at the local market, which went for miles and sold everything you could ask for. We found a lovely man selling fruit who gave us a free plum each even though we hadn’t bought anything. We’d seen these plums around the place before then but hadn’t tried them. Their skin looks blue, but when we bit into them they had really yellow, sugary tasting flesh. So Kat went back to buy some and tried to give him the equivalent of about 50c, and he gave her two or three times the amount she wanted.

Then we went and found a coffee shop and enjoyed the air con and free wifi for a bit. After that I think all we did was go to the hotel for a nap, then meet Cameron and Marsha for dinner. We went to a tavern called “?”, which is reportedly the oldest tavern in the city. I ordered a hamburger. Hamburger over here doesn’t mean the same as hamburger at home. What I got was basically a huge meat patty on a plate. When we finished dinner we went back to the pedestrian mall and people watched and discussed the cows. The cows are everywhere through Belgrade, I think they must be some kind of art installation. I feel like I’ve seen them somewhere else previously.

We had 24hrs in Nis (it usually has an upside down hat over the s and is pronounced “nish”, to rhyme with fish). It took five hours on a train to get there from Belgrade. To be honest, I didn’t think it was a particularly worthwhile stop, I would’ve preferred to spend ten straight hours on the train and have the extra day somewhere else. However, I still enjoyed it. Kat and I spent lots of time with Kylie, and here is what we did:

1. Eat
2. Drink
3. Sleep
4. Repeat

It was pretty awesome. They also have a fortress and a big pedestrian mall through the centre of town. The main restaurant street is called Tinker’s Alley, and it’s also a pedestrian mall. We went there for lunch and dinner and drinking. There was also a concentration camp, and a monument decorated with human skulls. I did not go to either of them. I did walk into the fortress to find a Serbia postcard to send to Nana, but there wasn’t a lot to see. It’s basically a local park with stone walls now.

What was cool was that we were on the 14th floor of the hotel. I don’t think Kat’s forgiven me yet though. We were given a room with a double bed and a couch on the 8th floor, and the room was really nice and had a separate lounge room and a nice bathroom, but I didn’t see the two of us sharing the double bed or either of us wanting the couch, so I went and spoke to Sara who organised with the reception desk for us (and the other three pairs who’d had the same thing happen) to change to twin rooms. The twin rooms were pretty crap, which I think was the problem Kat had. And I do agree, it was pretty bullshit that the doubles were so nice and big and comfortable and the rooms they swapped us to were small and had hard beds and crap bathrooms, even though the mix-up was the hotel’s fault. I didn’t try lying on the couch but Sara said she sat down on the one in her room and it sank almost to the floor, so it would’ve been a very uncomfortable night.

So anyway, I loved our room on the top floor because the hotel was by far the highest building in town, and we could see for miles. Also there must’ve been an air force base somewhere nearby, because there were jets going around and around over the town all afternoon and into the evening. They’d fly for an hour or so, land, then go up again, two at a time. I think they were student pilots. When they came in to land they flew right over the top of our hotel. It was awesome.

Overall I really enjoyed Serbia.  It's definitely one of those places I never expected to find myself!

Serbia - Novy Sad

I think I slept almost the whole 7hrs from Budapest to Novy Sad, in Serbia. I don’t remember there being any problem with the border crossing, but I think it took a while. When I was in the Middle East, we had a very hairy border crossing either into or out of Syria. We got abandoned by our drivers and ended up walking across over 2km, in forty degree heat, with these cars chasing us and the drivers yelling at us out the windows and cutting really close to us. We were in no man’s land so there was no protection forthcoming from the police or tourist police, and we had no idea whether these guys had any kind of weapon. They also went to the border into whichever country we were entering, and tried to bribe the guards to not let us through. Thank god the guards ignored them. Comparative to that, sitting at a border for two hours while they go through an entire train stamping passports really doesn’t worry me at all.

I liked Novy Sad. Our hotel was about 15min walk from the train station, and I would never have found it if Sara hadn’t been there. It was in a residential street, from what I could tell anyway, and the only evidence of it from the direction that we came was a sign over the door. The side of the hotel, which we could see when we were coming back from town, was bright green. It was just the front that was completely unremarkable.

Our hotel, and a representative of the buildings on our street.

Kat immediately liked Serbia’s good looking men. And I have to completely agree. That’s the first time since Russia that we’ve seen seriously good looking men. It’s so weird what you don’t see in particular countries – in Russian there were no children; most of the area had no attractive men. Serbians were really nice people, the young people spoke quite a lot of English and they were always friendly and laughing with us and interested in where we come from.

We went for our obligatory city walk. Nothing against city walks, they’re really good for orientating yourself and ticking off the churches and that sort of thing. As we were walking into town the sky was looking a bit dark around the edges, but I didn’t think much more about it. I found it weird that the area we were staying in was looking pretty rough, and the footpaths were a mess, but we were only five or ten minutes from the centre of town, which was beautifully kept and had lovely buildings and pedestrian streets with pavement cafes all along them and pretty churches. You literally walk around a corner and it changes. It was reasonably late by the time we got there, so we walked into town and had a quick look around, then Sara offered to take anyone who was interested over to the fortress, but it was 15min in one direction to get there, so some of us decided against that. Kat and I had already buddied up with Kylie, an Aussie (of course) who works as an economist (another one), and who’s about my height or slightly taller, and has the same slightly oddball turn of phrase and way of looking at situations as I do. It was Kylie’s 37th birthday, which I would never have guessed from looking at her. So the three of us and Cameron and Marsha went and found a pavement restaurant for a beer and a meal. We sat down and got our drinks and ordered our food, and it started to spit. Then the spits got much bigger, and the wind starting blowing underneath all the umbrellas and across the tables. Then it really started raining. Marsha bailed first and we all followed. By the time we got inside and sat down, there was thunder booming and rain pouring and wind howling. Very atmospheric. By the time we left the restaurant, it had all stopped except for sheet lightening flashing around the edges of the sky for the rest of the evening.

The other random thing was that having hardly seen any Cyrillic since we left Russia, suddenly everything was in Cyrillic again. Which is fine by me, I really like it and I’m on a mission to learn the alphabet. I’ve got about 75% of it now.

The main attraction in Novy Sad is the fortress, so that was where we went the following morning. It’s much bigger than it first appears. We had a guide who took us around the museum (which was ok, lots of Roman artefacts etc, the most interesting thing was the big canoe that they’d found at the bottom of the river), and then through the tunnels underneath. The tunnels were part of the defence system, and I think there’s something like 60km worth, but we only went into 1km of them. They were built to be a labyrinth, and they are very confusing. There are lots of dead ends and rooms off to the side and very short tunnels that connect back on to the same one. It’s quite amazing how much thought they put into what they’d do if each level of their defence system was breached. The Danube bisects the town, so if the enemy could get across that, they’d have to find their way through the labyrinth of outdoor channels that they built, some that could be flooded and some that were dry. If they got close to the main fortress, they could be blown up by the barrels of gun powder that were underneath them, or shot through the holes in the walls. If they made it into the tunnels, there’s no way they’d ever find their way out, and the fortress soldiers were trained to be able to navigate the tunnels in pitch black, and they built places that they could erect barricades really quickly and trap the enemy. So the fortress had never been taken. The guide was excellent, she was really interesting and interested in what she was telling us, and she was stirring everybody up about this legendary anaconda that’s supposed to live in the tunnels somewhere. She’d be maybe in her early thirties. We also liked her because as soon as she’d finished the tour she thanked us and left, and was quite embarrassed when someone went to find her and give her the group’s tip. So many guides hang around waiting to be tipped, or say thanks-bye at a time when it’s really awkward to then not tip them or to give them a smaller tip than they’re expecting.

        

Various photos from around the fortress and tunnels.

After the tour ended, I went with Kylie and Kat and Kylie’s roommate Kim (that’s a lot of Ks) and we sat on the terrace at the fortress and had a coffee. Food and drinks are so cheap in some of these places that you don’t even care that you’re being absolutely ripped off and paying tourist prices, because it’s still far less than it’d cost you at home. Then we wandered down into town and into a little lane that looked like it was going to have nothing on it, which turned out to be an absolute treasure trove of pavement bars and cafes. So we had lunch there. The waitress had this fantastic husky, low voice. Kim and I decided she should be a jazz singer.

And then we had to be back at the hotel at 3pm, so that was about it for Novy Sad.  Then on to Belgrade...