Are you being Serbed?
As mentioned previously, Bulgaria really wasn't endearing itself to us so we thought we'd head to Sofia to see if that could help change our minds. The one and only campsite for Sofia is something of an enigma. At the oxymoronic Tourist Information office, the woman behind the desk said she had heard that there was a campsite but couldn't be sure. The address we had from the internet turned out to be a car dealership. We then got lost trying to circumnavigate a military base and ended up at a petrol station and thought we might as well fill up. Then a miracle happened. The attendant was not only friendly, helpful and fluent in English but the second thing he asked us after "do you want it full?" was "are you looking for the campsite?!" I nearly hugged him. There was a secret, non-signposted lane that peeled off the main highway to the city that seemed to be known only to this petrol attendant, the surly man-bear that sat at reception and two prostitutes who used the chalets for their 
"business meetings". This wasn't the first campsite we'd been to where this sort of thing went on but it was the first one to have condoms for sale at reception. In fact, if it wasn't for the prostitutes I'm not sure the campsite would survive – we were the only actual campers there. And when I say survive I mean it looked like it was barely clinging to life. We were shown one of the chalets where we could use the shower and toilet. It was a crumbling, derelict bunker reminiscent of some of the communist torture chambers we'd visited in the Baltics. The "shower" was just a single pipe coming from a wall, with no head, and the "plughole" was an opening in the tiled concrete floor where someone had crudely smashed it through with a hammer. The toilet came with a little bucket which you had to fill at the sink and then use to manually flush your business away. It must be a real mood-breaker for the prostitutes' clients.
Sofia itself was pleasant enough, though it feels a bit like it's a town trying to be a proper capital city – the metro system only
has one line, for example. The centre is fairly linear with all the major points of interest along one route, a bit like a village where the shop, post office and pub are all on the high street. We did enjoy the Wizard Of Oz-inspired yellow brick road system in the centre and we had a very pleasant late-afternoon in a park listening to a local band play Cream and Santana covers, but other than that we were ready to leave.
From what we'd heard from other campervanners we've met on our travels, we were expecting
the crossing in to Serbia to be a bit tricky. However, we didn't have our booze confiscated, we didn't have to fill out a damage report on the van (thank God), we weren't fined for anything and after a cursory glance inside the backdoor we got a stamp in our passports (the first of the trip so far!) and were nonchalantly waved through. Brilliant.
Serbia was even hotter than Bulgaria had been and it seemed to change the minute we were across the border. That meant that we spent the next few hours making our way to Belgrade in our oven-like van while all the liquid in our bodies slowly transferred itself to our clothes. Not very pleasant. The roads are great (actually covered in tarmac) which makes a lot of difference but the driving is a w
hole new ball game thanks to the Serbian approach to overtaking. They spend so much time on the wrong side that they might as well just drive on the left. We were on a beautifully winding road through mountain ravines when we had a near-death encounter with an approaching coach. Just as it got to the point where we had to choose between hitting him or the cliff face to our right, he managed to swerve back in to his lane (proper tyre-screeching swerve) and we missed each other by millimetres. This did nothing to help my sweating situation.
The Ebay van did really well to get from Sofia to Belgrade in one go. So I felt a bit sorry for it when it had to sit in a massive traffic jam for an hour and a half once we arrived. Then when we got through that we, again, had trouble locating the campsite. We ended up driving round the suburbs while Claire kept leaping out, like Anneka Rice in Treasure Hunt, asking confused locals for ever more cryptic directions. Yet again we found salvation at a petrol station, this time from a girl at the till who was so excited that she knew the answer she even drew a little map
. We arrived at around 10pm, hot, sticky and a little bit tetchy. But the campsite is just 50 metres from our old friend, the Danube, and after a well-needed shower (in an actual shower) we lay on the grass and watched Belgrade twinkling on the far shore.
The next day we cycled into Belgrade. Now this is a proper capital city. It has a fortress, a proper centre, a main square, an artist quarter, great fountains, hundreds of statues – and a beer festival. If there were two words that encapsulate my ideal city break they would probably be "beer" and "festival", so to find them together in one glorious event, well… We'd met a Brit couple at lunch who tried to warn us off going because there had been some "random stabbings" a couple of nights earlier but we also heard that Simple Minds had played that night and that's enough to make anyone violent. So we ignored them and went anyway. And what a great night they missed out on. While I toured the many beer tents trying different beers from each, Claire (a non beer drinker), toured the Jack Daniels stand. She also managed to befriend the bartenders at a cocktail bar where she was in constant supply of a blue concoction called a Chuck Norris. The musical highlight of the night, in between atrocious Serbian rock acts and on-stage drinking competitions (yes, really), was a bewilderingly dressed ensemble of about 2
3 musicians playing a sort of turbo-folk dance music. There was a brass section of tubas and French horns, there were sitars, bongos, an accordion, a strange old man with a big white beard playing jazz flute and a guy playing two trumpets at once. They turned out to be called Sanja Ilić & Balkanika and I'm guessing that Sanja Ilić was the flamboyant chap in white suit and pink tie who led the whole circus from behind his keyboard and, at one point, a theremin. We obviously didn't know any of the songs but the crowd were going mental and it was very infectious music so we couldn't help but join in. It was brilliant. What was even more brilliant was finding our bikes were still where we'd left them – and that we managed to cycle the 10km home at 1am without ending up in a ditch.
"business meetings". This wasn't the first campsite we'd been to where this sort of thing went on but it was the first one to have condoms for sale at reception. In fact, if it wasn't for the prostitutes I'm not sure the campsite would survive – we were the only actual campers there. And when I say survive I mean it looked like it was barely clinging to life. We were shown one of the chalets where we could use the shower and toilet. It was a crumbling, derelict bunker reminiscent of some of the communist torture chambers we'd visited in the Baltics. The "shower" was just a single pipe coming from a wall, with no head, and the "plughole" was an opening in the tiled concrete floor where someone had crudely smashed it through with a hammer. The toilet came with a little bucket which you had to fill at the sink and then use to manually flush your business away. It must be a real mood-breaker for the prostitutes' clients.
Sofia itself was pleasant enough, though it feels a bit like it's a town trying to be a proper capital city – the metro system only
has one line, for example. The centre is fairly linear with all the major points of interest along one route, a bit like a village where the shop, post office and pub are all on the high street. We did enjoy the Wizard Of Oz-inspired yellow brick road system in the centre and we had a very pleasant late-afternoon in a park listening to a local band play Cream and Santana covers, but other than that we were ready to leave.
From what we'd heard from other campervanners we've met on our travels, we were expecting
the crossing in to Serbia to be a bit tricky. However, we didn't have our booze confiscated, we didn't have to fill out a damage report on the van (thank God), we weren't fined for anything and after a cursory glance inside the backdoor we got a stamp in our passports (the first of the trip so far!) and were nonchalantly waved through. Brilliant.
Serbia was even hotter than Bulgaria had been and it seemed to change the minute we were across the border. That meant that we spent the next few hours making our way to Belgrade in our oven-like van while all the liquid in our bodies slowly transferred itself to our clothes. Not very pleasant. The roads are great (actually covered in tarmac) which makes a lot of difference but the driving is a w
hole new ball game thanks to the Serbian approach to overtaking. They spend so much time on the wrong side that they might as well just drive on the left. We were on a beautifully winding road through mountain ravines when we had a near-death encounter with an approaching coach. Just as it got to the point where we had to choose between hitting him or the cliff face to our right, he managed to swerve back in to his lane (proper tyre-screeching swerve) and we missed each other by millimetres. This did nothing to help my sweating situation.
The Ebay van did really well to get from Sofia to Belgrade in one go. So I felt a bit sorry for it when it had to sit in a massive traffic jam for an hour and a half once we arrived. Then when we got through that we, again, had trouble locating the campsite. We ended up driving round the suburbs while Claire kept leaping out, like Anneka Rice in Treasure Hunt, asking confused locals for ever more cryptic directions. Yet again we found salvation at a petrol station, this time from a girl at the till who was so excited that she knew the answer she even drew a little map
. We arrived at around 10pm, hot, sticky and a little bit tetchy. But the campsite is just 50 metres from our old friend, the Danube, and after a well-needed shower (in an actual shower) we lay on the grass and watched Belgrade twinkling on the far shore.
The next day we cycled into Belgrade. Now this is a proper capital city. It has a fortress, a proper centre, a main square, an artist quarter, great fountains, hundreds of statues – and a beer festival. If there were two words that encapsulate my ideal city break they would probably be "beer" and "festival", so to find them together in one glorious event, well… We'd met a Brit couple at lunch who tried to warn us off going because there had been some "random stabbings" a couple of nights earlier but we also heard that Simple Minds had played that night and that's enough to make anyone violent. So we ignored them and went anyway. And what a great night they missed out on. While I toured the many beer tents trying different beers from each, Claire (a non beer drinker), toured the Jack Daniels stand. She also managed to befriend the bartenders at a cocktail bar where she was in constant supply of a blue concoction called a Chuck Norris. The musical highlight of the night, in between atrocious Serbian rock acts and on-stage drinking competitions (yes, really), was a bewilderingly dressed ensemble of about 2
3 musicians playing a sort of turbo-folk dance music. There was a brass section of tubas and French horns, there were sitars, bongos, an accordion, a strange old man with a big white beard playing jazz flute and a guy playing two trumpets at once. They turned out to be called Sanja Ilić & Balkanika and I'm guessing that Sanja Ilić was the flamboyant chap in white suit and pink tie who led the whole circus from behind his keyboard and, at one point, a theremin. We obviously didn't know any of the songs but the crowd were going mental and it was very infectious music so we couldn't help but join in. It was brilliant. What was even more brilliant was finding our bikes were still where we'd left them – and that we managed to cycle the 10km home at 1am without ending up in a ditch.
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