Down the Danube on a Bicycle, June 2015: Part Three--The Balkans

Stage Four—Yugoslavian Yin and Yang

Once across the Hungarian-Croatian border on Monday, June 22nd, where we saw our first border formalities of the trip (Croatia is in the EU but not in the Schengen Zone) we had a few kilometres of unpleasant cycling, along a narrow road with no real shoulder or bike path and some fast-moving trucks.  

Welcome to Croatia!

One of them actually ran Terri right off the road, much to her annoyance.  Luckily our bike path turned left away from the main road soon enough and onto the quiet road we would follow the rest of the day.  The scenery was fairly similar to Hungary:  a flat agricultural plain bordering the river, with small farms and a smattering of vineyards.  Our first village, though, showed that we had crossed a border, as it was half-deserted and partly in ruins, with little economic activity evident.  Banks and ATMs were nowhere to be found, and the only shops we found were tiny mom-and-pop corner grocery stores outside which men gathered to drink beer.  It turned out that we had arrived on a national holiday, which went some way to explaining the somnolence, but this is also the poorest corner of Croatia, still scarred by the 1991-95 war.  We had our biggest luggage-carrying climb of the trip to date, pedalling 100 metres uphill over a bend in the river, past more prosperous-looking country houses set amidst apricot orchards and vineyards.  We had pizza in a slightly larger town after 60 km which finally had an ATM, and then continued another 25 km to a tiny village called Kopacevo.  As had been the case all day, it was a mostly Hungarian-speaking village, thanks to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon that sliced away huge chunks of Hungary to give to the new state of Yugoslavia.  We found an almost-deserted campground with a gargantuan kitchen for our use, and cooked up some ravioli to accompany our bottle of Schwabenblut.

The next morning was Terri’s birthday, so I got up early to raid the grocery store for a special breakfast of pancakes in the kitchen.  After that we soon rode into the large provincial capital of Osijek, a sprawling metropolis after the tiny villages of the previous day.  We didn’t pause long, heading out of town on a busy road until we finally were directed onto a less-trafficked parallel road.  At lunchtime we found ourselves in Vukovar, a town still deeply scarred by the 1991-95 war, with its water tower still bearing the marks of the pounding it took from Yugoslav forces.  

Vukovar's emblematic water tower, a war memorial

Looking for a place to eat, we discovered that while there were cafes and bars everywhere, it was almost impossible to find a restaurant serving food.  Eventually we were directed to a lovely spot beside the Danube, where we waited out a passing rainstorm.  After lunch it was a pleasant afternoon of riding through a series of small wine-producing villages, each one down a small, steep incline from the plateau on which we spent most of our time.  Luckily we had fairly strong tailwinds to propel us on our way.  By 5 o’clock we were at the end of the road in Croatia, the border town of Ilok.  

Our view over the Danube from our luxury flat

We splurged on a fancy tourist apartment overlooking the Danube owned by a family who had fled Vukovar from 1991 to 1998 because of the war.  Taking advantage of having a well-equipped kitchen, I cooked up a birthday steak dinner for Terri washed down by some excellent local Slavonian wine.

The chef is in the house!

After only two days in Croatia, we crossed into Serbia the next morning over an imposing bridge.  It was spitting rain as we went through border formalities, and it continued to rain off and on all day.  By the time we reached Novi Sad and had a late lunch, the rain had strengthened into a miserable downpour.  Since the ride into Belgrade from Novi Sad was supposed to be not much fun anyway, we decided on the spur of the moment to take advantage of the rain and take our bikes on the train straight to Belgrade.  It took forever to find the train station, and more time to figure out what platform to get on, but by 6:30 pm we were on the train using Terri’s iPhone to find a place to stay in Belgrade.  We had a long and typically Balkan conversation with a middle-aged Serbian man named Dragan.  He was well-educated and clever, but consumed by a sadness at the tragic history of his country.  He had fought in the war against Croatia and was keen to set us straight about the Serbs being the good guys in the war.  He held up Serbia as the bulwark against the Ottomans, sacrificing their own freedom to save the rest of the continent from the Turks.  It was interesting to talk to him, but his deep-seated blind nationalism was all too drearily familiar to me from my previous trip through the former Yugoslavia.  By 8:30 we were pushing our bicycles through the darkening streets to the ridiculously ornate Baroque furnishings of the apartment we had rented.

Kalemegdan fortress, Belgrade

We had a proper day off in Belgrade the next day, exploring the city on foot and absorbing some of the cultural energy that pulses through the streets.  Our first port of call was the Kalemegdan, the massive fortress at the junction of the Danube and Sava rivers that has been fought over for centuries.  

Transformer statue, central Belgrade

On the way we passed the pedestrian streets of the city centre, decorated by huge Transformer statues made from car parts and featuring more ice cream stands per block than even Italy.  The fortress itself was impressive, with expansive views to the north over the flat Hungarian-speaking plains of Vojvodina and to the west over the sprawling Soviet-era suburbs of the city.  The military museum inside the fortress was left unvisited, although Terri relived her days in military intelligence by identifying some of the tanks parked outside.  We then wandered back through the pedestrian streets of downtown, enjoying the relaxed atmosphere of a capital city in summer.  We had a great lunch at a local joint recommended by our landlady, then hit the grocery store across the street from our flat to restock our panniers and cook up another feast in the kitchen before collapsing in bed early in our aircraft-carrier-sized bed.

Refreshed by our day out of the saddle, we left Belgrade the next morning after an epic 30-minute tussle with the lock that kept our bicycles safe in the depths of the subterranean cellars of the building.  It was raining, and we were glad for frequent EV6 signs that swept us neatly out of town and over the Danube to the left bank.  After crossing our bridge on a dedicated bike lane, we were directed down a muddy track through the grass to another quiet dike-top path that got us away from the heavy truck traffic of the main road.  As we rode along, we passed a surprisingly beautiful landscape beside the river, with quiet marshy backwaters teeming with ducks and other birdlife.  We pushed along, past old grim factory towns to a radler stop in a little pizzeria, and then continued along a busyish road to a small ethnically Hungarian town, Skorenovac (Szekelykeres in Hungarian), where we came across a piece of Serbian history during a late lunch:  a restaurant owned by the family of Zoltan Dani, an officer in the Serbian army who managed to shoot down an American F-117 Stealth fighter in 1999 during the NATO air war against Serbia arising from the Kosovo conflict.  Posters of two different movies connected to the incident adorned the walls.  Afterwards we tossed in the towel a bit early from an uninspiring ride and took a room in a small, unpretentious restaurant with hotel rooms in the back.  The rain had finally fled, and we eschewed the restaurant in favour of a takeout roast chicken, fruit and beer from the market stalls across the road.

Stage Five—Through Romania’s Iron Gates

We rode under brilliant blue skies through a peaceful, bucolic countryside the next morning east towards the Serbian resort town of Bela Crkva.  It was easy riding, although we had small undulations as the road veered inland from the Danube.  Bela Crkva was a town with a pretty setting around a series of small lakes.  There was some sort of festival in town, with lots of girls dressed in traditional costumes and others incongruously wearing cheerleader outfits and twirling batons.  A look at the various churches in town told a story of the various ethnic and religious strands woven through the area:   a Catholic church for the Hungarians and Croatians, a Romanian orthodox church, a Serbian orthodox church and even a Russian orthodox church. We stopped in a café for our daily radler and fries, changed money, met our second French couple on a tandem in as many days, and then pedalled off towards the Romanian frontier.  This involved a bigger hill climb than we were used to, as the road headed up and over into the valley of another tributary of the Danube.  By the time we had freewheeled down to the bridge at the border, we had built up quite an appetite.  Luckily a little restaurant stood just on the Romanian side and we tucked into a hearty and well-earned lunch featuring the local specialty of tripe soup, which was a lot tastier than it sounds! 

We had another climb in front of us, 300 vertical metres uphill to cut a series of meanders in the river and get back to the Danube proper.  Although it was pretty warm and Terri was a bit apprehensive about our first sizeable climb of the trip, it was relatively straightforward (especially fuelled by lunch).  

At the top of the first big climb of the trip, Romania

At the top we read that we had entered the Iron Gates National Park, and we descended for 10 km to the valley of the Danube through a lovely wild forest.  All along the left bank of the river the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains rose up to inviting-looking forests.  We had planned to find some wild camping that evening, but as it got later, we still hadn’t seen any likely-looking spots amidst the farm fields.  We passed through the scruffy-looking town of Moldova Veche, a vision of post-Soviet apocalyptica, and found a surprisingly nice hotel for 70 lev (about 18 euros).  We sat out in the café over good beer and dreadful red wine, eating very meaty stews while a local crowd of single young men got louder and louder as the beer bottles piled up on their table. 

The next day was definitely the scenic highlight of the entire trip.  Our route led along the Danube through the canyon known as the Iron Gates, where the Danube forces its way through the barrier of the Carpathians.  Not far from where we had stayed, the farmland ceased and we rode through a landscape of forests and fishing spots, full of perfect camping spots.  There were Romanian fishermen camped in almost all of these spots, but I’m sure we could have found one to ourselves.  There were towns marked on our map, but these were ghost towns, abandoned Communist concrete monstrosities from the Ceausescu era.  It meant that we had few restaurant options for lunch, and even had problems finding a radler, although a tiny little café eventually came to our rescue.  As dismal as the towns were, the scenery was magnificent, with steep-sided mountain slopes cloaked in dense forests tumbling right down to the river.  The road on the Romanian side was almost deserted, as truck traffic was banned through the heart of the gorges, and surprisingly flat given the terrain.  Looking across the river, the road on the Serbian side looked far less inviting for cycling, with heavy traffic and an endless series of tunnels.  On our side, despite a landslide that had almost blocked the road in one spot, the pavement was in good shape and perfect for riding, as well as being blessedly tunnel-free.

Iron Gates scenery

The Iron Gates are redolent of history, and our first taste of it was a strange-looking structure on the Serbian shore that proved, upon inspection through binoculars, to be a large excavated Bronze Age settlement under a protective roof.  Soon afterwards the swiftly flowing waters started to pool in the huge hydroelectric reservoir of the Iron Gates Dam, and we passed the half-submerged towers of a medieval castle.  Somewhere else along this stretch, Patrick Leigh Fermor (in the course of his epic walk across Europe in 1934) visited a completely Turkish village on an island in the middle of the Danube that has vanished completely below the waterline.  I watched for protruding ruins, perhaps a drowned minaret, but didn’t see anything.  In Roman times, this was where the marauding legions of the Roman Empire crossed north into Dacia to subdue the troublesome tribes on the other side of the Danube.  Although the Romans were in Dacia for less than 100 years, modern Romanian historic mythologizing ascribes a founding role to these soldiers.

We looked for wild camping spots as the day wore on, but instead we were diverted by a vision of beauty.  After a stiff climb up to another half-abandoned industrial wasteland of a town (Dubova), we spotted a sign for an upcoming nearby pensiunea and decided to call it a day.  When we arrived, it looked far too grand for the likes of us, a vision of four-star luxury with BMWs parked outside.  The owners were amenable to negotiating down their 100 euro rack rate, and for a hair under 50 euros, Terri decided to treat us both to a night of luxury.  We swam in the pool, sat sipping red wine (much less awful than the previous evening’s plonk) and absorbed the grand views.  The hotel was located on a wide stretch of the reservoir between two gorges, and we looked across at towering limestone cliffs that lit up as the sun crept towards the horizon.  It was a perfect setting, in the most impressive scenery of the entire day, and we slept the sleep of the dead in our huge king-sized bed.

The next morning we found that after the low traffic and non-existent population of the previous day, we had re-entered modern Romania.  

Terri with Decebalus, Romania

We cycled past dozens of new pensiuneas clustered along the water’s edge, then past the huge sculpted head of the Dacian king Decebalus carved into the cliffs beside the road in the late 1990s by a Romanian business tycoon, Iosif Constantin Dragan.  It was a pretty spot for photos, but it was also another instalment in the myth-making that characterizes so much history in eastern Europe.  We climbed up, up, up away from the hotels and weekend cottages that surround the town of Eselnita, and then descended into the larger city of Orsova where we picked up all the heavy truck and bus traffic that had been diverted around the gorge.  It was an unpleasant 20-km stretch along the river past the dam itself and into the city of Drobeta-Turnu Severin.  

Camping on a grassland that once was a collective farm

Here we stopped to recover from the head-down survival riding over perhaps the slowest lunch of the trip, with an old-school waitress prone to disappearing for half an hour at a stretch.  We followed quieter roads out of town along the river and ended up camping wild in an abandoned collective farm that has returned to nature.  There we gorged ourselves on the most delicious peaches we had ever eaten, plucked lovingly by old man from his own garden and sat watching the sun set the savannah alight in a scene oddly reminiscent of East Africa.

Southwestern Romanian countryside

Our last day in Romania ended up being the longest day of the entire trip, the only time we went over 100 km for the day.  We awoke in our abandoned farm field and spent much of the day rolling through tiny villages where horse carts outnumbered cars, on roads that varied from perfect new EU-funded asphalt to rutted cart tracks across the fields. 

The bit of the road that wasn't paved

We kept almost exact pace with the local beer delivery truck, passing them as they unloaded crates at cafes and shops, and then being passed halfway to the next village with friendly waves from the delivery guys.  We eventually popped out on a main road and had a fairly terrifying 10 km of dodging speeding trucks before the traffic calmed down and we approached the last border of the trip.  We had planned to sleep one last night on the Romanian side of the river, but Terri decided we could do another 10 km to get us across the new bridge and into Bulgaria.  

Sunflowers, southwest Romania

As we trundled along a back road into town from the bridge, my rear hub, which had made strange sounds earlier in the day, suddenly seized up and made a very unpromising and very loud crunch.  I realized that I had broken a bearing, and that the wheel was going to have to be rebuilt.  We made it another kilometre to the first truck stop we could find and took a surprisingly nice room.  I demolished a huge plate of the local specialty, satch (a giant meat and veg stirfry), but Terri, normally ravenous after a long day in the saddle, barely touched hers. 

Stage Six:  Bulgarian Beauty

It was the start of 24 hours of severe intestinal distress for Terri; luckily we were already planning to take the day off to get my wheel fixed, so she could have a bit of rest.  We got a lift into the Soviet-era concrete of downtown Vidin and, with the help of our driver, a local guy who had lived for 20 years in Italy and with whom I spoke in my pidgin Italian, we located a bicycle repair specialist whose shop was in his garden shed.  He took a look at my wheel, told me to follow him on one of his bikes and took me to a bike shop to buy a new hub (for all of 12 euros).  Then he told us to come back in an hour and a half and set to work stripping the spokes and rim off the old, destroyed hub and rebuilding the wheel on the new hub.  Terri found a hairdresser and had a haircut, pedicure and scalp massage while I wandered the streets eating.  The bike mechanic was done the wheel by the time we got back; he reminded me of similar gifted mechanics who had fixed my bikes over the years in places like Tbilisi and Baku and Sochi.  Armed with the new wheel, we caught a cab back to the hotel where Terri went back to bed feeling very unwell.

At this point, wondering what to do next, I got a message from a former student, Victor, who lived in the area.  When he heard that Terri was ill and that we were kicking around in Vidin, he hopped into his truck and drove us the 20 km out to the commercial farm that he runs in the village of Tsar Petrovo.  

Teachers-student reunion with Victor

He installed us in his guest cottage and we sat outside drinking good local wine, eating a great meal that his housekeeper had prepared and hearing about how a 21-year-old who had failed out of university through sheer apathy had been transformed into a keen farmer who had won the Bulgarian Farmer of the Year award the year before.  It was great to see a young man who had found his passion in life and become so successful.

We spent the next day touring around the farm with Victor, playing with the drone that he uses to survey his fields, checking out the irrigation system, riding in combine harvesters (one of Terri’s life-long dreams) and racing around on a quad bike.  

Flying drones on the farm

It was a wonderful day, and we finished with another great meal and more stories from Victor.  It’s always a welcome development in a long trip when for a little while you cease being a tourist and fit into the life of someone who lives in the country, and see the country in a completely different way.  

Storks following the combine harvester

Through Victor we learned a lot about the poverty and unemployment that blight this corner of Bulgaria; about corruption and gangsters; about trying to get his workforce out of their Communist-era apathy; about how cheap land and houses were around Tsar Petrovo; about the enormous depopulation of the villages. 

Seriously happy looking shotgun passenger!

The next morning Victor gave us a lift about 20 km out of town to shorten what promised to be a long day.  We waved goodbye on the side of the road, grateful for his hospitality and ready for the last three days of our ride.  That day proved to be a long one, both in terms of distance (93 km) and in terms of time.  Terri found it challenging, as it was by far the hilliest day we’d had so far, climbing away from the Danube and then undulating from valley to plateau all day.  It wasn’t terribly hot, but it was still sweaty work climbing up the escarpments, and when we came into a village looking for a restaurant that wasn’t there and Terri saw the next climb rising in front of her, she almost lost it.  I quickly directed us off the road to a riverside meadow and we had a picnic and a swim which restored spirits.  The afternoon continued to be hilly, and we decided to look for a spot to camp wild, but could not find any running water.  

Northwest Bulgarian traffic

Eventually, nearing dusk, the road took a final dip and led us down, down, down into the city of Montana.  I parked Terri in a café where she wolfed down a plate of hot fries and quaffed a beer in no time flat while I cycled around looking for a hotel.  It took a while, but I found quite a nice little hotel for a decent price.  We went back to the café for a huge dinner, and then collapsed tired into bed to sleep deeply for over 10 hours.

The next morning I had to make time for a medical issue.  I had, it seemed, been bitten by a tick the day we camped on the abandoned farm in Romania, and an expanding bulls-eye target of red had been expanding around the bite day by day.  Concerned by the prospect of getting Lyme disease, I went to the pharmacist who suggested a few days of doxycycline and an injection of something mysterious whose identity I never really figured out.  I had to go across the street and pay a nurse to do the injection.  The total cost for the antibiotics, the vaccine and the injection was 3 euros, a definite bargain. 

Petrohan Pass, the highest point of the trip

Once that was out of the way, Terri found a taxi driver willing to drive her and her bike up to the top of the Petrohan Pass, the 1400-metre barrier between us and Sofia.  Her legs were tired after the previous day’s exertions, and she was still feeling a bit dicey after her illness, so she left the climbing to me.  I love climbing passes on bicycles, and I had a great time rolling up into the Balkan range, through a series of small villages and then up through a lovely hardwood forest.  I left town just before noon, and it took about four hours in total from Montana to the top of the pass, where I found Terri sitting in a snug little restaurant reading and eating a delectable stew.  It was noticeably cooler at the top, and we sat inside beside the fire as I had some stew as well, having built up a tremendous hunger since breakfast.  Eventually we both climbed onto our bikes and started rolling down the other side of the pass, looking for a place to camp, but instead we ended up staying at Andreev Khan, a lovely fake-old caravansarai  set in a big garden beside the road, with a series of fish ponds.  It was not very expensive (20 euros) and it was a very pretty setting to sit and sip wine and eat as dusk fell.  We slept very well again.  

Andreev Han

Now that we were over the pass, not much stood between us and Sofia, about 60 km away.  We rolled downhill, took a short climb over a secondary pass, and then coasted downhill most of the way into the city.  We had a pizza and sausage lunch in the city of XXXXXXX which marked the end of the downhill.  It was hot as we trundled across the flat valley floor and into the bustle of the capital.  By dumb luck we chose a route into and through the city that had bike lanes, and then climbed up towards the leafy suburb of XXXXXX where Victor’s father’s house was.  Victor’s brother Igor was going to be staying there that evening (his father was on the Black Sea coast) and we looked forward to another reunion with a former student.  As we got closer to where Google Maps said the house was, the streets got steeper and steeper and narrower and narrower and Terri ended up pushing her bike and voicing her displeasure at the steepness.  We couldn’t find the house and settled down to wait for Igor’s arrival, which was in about half an hour at the wheel of his father’s convertible.  It turned out that Google Maps, and most other city maps, don’t have the street’s location correct.  Maybe this is a security precaution, as the Gatsbyesque mansion that Igor led us to was once the personal home of Todor Zhivkov, the long-serving Communist boss of the country from 1954 to the downfall of Communism in 1989.

Olympian feast in Sofia with Xander and Igor

Our last two days on the road were spent in the lap of luxury, eating like kings in a couple of beautiful restaurants, swimming in the pool, packing our bicycles into boxes and swapping stories with Igor, now an engineering student in Sydney, and his friend Xander, with whom he had just finished a high-speed road trip around Bulgaria.  

Igor and I atop Vitosha

We went for a drive and hike up the Vitosha mountain range that rises directly behind the house, and after a month of lots of cycling and little walking, our legs were sore for several days afterwards.  Sofia seemed a world away from the grinding poverty of the northwest of the country, and made a fine spot to end our month-long cycling odyssey that had started in Vienna. 

Our oasis of luxury in Sofia

I was pleased with the route we took.  Although it was very flat most days, we had interesting historical, cultural and natural sights to look at, and the heat and winds gave us some challenge.  I particularly liked going back to Hungary, but the two countries that I think I would most want to explore further are Romania and Bulgaria.  They will have to wait for my return to Europe, and I don’t know when that will be.  As we took our flight from Sofia back to Geneva so that Terri could return to Leysin for the last summer term of her career, I was already looking forward to my trip to Scandinavia, due to start only 48 hours later.  No rest for the cycle tourist!!