2012 Travels: Serbia

It’s not that Timisoara isn’t pleasant, but it’s a small provincial city and we didn’t have a reason to stick around nearly as long as we did. Here’s the deal.

Onward transport to Belgrade shouldn’t be a problem. The two cities are about 150km apart. But apparently, onward transport is a problem. There are no buses. There are no trains. You can take a train to the nearest border town in Romania, hire a taxi (maybe) across the border, then catch a bus…blah blah blah…I’ve done that sort of thing before and it’s a lot of work. So we found a private minibus service, GEA Tours, that does this run. I’m naming names because this needs to be something people see in the Google search.

We arranged for them to pick us up between 9–10am. We were up early, went downstairs and waited. And waited. By 10:30, we called them. They did not answer. We emailed as well. No response. NOTHING. The hotel tried to call them. Eventually, long after we realized the ride wasn’t forthcoming, we got hold of them around noon. They said we never confirmed the booking. I’m sitting there staring at the email I sent that confirmed the booking and pickup time. They flat out lied to me on the phone.

The problem is that there were no other options. We thought about taking a train to Bucharest, then cutting south from there to Sofia and exploring Bulgaria. We thought about going north into Hungary, but the connections are awful there as well. We realized that if we didn’t want to blow up our trip entirely, we had to book with these people for the evening minibus. Not cool. Also, even when confronted with the email evidence that they made a mistake, no apology, and they ignored my request for a discount on the new ticket. GEA Tours do not run an honest business, and I made sure we didn’t use their service to get to Sarajevo.

Belgrade is a pleasant and civilized city. While most of us remember what the former Yugoslavia was like from the news reports in the 1990s, it is now 2012 and life returned to normal here a long time ago. Belgrade was enjoyable, and in fact we wished we had more time there. But we didn’t, because GEA Tours cost us a day. We spent that day twiddling our thumbs in Timisoara waiting for the evening minibus when we should have been exploring Belgrade.

At any rate, there aren’t a lot of things to see or do, per se, it’s one of those cities that is just incredibly comfortable in which to hang out. So that’s what we did.

Interesting thing about Serbia. They have a weird system for buying beer. Cans and plastic bottles are fine, but glass bottles are a serious problem, apparently. The stores sell them, but in order to buy one, you need to bring back an empty. Tell me how much sense this makes. We aren’t from Serbia, so we don’t have any old empties to bring back. We cannot buy a bottle, so we have no future empties either. At some point, you have to buy your first bottle of beer! Kids who just turned 18 need to get their first bottle. Tourists, same thing. And what of people who already had a bottle, but it broke. Or they have six bottles, but are holding a party and want 24? There is a logical disconnect here. At one point, we had to ask our guesthouse to facilitate a couple of empties, just so we could grab a new tick at the store. Whacky system, I tell you.

The next step after Belgrade was to circumvent dealing with that company again and rent a car. Apparently, there aren’t many buses going south to Sarajevo. In fact, I suspect there are, but one of the things about travelling through this part of Europe, something we’ve encountered a lot on this trip, is that there are so few Western visitors that we can’t find the information we need online. Besides, we had a new plan now.

The first step involved driving down the Danube. The Iron Gates Gorge is spectacular, and at the entrance is Golubec Fortress, which you can climb all over. The road runs through the fortress, which is even more amazing. We stuck to the back roads all the way south. We visited Gamzigrad, which is a Roman ruin. We visited Lepensky Vir, a Mesolithic site where the local culture had cool carvings. We visited the city of Nis, and we stayed in the hills where Studenica Monastery is. They started Serbian Orthodox there, and we enjoyed the peace and quiet, since using public transport means you never get to stay in places like that.

Then we drove through the mountains, avoiding all other traffic almost entirely, until we arrived at the Bosnian border. The border crossing was smooth, since we don’t speak the language very well they can’t ask us much. In fact, the language being Slavic, there are words similar to Russian, or even the same. That makes it a bit easier. I cannot put a coherent sentence together in Russian, but at this point I have some vocabulary.

After enjoying a relaxing tour of the Serbian countryside, it was time for us to head to Sarajevo.