The Archive

Hand me a driver, caddy

OK, so we awake, refreshed and ready for a nice four-hour drive or so from Dubrovnik to a carefully selected town about halfway between us and Belgrade - Zlatibor.

Yes, I know, it sounds like a name we just made up, but I assure you we didn't. Zlatibor, we were assured, is a ski resort but one which also has something of a summer season. This is just as well really, as a the winter in the not-very-high mountains of Serbia is only a couple of months.

And how do we know it's only a four-hour drive? Easy, it sort of looked like it on the map. Surely that couldn't go wrong.

The first way it went wrong was when we forgot to take any kind of map. Fortunately for us, there really aren't very many roads in Croatia/Serbia/The Balkans. Presumably this is to make life a little more tricky for invading tanks.

Unfortunately, this meant that those roads that did exist were about the size of the B193 from Chichister, assuming that the B193 from Chichester ran tortuously around the Croatian coast, with the right hand side of the road nothing more than a vertical drop into the sea. No wall, no barrier, no nothing.

Oh and did I mention that we weren't in a car. Oh no. To accomodate all five of us, the smallest thing we could hire was a minibus.

So there we were winding around, stopping occasionally to allow another vehicle to creep by, millimetres from our paintwork. What fun!

To make matters even more confusing, those tricky Balks had added a whole new country just before we'd arrived (Montenegro, if you haven't been reading the papers). So every now and then we'd suddenly come up to another border point and the conversation would go something like this...

"Passports guys, it's a border."
"Right. Where are we?"
"The border."
"Yes, but which country are we coming in to now?"
"Er... just give me your passport, we'll figure it out later."

Well it's a bit rude to ask a border official what country you're entering isn't it? That's the kind of thing the seasoned traveller is kind of expected to know already.

So on we drove and before we really felt like we'd started, four hours were up. And we weren't quite halfway to Zlatibor. Brilliant.

Fortunately, we then turned left away from the coast and it's windy, sea-brinking tarmac.

Instead we were headed into the mountains with equally windy tarmac, but instead of a two metre drop into the sea, a two-hundred metre plummet down a rocky precipice.

On the plus side we eventually came to the Serbian border.

Some bizarre traffic problems aside, we sailed through the passport and customs checks like a breeze.

Which you'd think would be a good thing, wouldn't you? Except, ringing in our ears, was the advice of the British Foreign office... "You should only enter Serbia through recognised border crossings, where you will receive an entry stamp in your passport. You will face penalties if you try to leave Serbia without an entry stamp."

These 'penalties' are apparently either a big fine or, even better, a jail sentence.

We had no stamps. Hmmm.

Nothing like the lingering suspicion that you're going to end up in a Serbian Prison to add spice to your trip. Still, no time to worry about such trivialities, we had a mountain range to traverse.

And so we did. After another three hours we were there.

Ha! Fooled you. No, after three more hours, it got dark. And the road ran out.

So now, we're eight hours in, it's dark, there's no actual road to follow, just a dusty, in-progress roadworks. Still, we could take some comfort from the fact that even if it were daytime, trucks everywhere were kicking up so much dust that visibility would still be zero.

So now I'm going to shock you.

I happened to be the driver for this leg and, for all the preceding complaining, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Just as I was getting tired, this whole rally-style off-roading event began and the adrenaline of four-wheel drift around corners whilst trying to stay close enough to the truck in front so you know where the road is, but far enough behind so you don't die if it suddenly brakes was, well, bracing.

Certainly it made the time fly.

The passengers, on the other hand, aged about fifteen years each over the course of the trip.

But, as you may have guessed by my being here to type this, we did not die. Hurrah!

Instead, we arrived in Zlatibor and pulled up at the curiously named Hotel JugoPetrol (a bit like calling a hotel here Hotel Esso) without so much as a scratch on our beloved vehicle.

The hotel was actually a ski lodge, obviously left over from communist times. Certainly the designer had been trying to please all of the apparatchiks who I would imagine stayed there, by chucking in bits of every type of decor you could imagine. In the bar, Louis Quatorze style furniture nestled snugly with eighties pastels and art deco lamps. It was quite, er, overwhelming. No, hideous, that's the word I'm looking for.

And the other bizarre thing about this hotel was that it seemed to have been constructed to avoid using a single right angle. All the walls were at odd angles so they came together in pointy corners. I think the architect had been inspired by Superman's fortress of solitude.

Actually no, we did figure out what it was in the end. It was a stealth hotel, designed not to show up on radar. Obviously.


Stealth Hotel Jugopetrol - note lack of right angles

Anyway, at the hotel we asked our concierge where the restaurant might be. He told us, adding that it was closed.

So he suggested we go into the bustling centre of this town which, let's not forget, boasts something of a summer tourist season.

The town centre was also closed.

Well not quite closed. There were people in various restaurants and cafes, but things were obviously winding down and everybody refused to either let us in or feed us.

A short and increasingly humourless walk later, we came across the only game in town - a 24 hour kebab shop.

Now bearing in mind that this is supposedly a tourist resort of some kind, we were surprised to discover that nobody spoke any English. Not a massive problem normally, but among are party were one Hindu and one Jew. So it was quite important that we be able to identify the cow and pig elements of anything we ordered.

Which is how we ended up at close to midnight, outside a kebab shop, making horns with our fingers, shouting 'mooo!' and pointing to things on the menu. A high point of the trip I feel.

It worked though and we got to eat and, more importantly, enjoy a few beers from the bar next door. Oh, and the bar next door, it turned out, was actually a cab office. So the cab drivers were based out of a bar - how could that possibly be a bad idea?

We walked home.

In the next edition - Belgrade, bombs and butter

posted by Peter The Great @ 5:02 PM