Basketball and corruption
Dimitrovgrad to Vojska, 15th - 20th June
Now I was in Serbia, I had a pretty straight route towards Belgrade. First I'd go to Niš, Serbia's third-biggest city, then I'd head northwest along a valley to the capital. Southern Serbia is quite mountainous, but this way I'd avoid a lot of climbing - which was the reason I decided to come to Serbia to begin with. Earlier, I'd been thinking of following Trans Dinarica along a more southern route, but I changed my mind after realising just how much climbing that would mean. I'd still like to do it, but I'll come back to it another time with lower gears and carrying less weight. For now, my path to Belgrade is overall a little downhill - perfect.
The way from Dimitrovgrad to Niš was still a little hilly, and I was a little irritated by what felt like an early stage mild cold. The night camping had been chillier than I'd expected, and I was feeling the results of not layering up. It wasn't too bad, though, and I rode a solid 75km in warm weather before treating myself to a bed for the evening. It turned out to be a homestay and my hosts didn't speak any English, but warmly welcomed me with some rakia and conversation through the language barrier (Google Translate's conversation mode helped a lot). I had optimistically been hoping to reach Niš that day to give myself the whole next day off to rest, but with just 25km left I would be able to reach it the next morning and then chill. The homestay was also pretty cheap - the same price as a hostel room, €15.
I often think about the other travellers I've met and their varying styles: Paul with his commitment to frugal wild camping, or Inez and Jo who usually take campsites or rooms. Meeting them also influences my own approach - Paul inspired me to live a bit rougher and dirtier, Inez and Jo to have a bit more comfort. Comparison is the thief of joy, but I'm not so enlightened as to be above it - I want to be the kind of person who's okay with always wild camping and being a bit grimy. Money is always a factor, too, of course. I feel guilty for taking paid accomodation or hot meals when I could be using that money to extend my travel or just saving for the future. The luxury of a bed and a shower after a sweaty day is very tempting at the €15 mark though, and it can be a hard habit to break once you get into it. I compensate by eating more cheaply, which makes me feel a bit better, and gives me a concrete motivation to wild camp - nicer food.
It was a short ride to Niš through a beautiful gorge, and I was glad to have the time to enjoy it rather than rushing through at the end of a long day. A very generous Warmshowers host had told me to stay in his open apartment even though he was away in Belgrade. It was a beautiful display of trust, and I was looking forward to doing absolutely nothing indoors for the afternoon. Unfortunately, upon arriving at his address the door was actually locked and he wasn't replying to messages. Waiting around in a hot park, anxiety got the better of me and I booked a hostel for the night. Although I could've waited longer from a pure logistics perspective, I was much more able to relax in a cool indoor environment with a bed, a sofa, and no worries about moving my belongings again. I'd temporarily left them outside his apartment door, up four flights of stairs, for a couple of hours and doing more heavy lifting was the last thing I wanted to do. My social tendencies got in the way of resting in the hostel, however, and I ended up out for drinks in the cool evening rather than sipping tea inside. Perhaps because of this, the next day I had more of an irritated throat and committed to the laziness with another night in Niš. Once again I was out late with new friends, albeit dressed warmer, but even after a far-too-short sleep I was committed to leaving the following morning. I was still on a timeline to arrive in Belgrade, after all, and I was using up the slack in my schedule.
I wasn't in any schedule trouble yet, but I wanted to keep moving and have chill moderate-distance days, especially considering the midday heat. For the next two days, I had calm, flat riding and took naps through the midday heat. It's very convenient being able to use any green space for a lie-down without anyone having a problem - Serbians are very chill about that stuff. In a small roadside restaurant in Zitkovac, a man even paid for my meal after hearing that I'd been cycling from Italy. I was quite taken aback by the random generosity, and only half-understood his explanation in Italian, but he seemed very enthusiastic about my travels and possibly thought I was actually from Italy (oops). I wasn't able to talk to him much, as he only came over on his way out, perhaps to make it clear he didn't want anything in return.
To make a national generalisation, Serbians are very hospitable people. I stayed in a farm guest house and a small town guest house, and in each case had a long conversation with the owner. I think they would've been quite disappointed if I treated it as a pure business arrangement and stayed in my room alone the whole time - they want to connect with their guests, give them the homemade cherry juice (as it may be), and talk about the other guests they've had and their own stories. I heard about people who walked to Vietnam from the UK, many other cyclists (I'm on a EuroVelo route here), and (my favourite) the guest house owner's experiences with Serbian corruption. He'd had another business before, and was asked by national party leadership to join the party and be the local boss. After he told them no, they sent inspectors and bureaucratic nuisances after him. He gave up and did business in Switzerland instead, coming back to Serbia last year with his new business and the fresh courage to take on the party again. Corruption is a popular topic in Serbia, with seemingly nobody having trust in politicians to be in it for anything other than profit. This is the subject of the mass student protests in the capital which have been happening since a deadly train station canopy collapse last year (described to me as the last straw).
I had the opportunity to talk to more Serbian locals on Friday evening, when I stopped in a village after spotting a flat green space next to a school under repair. I asked a guy in a car who had just pulled up outside whether I could possibly camp there, and it began: I was pulled into the Serbian generosity vortex. He was meeting some friends to play basketball outside the school and I was soon shown a better spot nearby. It was still a few hours until sunset, though, so they invited me to join them hanging out and playing basketball. Serbians love the game - apparently they're the second best country in the world, after the United States. I met the whole group, who all spoke at least some English and were around the ages of 23-27. As often happens, when I said I was British I had to explain my ethnicity as well, and through their retellings to each other I think some of them thought I'd cycled all the way from India even after my corrections. I met what felt like all the young people in the village, including a sweet 11-year-old girl who, in very proudly good English, showed me her bicycle and her two little sisters. I was a popular figure - the exciting foreigner visiting the sleepy village. One woman even brought me some homemade food (pljeskavica, to be precise) telling me that it was much better than the commercial stuff. Corruption came up again: all the young people were angry about it, and told me that there would be a huge protest on Saturday 28th in Belgrade and telling me I had to be there. I also heard about a handful of other bike travellers who'd passed through the village in years past on their way to far-off places. You could tell that they were proud of their hospitality in the village - it was a mark of honour that "it was a very rainy night, they stayed in my house".
Another character keen to talk to the foreign cyclist was one of the guys' drunk uncle, who powered through our English language barrier with sheer determination and occasional German vocab. He liked to talk about politics - I must have heard "fuck Israel" a hundred times along with his comtempt with NATO because of the 90s bombing. Although a bit loud, he seemed like a genuinely nice man and invited me to camp in his garden rather than in the middle of the village. After getting a character reference from his sober nephew, I took him up on the offer, and ended up staying in a spare bed in his house. I had heard about Balkan hospitality, and truth be told, I had been hoping for something like this to happen, but experiencing it first hand was really special. It's not something I'll forget in a hurry.