Writing is dumb. For one, no one reads any more. Second, AI does it much quicker and better. Yet, here I am, stringing words together manually like a maniac. But I guess that fits in with the rest of the adventure, pointless being the overall theme.
Three years passed since the last story. She was there with me. Things were good. Professionally, I got tired of IT so I meandered a bit. I bought a tow truck and a bunch of old cars to fix up. I got my commercial licence and bought a big truck. After about a year of bassically playing with my hobbies full time, I took a job at the university. That was nice for a while but by the end of my second year I grew very disillusioned so I quit. Once more, I had to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. What better place to start than taking a trip.
I had all but forgotten about the little black ball. Remember the little black ball? It’s the one from this story. Suddenly, I felt the time was right to make that journey. I completely forgot that when I first brought the ball home and explained the metaphor, my mom asked to go with me when I go take it to the Black sea. Apparently, I said yes, and apparently, she meant it. I messaged my Sarajevo friend, he was in, he just needed some time to get his vacation days approved. That gave us a start date.
I did no planning whatsoever. The idea was to drive where we feel like for as long as we feel like, roughly following the Danube river towards the Black Sea.
The one bit of preparation I did was email a famous Serbian youtuber and asked him if I could visit. To my surprise, he said yes. We’ll get to that.
And, of course, I had to get the car ready.
I wanted to take one of the oldies, I thought it would add to the experience. The final choice came down to a Punto MK-1 convertible and a W116 Mercedes. The convertible was tempting, it definitely would have been interesting, but in the end I opted for the comfort of the Benz. It had been sitting in a garage for almost a year, and it had been 6 months since I last checked on it. To my joy, I swapped the battery, added fresh fuel and it started right up. I changed the shock absorbers, belts, a couple of hoses, had it inspected and insured and it was good to go. I added an AC inverter so we have electricity. I added a dashcam, the idea was to record the whole trip and make a time lapse. I also had a big logo and a QR code (pointing here) stickers made. I specifically asked for letters on transparent foil. I got letters on a matte foil. Oh, well.
Right off the bat we took the long way around. We were in no hurry so taking the more scenic route along the Adriatic coast was an easy choice. When i posted the approximate route, I got comments saying a route through Hungary would be more logical. My reply to that was that if logic were a factor, I wouldn’t be doing this at all.
Half an hour into the drive I wanted to toss mom out the window. She didn’t actually do anything wrong, it was just a clash of visions. To me, the drive was supposed to be a time for quiet introspection and reflection on where I am in life, where I wanted to be and how to get there. To her, it was a chance to catch up. Neither vision was wrong but they were mutually exclusive. In the end we ended up sort of compromising which meant neither of us got what we wanted. That’s the thing about compromise, we’re thought to regard it as this ideal, a solution to problems, something we should strive to achieve. But it sucks for everybody, always. I have a friend who occasionally stumbles upon a decent thought and I think he and his wife actually got this one right: they don’t compromise. One time they do his thing 100%, next time they do her thing 100%. That way, when it’s your turn, you actually get what you want. Anyway, we didnt do that so the overall mood was not the best it could be. But not the worst. It got better after we stopped for coffee.
Our first checkpoint was Imotski. It’s a small town famous for their collective love of Mercedes. Older generations refuse to drive anything else. There are tales of parents kicking children out of the house for driving up in a different brand. There are videos of people talking about how the whole town would come together to intervene if somebody bought anything else but a Mercedes. I’m sure a lot of the stories are exaggerated, but, the people did build a monument to a mercedes. A legit, stone monument. I heard of it before, they aledgedly started working on it just before corona hit. I actually went looking for it in ’23, it wasn’t there. So when I heard that they had actually completed it, I had to go check it out. And sure enough, it was there. And damn it, it was glorious!
Meanwhile, our car was not at it’s best, it started losing power. It barely made it up the hill to Imotski. Still, we proceeded. We crossed the border with no hassle and carried on. More hills, the car barely trudging along. I suspected it wasn’t getting enough fuel. I pulled over by the side of the road. There was a cross with a metal Jesus there and a bench with the writing “Sit down, rest, pray to God”. It made me giggle.
It’s strange to feel happy to see something is wrong but I was happy to see that the little pre-filter was full of muck. That was literally the simplest problem it could be, provided that’s all it was. I had a spare in the trunk so I went on to replace it hoping that would be it but also worrying that it wouldn’t. It was. The car ran fine again.
We got stuck in traffic for an hour due to construction so it was almost midnight by the time we got to Sarajevo. My friend met us at his appartment but that was not where we were staying since the place was being redone. We went to the other place where his mom and their two dogs were waiting for us. The old dog and I were friends, but the new dog and I only met once, and it never saw my mom, so it barked it’s little snout off at us. It took a while to pacify her.
It was past 1AM by the time we went to bed. This was unusually late for me, I usually go to bed before 11. And I wake up at 6:30 every morning. I know it probably sounds insane to most people, I know it would have sounded insane to me when I was younger (and a total night owl). It does have benefits, though. Anyways, at 6:30 I’m awake. I know I can’t go waking people up at this ungodly hour so I start thinking about sneaking out of the appartment to go search for coffee. As I silently make my way towards the bathrom, I hear the shuffle of paws in the next room. And then the barrage of barking. My friend got up, opened the door, the dog saw me and calmed down. But everybody in the appartment and likely half the building was awake. So, problem solved, hihi. With everyone up, we had coffee and headed out.
Now we were three. We made our way north. It was cloudy and you could almost feel the sky pressing down on you. But we were in a good mood. When it started to rain I noticed I had bought the wrong wiper blades. The driver side was fine but the passanger side needed a shorter blade, and I installed an identical pair. The passanger blade would hit the seal at the top of the windshield. To get us moving quickly, I just bent the passanger blade.
At one point, I smelled the distinct odor of electrical insulation burning. I stopped, lifted the hood, tried locating the source but I couldnt pinpoint it. I figured it was probably coming from outside, maybe someone was burning old cables for the copper. With this air pressure the smoke would linger for a long time.
But I kept smelling it. After a while I stopped again and this time I could trace it to the fuse box. It was us. The modificatons I made to the electrical system had a separate fuse but I still started there. The cables were all cold and seemed fine. So, if it wasn’t the mods, the next most likely thing was the latest thing we started using – the wipers. Sure enough, since the rain stopped, I thought I had turned the wipers off, but they were actually set to interval, only they weren’t moving. I turned them on, they still weren’t moving. When I gave the blades a little nudge, they completed a cycle and stopped again. When I lifted the passanger side blade off the glass, they worked normally. Obviously the passenger side was getting stuck forcing the motor to suffer and it’s wires to overheat. Again, not aiming for a real fix but for gettting us moving quickly, I just took the whole passanger wiper arm off. The driver blade covered most of the pane anyway so we didn’t really miss it. The smell went away.
There was a bit of a queue at the border to Serbia. We drove through Belgrade but decided not to stop, nothing new there to see. We booked a place in Donji Milanovac, which is in the middle of the Đerdap national park. That sounded like a good place to end the day. But we misscalculated the trip duration so it got dark before we even reached the start of the park. We missed any scenery there was. However, that wasn’t all bad because we got to see the Golubac fort at night, all illuminated and fancy. And there was still plenty left to see the next day.
We got to the appartment, it was a nice place with self-check-in. There were a couple of dogs in front of the building keen on coming in so we called the landlord to see if they belonged to a tenant of the building and got locked out. Turned out, no, they were just local dogs.
We ate, went to sleep. The sd card slot on my laptop failed so I couldn’t back up the dashcam. I definitely didn’t want to risk loosing footage so I figured we’d go look for a usb card reader before we head out in the morning.
I woke up first again. I thought the best way to wake up the rest of the team was to find a video of dogs barking and blast it. And it worked like a charm, woke them up and confused the hell out of them (with the dogs of last night fresh in their minds). This was now the official wake up alarm for the trip.
Right, so, finding a card reader in a small tourist town at the far end of Serbia proved more difficult than I had hoped. After a couple of failed attempts, I found a photographer who, while he didn’t carry card readers, offered to back the card up for me. I thankfully accepted but the process was painfully slow. While we waited, a couple of his friends came by and they invited me to join all of them for coffee in the square in front of the shop. We chatted about where I was from, where we were going, the car we were going in. After a while my friend and mom joined us, we all chatted some more so the wait was actually pleasant. Once the backup was completed, the photographer gave me his personal reader, said he’d get another. He wouldn’t charge me for the backup and he even payed for my coffee, he only accepted something for the reader. They sent us on our way with the best of wishes.
The Danube is impressive. I had no idea exactly how wide it is in places. And then there’s The Gorge. That’s where it goes through the mountain. Looking at it, I got to thinking about how it is that a river can do that. I get erosion and all, but a river cant cut upwards, how come the mountain is cut from the top? I couldn’t really think of a way but a quick search settled that: the river was there before the mountain and as the mountain rose, the river cut it. That made me aware of just how incapable I am of grasping just how much time there is and was and will be. I mean, you hear the numbers, millions of years this, billions of years that, but you’re still somehow too stuck in your own personal idea of what a long time is to really grasp just how much time that really is.
The guys at the coffe that morning told us there was a huge face carved into stone on the far bank of the river (mount Rushmore style) and I was looking forward to seeing it. But somehow I missed it. As we moved further the terrain got more level and less exciting. We stopped at a sand beach to dip the ball in the Danube and toss it around for a bit.
We looked at our options for a bit and decided to go through Bulgaria for a bit rather than going straight to Romania. Just because. There was nobody at the border, the guards looked almost happy to have something to do. They asked me to open the trunk. They took a quick glance but didnt really examine anything. They asked about the car, they found it charming. Since they seemed genuinely interested, I told them we were on an adventure and that they could follow us. One of them scanned the qr code we put on pur rear window. It made me kinda happy.
Not long after the border we found an interesting site: a W116, like the one we were driving, suspended over a gate, along with a couple of concrete lions. I wonder what the story is there.
At one point, I wanted to take a little break at a rest stop of sorts but when I made the turn I found it occupied by a very scantily clothed lady who put on a little dance for us when she saw us pulling up. I laughed and drove along. I remember thinking it’s a good thing we have a dashcam becuse nobody would believe this.
We found a different place to rest. There was a fishing cabin/trailer nerby, it looked like nobody had been there in a while, but there were a couple of copy/paste cats. We shared some of our food and mild and they looked happy about it. One of them olmost got in our car but decided not to join us after all. 🙂
We booked a hotel in Oryahovo. When we got there, a very unpleasant man said we needed to pay extra on top of what we paid through Booking. I refused. We got into an argument and he shouted and got in my face. He called me a gypsy for not wanting to pay extra. And this whole exchange took place in a weird combination of bulgarian (which I don’t speak) and serbian which he barely spoke. It wasn’t about the amount for me. I was adamant about not paying extra and I asked for a refund, he said to go through Booking. But as soon as we left, the jerk marked us as a no-show and keept almost the whole amount as a fee. I tried going through the platform but all I got was “sorry you had a bad experience”, but no refund. So, I’m currently looking for alternatives to Booking.
I was tired and upset. I tried booking a different place that looked like it was near but when I booked it the address was actually a couple of hours away. Thankfully, these people were really nice, as soon as I messaged them saying I made a mistake, they immediately refunded the whole amount.
Our only option left was to keep driving until we found a hotel. After about half an hour, we did. We walked in off the street and asked for a room. They had one, the price was good, this was our spot. Only they didn’t accept cards. And we didn’t have monopoly money. The guy was kind, he walked me to an ATM. But the ATM wouldnt cash out. It was not broken or off or out of order, it was perfectly responsive, but refused to pay out. I was happy he was there to see it not work because his english wasnt great, my bulgarian was zero, and I have no idea how I would have explained what the machine did.
Finally, he called somebody to ask if he could accept Euro and give back change in monopoly money. It turns out some nubers sound almost the same in croatian and bulgarian so I actually understood when he asked about change. He said 20, then repeated 15 as a question and laughed. I did the math, 20 was right and the guy wanted to do right by us but his superior told him to short us. I mean, it was 2.5€, didn’t really matter either way, not as far as value goes. And they were bending the rules to accommodate us so I let it slide. I asked if I could park in the street, he said no, then took me to their parking. It was tight and I had no place to put the car without blocking somebody in. But one of the cars was his, so he moved, I took his spot and he closed me in because he was leaving before me in the morning.
I wanted to back up both the dashcam and gopro micro sd cards. It was a mess, I had actually used the gopro card in the dashcam, and a new card as well. I tried backing up one of them (wasn’t sure which) while driving but it would lose contact and stop so I figured I’d do it in the room. But now, when I went to do it, the usbcard reader we got died as well.
The next morning I didn’t wake up the crew, I went out to find coffee. I ran into the receptionist from last night, we chatted for a bit, when he learned I was in IT he asked if I could crack DaVinci for him. I wish. It’s strange how when you say programmer people hear hacker. He pointed me to where I could find a reader. It was just across the square from the hotel, a little bit to the right. They didn’t have one. So I continued down the square and stopped at every electronics and mobile phone store I could find. No luck. This went on until I ran out of places to check. I came back to the hotel and went in the opposite direction. Not a 100 meters the other way, I found one. But again, no cards, he couldnt accept Euro. After a moment of me just standing there and looking at him, he took me to the general store next door, said something to the lady, she charged my card and back at his store he gave me the reader. I’m not sure exactly how they did that since the stores didn’t appear to be related in any way but I loved that they found a workaround!
Happy to have finally gotten the reader, I went back to the room to complete the backup. I didn’t want to lose daylight so I only backed up one, formatted it and put it in the dash.
We thought we’d take it easy for a day so we only drove a couple of hours to Ruse. Tired of sandwitches and cans, we sat down at a nice restaurant and ordered as if it was our last day on Earth. We each got a dish but we also ordered a couple of extra dishes to share. And we finished them all. We went to park at the accomodation and went for a walk.
My friend googled tourist attractions but there really weren’t that many. There was a museum that had closed while we were having lunch, maybe some other thing we couldn’t see for some reason, and there was a tomb of sorts. That was within walking distance so we went.
It was really not that impressive, I’ve literally been to more lavish subway stations in Moscow. We waked up to it, there was a guy charging admission and I really didn’t care enough to pay. Mom wasn’t keen on entering either so he backed out as well. But he complained about it, acting as if I didn’t let him go in. Granted, it was only 4 euro, but I barely wanted to walk in for free. To deal with his sulking, I did what I always do: tease him. As we were passing by some tiny shed by a store, I pulled him in and said hey, check it out, give me 4€ and I’ll let you walk in there. He protested but this time it was fake anger, he was amused.
We indulged him by going into a souvenir store. Which, I personally think is a waste of money. You’re basically buying people garbage. I get that it’s a nice thought but when you think about it, what are the lucky recepients of a souvenir actually going to do with it? At best it will collect dust on a shelve, more likely take up space in a drawer. Or go straight in the bin. Very rarely can you stumble upon something really genuinely interesting, and that’s usually only because it’s from far enough away that it’s exotic enough to genuinely be interesting. That being said, I do like to take a quick look at what they sell.
We walked around for a bit more. I found a cute bench and I started to think if I could possibly explain to someone why to me this was more of a site than the tomb I wouldn’t go inside. I guess it’s about being special. Sure this is only a bench, but as far as benches go, this one is pretty exceptional. And the other is a building with a dome, but as far as those go, this one is at the lower end of the spectrum. I don’t know, am I making sense?
We bought some water and deserts and went into the appartment.
I finally had enough time to sort out both cards. I started copying files from one. It got interrupted for some reason and when I went to do it again, it said some of the files are already there, I clicked to confirm. Since only one or two were copied before, I expected it would go on to copy the rest. But instead it just said it was done. Of course, it didn’t actually copy the remaining files. And immediatly I went pale. I remembered that it was done copying very quickly this morning as well, but I thought that was because I had copied more than I realised in the car. I couldn’t remember if I was copying to a hdd or directly to my phone (which had more space left). I checked the hdd, yesterday’s footage was not there. I checked the phone, not there either. I checked again. Nowhere. Remember how I thought it was lucky I had a dashcam because noone would believe the prostitute? That’s the day that was missing. And I had formatted the card. And recorded today to it.
I backed up what was left on both cards. Checked this time. Then I started thinking real hard about which card was in the cam that day. I was fairly sure I knew. I formatted the other to use in the dash. Started messing with recovery tools for the first one. I let one tool work over night but it wasn’t finished by morning so I interrupted it. But I was going to keep trying in the evening.
My overall mood was fuck Bulgaria and fuck me for choosing it. I’ve been to so many contries and Bulgaria is my least favorite one. I’m not exactly sure why, it’s probably not that bad, I just seem to have at least one unpleasant experience every time I go there and there are few redeaming qualities. I was happy to leave it behind. I would have left it sooner but there are very few places you can cross the Danube over to Romania. There was one bridge near the serbian border and there wasn’t another until Ruse. There may have been a ferry somewhere but I didn’t feel like figuring out when and where I could get one, I figured I’d come across a bridge sooner or later.
The scenery at the south of Romania is just about as boring as it can get. Just endless fields in every direction.
So, when we found a village with a store, that was our store. And what a strange little store it was. It looked like it was still the 80’s in there. It was very poorly stocked but we had no other options so we bought a bunch of junk food. The cashier didn’t ring us up in the traditional sense, he didnt add up individual prices (unless he was doing it in his head). Once we were done I’m pretty sure he just guestimated a nice round number. He did accept Euro, but he didn’t have change in Euro, we had to take monopoly money.
We went back east for a streach because I wanted to show them Buzescu. If you’re not familiar, it’s a village with non-stop over-the-top pallaces, with a bizare mix of styles and decorative elements. I’ll just put a video here because it’s hard to describe.
It was a little cleaner than the last time I saw it but I don’t think much else changed. It felt a little less special this time, mostly because I had seen it before ut also partly because it didn’t feel as obscure any more. First time I saw it I only knew about it because of a post that was emailed to me, I had a much harder time finding out what it was called, I used some sketchy offline map to find it, it felt like more of a hidden gem. Now it’s way more known globally.
We reached Bucharest. While looking for the app, we entered a multi-level subteranean parking structure that looked like a maze, had a million exit signs none of which lead to an actual car exit (pedestrian only), the one exit we were able to find was actually an entrance and wouldn’t open from the inside, so we spent 10 minutes trying to find our way out. We finally parked at the app and went into the city by bus.
I was there for work recently so I remembered a couple of sights to show them. As you are probbably used to by now, I rarely post photos of famous sites, there are a million of those online taken by proper photographers. What you get from me is a Mozambique-esque bunch of cables, some of the creepiest dolls ever and something going on under a statue.
We sat down to dinner at a fancy place. Rain started pouring outside so it made the restaurant even more cosy. The junk we bought in the morning was so bad we kept laughing about it for days so the nice dinner was accentuated even further by the contrast.
And even after a lovely day and a fantastic meal, I was still not happy. I was on edge, testy, almost grumpy. I wasn’t even sure why.
When we got back I resumed the SD card recovery. In the morning I found the laptop off, mom closed the lid because she was bothered by the light. That didn’t help my mood.
Each morning I was the first one to get ready and I was annoyed I had to wait. Not for mom, she’s always ready in minutes, but he takes his sweet time to get ready in the morning. It drove me mad. It shouldn’t have, there was no real reason for it, we weren’t in a hurry, and yet I was upset by how not productive this was. My mind clearly wasn’t in holiday mode.
We headed out of Bucharest. I thought we’d chance upon a store somewhere but strangely we didn’t so all we had was leftover junk from the day before. That had to do. We laughed about how terrible it was but we ate it all. We found a really nice spot by the river, it had a table and it even had a sort of hammock tied to trees with old seatbelts.
We looked ahead for accommodation. There was a medieval castle listed. It had poor reviews but looked pretty cool in the photos so we figured we’d check it out anyway. This was the final stretch, we were getting to the Black Sea that day.
We took a ferry accross the Danube and carried on. It was an old-timey ship with very few safety measures. I liked that, reminded me of the “lets take the safety stickers off everything” joke. I was charmed by how the anti-slip welds just turned into abstract art at one point.
We reached Constanta and went looking for the castle. We werent sure what to expect or if it even actually existed (since there was no way to book online). But it was there and it was available. Of course, calling it a castle is streatching it, but it was still pretty cool and very retro. We loved it and since it wasn’t expensive we splurged and each got a separate room. It only has 4 large rooms, we bought out 3 and the 4th was empty so we basically had a whole castle to ourselves.
We left our stuff, took the ball and headed to the beach. It was close enough to go on foot. We found a path down some steep narrow stairs. Going back we learned there was a way more civilized path nerby. But we made it down to the sea. I dipped the ball in the sea, made some videos, dipped it again, picked it up and was ready to go back to the hotel. Like, right, that’s done, let’s move on. And then it hit me, that’s when I realised my head wasn’t in the right place. What do you mean, done, moving on? This is not a task to complete as efficiently as possible and carry on. So I sat down in the sand and looked out to sea. And suddenly a wave of emotions came over me. After it washed over me, I started feeling more relaxed. And I started feeling good about what we’ve done. Sure, it was a pointless task, but the metaphor was powerful and we made it happen. We took time out of our daily struggle to go out and do something to feed the soul.
I was happy with how we hit the spot by pure luck, there was even a triumphal arch for the ball’s arrival! 🙂
The next day was rest day, no driving. But we started early, even by my standards. We wanted to see the dawn from the beach, the sun raising from the sea. It was windy and cold and rather boring. But still, worth it. We got our timelapse, a bunch of photos and a memorable experience. I had done this onece before, down in Varna, but my camera at the time was, wel, what a phone camera could be at the time.
The only thing that made it a little less cool was a bit of mist over the horizon so the sun doesn’t raise out of the sea directly.
We walked into the city. They have a ferris wheel so we went on it. I got a little nervous in it. Which is not really rational. I remember when I went on a larger one in Brussels and got scared. And then I started laughing at myself because I flew to Brussels on a plane without being nervous at all. I guess it’s the motion of the cabin that makes the height feel more real. On the wall of graffiti at the base of the wheel, somebody spray-painted a working qr code for a street art festival, that was so cool!
We sat down to eat at the waterfront. Seaguls are used to getting food from tourists and I could see the locals were not happy about that. When my party accused me of being heartless for not feeding them, I replied that the little bastards eat at the fanciest restaurants in town all day long and that they really have a way better life than me. 🙂
The toilet had the “no toilet paper in the tiolet” sign. When I first saw that in Russia I was so surprised I thought they couldn’t be serious.
We went to the beach, I watched them swim but couldn’t be bothered to go in myself. Found a store, got food, went back to the castle to rest. This store was a legit, modern store, it had beer in cute 1 liter bottles. It also had a pair of copy/paste jitties guarding it.
We gave up one of the rooms, my friend and I shared. We still had the whole place to ourselves, though. He made the mistake of saying the castle had a bit of a spooky vibe so, naturally, when he was moving his stuff through the dark stairway, I took the opportunity to hide under the staris and give him a bit of a scare.
The recovery tool had time to do it’s thing and to my great joy it actually did it! So here it is, the proof of our encounter:
The next morning we headed out again. We weren’t going straight home, though, there were a couple of things we wanted to see first. We went to the beach first. It was late September and the water was cold, I bitched and moaned all the way going in, wondering why one would do this to themselves, but I wanted to play with the ball in the Black Sea. But after the initial adjustment, it was actually very pleasant. I wanted to get a video of us playing from the shore but I didn’t have a stand so I just burried my phone in the sand. I didn’t make it leve enough, though, so the video was useless.
We saw they had some sort of a cable car going above the city (sky view gondola) and we wanted to ride it but it was closed. It would reopen next season, unlike the water slide we found.
I noticed this all over Romania, they have a bunch of coffe machines everywhere. Not the garbage instant stuff either, the machines grind actual beans. I’m used to coffee machines being indoors but they also have outdoor machins, like a coffee ATM. Respect 🙂
We spent the remainder of the day sweating in the car. The valley offered no shade and the car has no AC so it was more of a chore that a pleasure but we covered our distance and got to a motel.
The motel balcony had a roof access ladder which probably wasn’t meant for use by guests, which made me want it even more. It wasn’t very impressive, though.
Today we were crossing the Carpathian Mountains. We were in for a treat. The road that crosses the mountains is the one that Clarkson (of Top Gear) called the “the best road in the world”. We’ll gloss over how it was built by a dictator for military purposes and just focus on what it is now.
Before we got to the “main attraction”, we went to visit the Dracula complex. It has no historical relevance whatsoever, it’s a new building, but I guess it’s kinda cute. Inside you get to see a documentary about Vlad Tepeš in which he is depicted as a good guy and a patriot who reduced crime to an all time low. Sure, he may have impaled a little, but overall, a great guy. It was strange to think about him in this way but who knows, that may well be a more accurate description than what I had in my head, it is quite feasible that over time the monstosities got exagerated. And who knows how far Turkey would have expanded had it not been for him. Anyways, the film was interesting, the rest of the experience gets points for effort, I guess.
Dracula’s actual castle is near. We didn’t go. It’s just ruins, it hardly seemed rewarding enough. We continued north. The road gets more interesting and leads to the lake. It’s an artificial lake and the dam is impressive.
There’s a viewpoint and on a hill over it there’s a large monument. It’s a man holding a lightning above his head and there’s a lightning rod attached to it. I don’t know if it’s a monument protected by a lightning rod or if it is in fact the coolest lightning rod ever! I choose to believe the latter just to make it more cool. 🙂
Unfortunatelly, there doesn’t seem to be much environmental awareness across the country, garbage seems to be dumped at whatever point it stopped being used..
The road winds up through untouched nature, just tall green mountains. Part way up our engine started overheating. We stopped to let it cool down and got water for the radiator from a mountain creek. I was worried but also optimistic, there were lots of “benigne” reasons for this to happen, it didn’t neccerasrily mean the engine was dying. But it also could have been the engine was dying. Either way, there was no real alternative to just moving forward, light on the gas and one eye on the temperature gauge. In hindsight, I guess turning back and taking a less demanding road was an option, but I hadn’t even really considered that at the time. I was set on taking this road and, again, optimistic about the car.
Further up there’s another viewpoint with a cool dissapearing statue. It’s made out of metal plates with gaps between them so when you look at it from an angle parallel to the plates it “vanishes”.
The final strach leads, somewhat dissapointingly, to a tunnel that breaks through to the other side. There was a traffic jam, people parking, walking, the place was bursting with life. The reason for all this commotion was most likely the lake. Which I had no idea existed until much later. I have to grudgingly admit that my no planning, spur of the moment approach to trips has it’s down sides, this being a prime example. I would have loved to see the lake had I know it was there. It’s like that beach cave in Portugal that I had no idea existed but looks sooo cool in the photos, I’m still angry at myself for driving past that. Anyways, we started our descent. The car made it up the hill so I was able to relax again.
We stopped for lunch on a rock by a creek, somehow even the garbage food we had tasted good here.
On our next pit stop, down in the valey on the northern side, we found a hawthorn tree. We ate some of the berries, but more importantly, we broke off a couple of pointy twigs – these were our hawthorn stakes. We could now fend off any vampires we may encounter! 😀
Our next stop was Dracula’s birth house. Last time I was there I only saw it from the outside, this time I went in. It’s kinda cute. They have a guy in a coffin there but I guess we were too quiet coming in so we caught him putting his rubber mask on. He then sat up in the coffin but, you know, the magic was just not there any more. Still, we took a photo with him.
Next we wanted to visit Bran castle. It’s a real medieval castle but the connection to Dracula is alsmost certainly not. I was there before, quite a while back. The tallest tower was closed for visitors, the door was locked. However. The way they locked it was interesting. So, the staris wind and come back, but they put the door just before the turn. So I could just sneak through the gap to the left and bypass the locked door. From there a rickety ladder-staricase hybrid led to the top. I was so scared of getting in trouble I took a quick glance and went straight back down without even grabing a photo of the view. But the view wasn’t the point anyway. I went back down and into the allowed area without getting caught.
This time I was going to film the whole thing wiht the gopro. I went around the castle partly enjoying the tour but more looking for the forbidden staircase. The castle had changed a lot, they spruced it up and made it a lot more touristy. At last I found the stairs. Very predictibly but still disappointingly, they fixed the security gap, there was now a glass door infront of the staricase. On one hand, I was disappointed, but on the other, well, no, still disappointed. But I later rationalized that the fact that it can no longer be done makes the fact that I did it all the more special.
We found a place to stay that offered a hot meal, it was just what we needed.
We had one more thing on our list the next day – Peleš castle, the most beautiful castle in Romania. So the internet said. We got there and it was closed for visitors. The outside was nothing special. So, pretty anticlimactic. Looking back at the photos now, I can recognize the amount of detail and I can’t deny it is beautiful in it’s own way, but when I hear “most beautiful castle”, this is still not it. A nice garbage fire near the parking lot, though.
The rest of the day was just an uneventful trek towards the border. We booked a place which we reached around 10 PM. I was looking forward to a bed but when we got to the place it was clarly unprepared, the beds had been slept in, the place a mess. We called the landlady and asked if she has clean sheets somewhere so we can make the beds ourselves. Instead, she appologized and offered us a free upgrade. Sure, we had to drive again for a bit, which I wasn’t happy with because I was dead tired and just wanted a bed, but oh man was it worth it! She put us up in a luxurious appartment, 3 large bedrooms, each with a king size bed. We looked it up, that place normally costs around 7 times what we ended up paying for it.
Traffic at the border was slow so they passed time by doing very detailed checks. I was wearing my chest strap for the gopro so when they took me to the office they asked if I was recording. I said no and that was the end of that conversation, they never checked. Other than that act of pure trust, they were thorough but they weren’t dicks about it, they were actually quite nice.
We were now headed towards Mustapić, a small village in a remote part of Serbia. Why, you may be right to ask? To meet Čiča.
Čiča is a serbian youtuber. He owns a garage where he fixes tractors, he has tons of videos where he shows lathe work, welding, honing and the likes, all done with a specific kind of charm in his explanations. He also runs a small still where he manufactures some of the best rakija I ever tasted. We got him to pose for us in the Benz!
His charm is even more captivating in person. We just met but he made us feel like we were visiting relatives rather than a complete stranger. We got to taste different brands of his rakija, all single barrel, one of which was the last bottle in existence. We had a nice conversation, he showed us around the estate. I was lucky to capture one of his chickens mid-flight to the barn roof. And in the barn I was thrilled to see a couple of Pinzgauer truck in perfect condition!
Later he even took us to the workshop where he makes his videos so we could experience the space where he makes the magic happen. The visit really lifted our spirits.
We reached Valjevo that evening. We had a bit of trouble finding the address of the place we booked. Our internet wasn’t working since Serbia is not in the EU. We parked near where we thought it was and started looking. The owner approached us in the street and showed us to the appartment. This was quite lucky, he happened to be there at that time. It was a bit tricky to find and we couldn’t read the messages he had sent. Had he not just happened to be there then we would have had to first find internet and then the place.
The way they translate/trasncribe movie titles in Serbia made me giggle. The completely ignore the original spelling and do a phonetic approximation.
Croatian licence plates are not the best plates to have on your car in Serbia when leaving it parked in the street overnight. You know, because of the whole war thing. But once again, nothing bad happened. The tension between the nations doesn’t really seem to exist. I’m not talking about political tension, that is definitaly there. I talking about personal tension, between actual people. I’ve been to Serbia many times and I only had a bit of a bad vibe once, and even that was just a guy passive-agressively taking a stab at my nationality while doing a nice thing for me. It was a guy at a gas station who volunteered to wash my windshield and said something alond the lines of “see how us serbs are nice, not like you croats”. It’s in somebody’s interest to have us hung up on the past and the resentment and the fear and the hatred so that’s what we’re constantly reminded of. But when you forget about the politicians and the media and go and meet the people, you find that they are just people. Not, them, the others, the different, just people.
We stopped in a small town to have coffee. There is a guy who charges for parking. He asked how long we need a ticket for, I said we’re just going for coffee, he said it’s fine, no charge. So, the opposite of tension, this kind of niceness is actually less like to happen to me in Croatia.
We reached Sarajevo that evening.
I went into town with my friend and kinda shot down my mom when she wanted to join. I could see that it hurt her but in all this time I never got to sit down with him alone, to check in and actually see how he was doing.
We sat down for a hookah and talked about work, life, and most importantly, our next adventure. We’ll drive up to see the nordern lights, a month long road trip. That should really be quite an adventure!
The trip was basically over. All we had to do was drive back home along a familiar route.
When we got home I bought a new radiator cap for the car. The seal was old so it couldn’t hold the required pressure and so the coolant boiled. That fixed it, it hasn’t overheated since.
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contributors
Hamdija Sinanović
Miljenka Car
Ivan Tuđa
Ljiljana Slaviček
Adventure Imminent 