Today was the day we got to meet the people on our tour. Since the Balkans make up so many different countries that all have their own languages, histories, currencies, and customs, I thought that it would be kind of complicated to try and navigate the cities, buses, and borders without a little help. After researching how to get around on our own and realizing that bus stops were, “past the red building, down one block, and next to the rock”, I realized that we would waste about 4-5 days on just traveling to places if we tried to do this 30 day trip without help. With a tour company, we could get to some of the out of the way touristic sites that a non-tour traveler would have to catch 2-3 different public buses to, in about a 3rd the time. Plus, a tour company would know how to handle all the border crossings efficiently and quickly and have helpful cultural and culinary knowledge for all the cities we’d be going to.
I spent about 4 months researching various tour companies, going a little OCD with all my numerous spread sheets, before booking Borderlands Travel. The company is owned and run by Louise, a British woman who fell in love with the Balkans after traveling here about 7 years ago and whom decided to share her passion for former Yugoslavia with the rest of the world. Our tour will take us through 9 countries with 5 other people, so there’s only 7 of us in total (well, 9 if you include Louise and the van driver) along for this 15 day adventure. So out of all the tour companies, Borderlands seemed awesome because the tour is a mix of full day sightseeing trips mixed with free days to wander cities while all the hotels, border crossings, and transportation is taken care of. Plus Louise speaks perfect English, unlike a lot of the tour companies based in the Balkans.
But before we got to meet our fellow tour acquaintances, we had to pack up all our crap (we tend to have our suitcases explode all over the bed and floor every time we step foot in a hotel room), and hike a mile up and over the hill from our current hostel to our new hotel. We ditched the bags in hotel storage and headed off to the Nikola Tesla museum. We left about 50 minutes to walk about 1.2kms and get coffee, but with our shitty sense of direction and inability to read a map without being properly caffeinated, we took 45 minutes of wandering in circles before arriving 5 minutes before the museum tour started - so no coffee for me. 😩
The Tesla museum showed us an interesting 15 minute video on Tesla’s life - in short he grew up in Serbia with a supportive family who realized early on that he was a genius and encouraged him to work on his weird inventions. He went to school in Prague and tried to convince people in Europe to use alternating current for power, but no one wanted to change what they knew worked for something that sounded absurd, so Tesla ended up in New York being an apprentice to Thomas Edison. They were both A-type personalities, so inevitably they ended up competing against each other to convince the world on who’s power source was better - Edison with his currently used DC, or Tesla with his previously thought to be unattainable AC. Tesla won the War of the Currents with the help of investor and inventor George Westinghouse, whom had also been feuding with Edison.
The museum guide showed us a few of Tesla’s early inventions and demonstrated how the Tesla coils - the giant balls of lightening hitting a metal ball seen in old films - worked. He told us that for the first Star Wars film, they didn’t have electricity in the light sabers (no batteries back then), so the actors held long tube lights which were powered by a Tesla coil that expelled harmless energy to the actors, who were the energy conductors, and the “sabers” lit up.
With a few hours to kill before officially meeting the other people on our tour for our welcome dinner, we did a little illegal bus riding to the town of Zemun. We tried to pay the drivers on 2 separate buses, but they blatantly ignored us, so we just sat in the back and hoped no one asked to see our tickets. Apparently you are suppose to pre buy bus tickets at the numerous water kiosks around town.
For Zemun, a small fishing village, I had read that we needed to catch a bus from a station near a park. We got semi directions on what bus went to the park, but as we were riding said bus, we passed the park. I shrugged my shoulders and said we’d get off at the next stop and catch the bus back to the last stop and then walk to the park, but our current bus decided to go across a long bridge and the park got very small. We did get off at the next stop, but immediately a new bus showed up and the sign said, “Zemun”, so we just hopped on and hoped the bus went to the part of town we wanted. It did, but only after we took it to the very end of the line - basically a water stand and some creepy communistic looking apartment complex’s next to dirt fields, and had to take the same bus back 7 stops.
We wandered the back alleys and pedestrian only shopping streets (apparently all cities in Serbia thus far have had a section where people can shop without fear of being run over by the crazy drivers) before hiking up a crazy amount of stairs to the Millennium Tower. Zemun is most know for a large hill called Gardos in the urban neighborhood of Gardos that houses the Gardos (Millennium) Tower. It’s like the Serbs gave up on naming things. The Tower was built in 1896 to celebrate a 100 years of Hungarian settlement in Central Europe. It held a lovely view of the Danbue River and the red terra cotta roof buildings of town.
With 2 more hours to kill before the meeting time, we went back to Belgrade and wandered around the Belgrade Fortress located inside Kalemegdan Park. The Fortress sits atop a hill over looking the Sava and Danube rivers- they meet in the middle, but do not mix. The Fortress has been around since the 3rd century BC and has housed numerous armies; most recently the Turks and Ottomans. Now-a-days the Fortress is essentially opened to everyone 24/7. It’s crumbling walls are intwined throughout Kalemegdan park which also includes tennis courts, a animatronic dinosaur park, a concert field, and a military museum.
I ended up being extremely lazy from walking over 8 miles during the morning that when we were offered a ride on a mini car train around the park, I was all for it. Turned out to be a great option for letting us see an overview of all the things the park had to offer, but terrible for our butts as the narrow wooden plank we sat on didn’t do anything for comfort as we bounced along the cobblestone walkways.
At 6:30pm, we finally met our fellow tour travelers. All 5 of them are Aussies. Dale, Jackie, and Cindy all know each other and then Mary and Ann know each other. Louise, the owner of Borderlands, is our tour leader and she took us on a 20 minute walk back up the hill to the Skadarlija neighborhood (literally across from our old hostel) for a traditional Serbian dinner in the oldest restaurant on the street.
Apparently in Serbia, people believe that everyone has 2 or 3 stomachs because the pre-meal salads are bigger than lunch plates. Our prefix dinner was a giant tomato and cheese salad followed by a huge bowl of coleslaw-esque salad, then an 8oz piece of salmon with fresh veggies, and dessert. Plus unlimited drinks. Good thing we were allowed to be there for a few hours.
After dinner, Louise took us to Globetrotters - an underground pub in the basement of an apartment complex. During the 1990’s Yugoslavia war, people couldn’t really go outside because of the bombs falling everyday, so a resident of the building said he would supply the booze if every resident in the building brought a piece of furniture from their apartment to use in the pub. So the bar is a mix of different furnishings and wall decorations. The building still has actual residents living in it, which was only slightly an issue when we arrived because there’s no sign on the door and Louise didn’t know what button to push so we could be buzzed in. She didn’t want to wake up anyone as it was about 11pm. Luckily the top button, written in pencil, said “Klub”, so we took a chance and pushed it. Turned out to work and down into the basement we went.
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We decided to take the free city history walking tour the next morning which was semi ok. Kind of like the guide only knew cursory bits of knowledge on every place that we went, but didn’t know to elaborate. We did learn that in the late 90’s only the businessmen and macheesemo thugs had money, so they would hang about the one neighborhood in town with the best restaurants. Most of the city’s vapid, implant enhanced women flocked to the area in hopes of attracting a rich husband, and so the neighborhood became known as Silicone Valley; a slightly different one than the one in California.
Our afternoon underground tunnel tour took us through 3 different areas under the Belgrade Fortress. There’s apparently tons of hidden rooms and passages under the fortress, but most people don’t know about them because they were classified military secrets or covered by nature for so long that they were only accidentally rediscovered after someone’s fell through a hole in the ground. We saw an old military bunker that was built to protect Tito from Stalin incase Russia attacked Belgrade since Tito was not interested in becoming one, big happy communistic country with the USSR. Luckily the war never happened and the bunker was never used as a hideout, only military storage.
The second place we saw was an old cavern that housed a bunch of grave stones, sarcophagus’, and other old relics. The cave was used as a night club with guest DJ’s and super loud music. People used to dance around the relics and leave a shut ton of chewing gum on the ground. The place closed about 10 years ago because the music became so loud that the support pillars started to crumble. We also saw a Roman well that was neither Roman or a well. Serbians though everything that was built well was Roman and that the hole they found would contain water if they only dug far enough. So they named it “Roman well”; but after 60 meters of digging, they realized there was never going to be any water, so it was used as storage and place to kill people. The last stop was an old cave turned into a bar and then a wine cellar.
After the tour, we explored the 2 month old abandoned train station across the street from our hotel. This was the train station we were suppose to use to get to Novi Sad, but it closed because a large waterfront housing and shopping development was in the works and a shady government deal included the selling of the land that the train station was on. Now the central train station is located 10kms outside of town, much to the dismay of the Belgrade citizens.
The old railroad station looked like it had been abandoned for years with knee high grass growing between the tracks and cracks in the asphalt. As Robby and I took pictures I kept looking out for the zombies, as this is the perfect place to film an “end of the world” horror film, but we only saw a few beggars. It was sad and neat at the same time.
After exploring, we had a nice dinner (after climbing the damn hill again) and then Robby had to get a diabetic waffle dessert thing stuffed with ice cream, caramel, Nutella, and Oreos. Placated by delicious sugar coma happiness, it was off to bed for the night.
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