Croatia is certainly much more attractive in summer. From the highway you can see nothing but fields and forest all in a monochrome tone of grey and brown. Cause we couldn’t really see any villages from the highway and the whole ride was quite boring we decided to go off and have a look at the croatian countryside. The few people we met seemed to be very sceptic. The one place where we thought we could get a pizza or sth else to eat (it said on the sign outside) turned out to be a dark bar with almost nothing in, including food. Too bad, because we would have liked to get a taste of the croatian countryside people.
In the parts of Croatia we came through we could see a lot of new houses. But they all were only half done even though the people were already living in them. That’s why we made up the theory that you get some sort of tax advantage if you build houses – and people keep the houses unfinished to not have to pay so much tax??
Good that we have an autopilot.
Croatia country side
After two cold nights in the car we decided to go into a hotel in Belgrade. When you enter the city you can still see traces of the war. We passed a few buildings which had been half bombed. The inner city is dominated by big grey and monumental buildings in socialism style. The air is full with a nice cole smell, which reminds me of Berlin. The people we met were all very nice but obviously not very used to tourists. You can definetely see the european western influence with all the shop chains next to the older local nice shops. For better or worse.
Left overs from the war.
The next day we wanted to leave early again to get to Sofia. From a trucker and a croatian worker at a petrol station (probably not a very serious source) we got the information that the trip to and through Bulgaria wouldn’t be 100% safe and we should watch out for bandits after dark. But because we couldn’t be sure if they were telling us the truth, we wanted to get to Sofia as early as possible. And we also didn’t know what the way to the bulgarian border would be like.
At the end we drove in heavy snow towards Bulgaria. There is a highway until Nis, but after that there is only a two lane, paved road. Before Nis we had to take a by-pass for 25km through the countryside, which took us on streets up to 12% steep roads. But, we haven’t been the slowest car!
The border crossing to Bulgaria was over in 40 min. We had to pay a fee of 5 Euros for some desinfection of the car?! Even though there was now desinfection at all?!
After the border we had 57km left for Sofia and it was already dark outside. The street lead us through woods in a convoy of a few cars through deep snow (Good we had Sally with us, so the snow was no problem). Due to the fact that we got the bandit flee in our head, we were a bit tense not knowing how the way will be like towards Sofia. We were tired of driving and just wanted to get to the city safely. The bulgarian car in front of us seemed to keep our speed in order to be able to guide us towards Sofia.
Now we are sitting in a hostel in deep bulgarian winter and it is still snowing outside. In the meantime we heard about the things happening in Syria so we decided to stay one more day in this city to check the situation. From here we are also still more flexible to make changes to the route.
After 15 min of trying to understand the parking fee of six leva we agreed and were all happy.
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