🇷🇸🇷🇴🇧🇬 Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria – pushing the limits of Gore-Tex
7 days and 1,434km (Total: 32 days and 6,419km)
When it starts raining, riding a motorcycle on the road instantly pivots from fun to shit. You can’t see through your helmet and the bike’s tires are on the edge of sliding around every corner. Despite the powers of Gore-Tex, you eventually get wet… and cold… somewhere… somehow.
After Sarajevo we decided to head further East into the Balkans. But the forecast was showing rain — everywhere — so we did a short ride over the border into Serbia and found a small apartment (most importantly with a garage) on booking.com. We contacted the host on WhatsApp and he gave us the codes to get in and asked for us to leave €20 on the table before we left. We never met him. Perhaps spending too long in cities like London has made me, rightly or wrongly, overly skeptical of humans. But, especially in the more eastern parts of Europe, I can’t believe the levels of trust, warmth, and generosity we’ve been experiencing.
We arrived early afternoon and within minutes the storm raged. One of those downpours with flashes of lightening that you can just sit and watch for hours. So that's exactly what we did, with food, local beers (60p each…), and music. Loved every minute.
The next day the clouds parted for a few hours and we rode into Belgrade. It was like the exact opposite of Venice… no tourists, brutalist architecture, and fittingly dark weather. I instantly loved the vibe. That evening we ate Cevapi (bread with sausages and clotted cream) before watching Red Star Belgrade play football. I’ve only seen two professional football games before, but this was something I wasn’t expecting. It was 300-ish men (the rest of the stadium empty) chanting to one fan acting as a conductor and another banging a drum. They weren’t even watching the game. Seriously, when their own team scored they didn’t stop to celebrate. Ironically, we were more interested in the fans than the game! We felt a bit unsafe (we were told not to sit in the North stand; advice I decided to ignore) so left at half time. It was a great night.
The rain was still going the next day but we decided to leave the city and keep venturing East. A small break in the clouds mid-morning and we headed out, only for the rain to start laughing in our face within fifteen minutes. It was a brutal hour but we got it done, arriving to a hostel on the edge of the Danube river. We were lucky again to have the place to ourselves, so cooked some dinner and watched the rain bounce off the river with more 60p beers, whilst deciding which country to visit next.
We decided on Romania because the motorcycle community raved about two roads: the Transalpina and the Transfăgărășan. Against our luck, we got there after two day’s riding and learnt that both roads were shut because it was snowing (perhaps not luck but instead naivety considering we knew about the “rain — everywhere” situation). So we spent our second and final night in Romania in a hostel in a tiny town wearing every piece of clothing we had with us. But it was worth it just for the ride back down the mountain and further South the next day.
That night we camped about 20km across the border into Bulgaria. It was our favourite campsite yet. An open field on a hill with little huts dotted around for the kitchen, toilets, and areas to hang out. You could sense the owner’s kindness and peacefulness despite us not be able to speak the same language (where we are now a lot of people seem to speak Russian or Turkish as their second language). The sun was back and it felt good to be sweating again. We initiated our camping setup assembly line (secure bike –> make tent –> blow up sleeping mats –> unpack sleeping bags –> …), which we’re getting pretty good at, and were asleep by 9pm.
The next day we drove all through Bulgaria — probably missing dozens of “Must See Places in Bulgaria” along the way — and arrived at our next campsite (another campgarden) at about 5pm. We were shattered but luck was on our side this time. Just as we were about to initiate the aforementioned assembly line, the owner said he had a spare room in his house if we wanted to use it, for no extra charge. We immediately said yes as “rain — everywhere” hadn’t finished yet. We woke at 5.30am the next day, I went to do some pull-ups in a children’s play area I found in the local village (the locals looked very confused), and we were on the road towards the next border before 8am.
One month and one day and Europe is now done.
Next stop: Where the sun rises.