Part 20: Belgrade (Days 52, 53, 54, 55, 56)

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We had altered our itinerary to be in Belgrade a little earlier to see the stand out fixture in the Serbian football calendar. Red Star Belgrade v Partizan Belgrade, due to take place on Sunday.

We rolled into town at roughly 7.30am the day before having spent the night train journey sharing a compartment with Bane, a 20-year-old Red Star fan from Podgorica who was returning to the Serbian capital to study. He spoke excellent English and had even mastered the very British humour of sarcasm. After two months without being able to crack a joke without seeing a puzzled look, both of us enjoyed his company.

We checked into our hostel, on the 6th floor of an apartment building, to be told by another very friendly young Serb chap that our beds would not be ready until about noon. Tired but not prohibitively so, we headed out to see what the city centre had to offer.

Just as bustling but more cosmopolitan than Tirana, Belgrade isn't filled with beauty and we were slightly underwhelmed as we walked through Trg Republike, the main square, and up the pedestrianised boulevard of Kneza Mihailova. The damp weather didn't help and there weren't many people about - but then it was 8am on a Saturday. As we had been told that Belgrade's key is its nightlife, some of them had probably just gone to bed.

At the north western end of Knezy Mihailova is the massive ruins of the Kalemegdan Citadel, arguably Belgrade's main tourist attraction. The Serbians have "enjoyed" plenty of conflict over the centuries and this hilltop citadel has seen a lot of action, strategically placed where the Danube and Sava rivers meet. The citadel and its ruins provided a terrific view to the north west and we strolled around the hill, being careful to avoid areas where signs ominously warned "walking in these areas you risk your life". Not quite sure why you do, but we heeded the advice.

After finally checking in at the Green Studio Hostel and catching up on a couple of hours lost sleep, we set out for a drink with a Canadian lad called Derek. Over a few city centre beers we established that he had arrived in Belgrade by accident having boarded a train from Budapest that he thought was headed to Romania. One half of it was. But the train had split into two and Derek was on the one bound for Belgrade rather than Bucharest. He had got chatting to some girls, possibly fascinated by his ineptitude, and he had followed them to the hostel they were staying in - the same one as us. He hadn't a bed for the night though, he was going to catch a train at 11pm.

Derek worked for the Canadian civil service in some capacity but he was vague - possibly because he didn't know himself - about his job description. He was also quite full of himself. After five or six beers, he promised to take us through the pouring rain to a restaurant he had visited with his travelling companions earlier that day. Unsurprisingly, he didn't actually know the way and when he tried to take us around the same kilometre loop a second time without noticing, I felt the time was right to point out that he didn't know where it was and we should go into a bar for a drink. It became clear as he fell asleep in said bar that, although he had boasted of his heavyweight drinking ability, Derek was utterly annihilated. Never try and outdrink the British. Time was getting on and he had a train to catch, so we woke him. Or tried to. I have never seen anybody so completely out for the count. It took Si slapping him around the face with both hands to get him back with us, but as we tried to direct him towards the station, he was a law unto himself and kept wandering off in the opposite direction. Si rightly pointed out that we were "not his bloody mother and he's ruining our Saturday night" so we left him to it. Sounds harsh, but believe me we had been patient enough.

It was now gone 11pm but luckily we finally got some dinner in a tavern off the main street and enjoyed an excellent plate of different grilled meats. When we got back to the hostel, who was to greet us but Derek. He had missed his train and was going to sleep on the floor. It was party time at Green Studio and about 15 people of different nationalities were up drinking and enjoying themselves so we joined in and I ended up drinking rakija (plum brandy and the local speciality) until 5am with a Serbian Red Star fan called Dragan and a Frenchman called Nicola talking about all aspects of life.

Derby day saw a group of people I had met during the aforementioned hostel piss up announce their intention to go to the game as well, so we all went into the city centre to get tickets together. There was a tension in the air that had been absent the previous day as groups of young men dressed in casual clothing talked on mobile phones, police looking on intently. Nobody was wearing a replica shirt.

Tickets cost us about four euros to sit in the east stand with Red Star supporters. We got a tram to the Marakana stadium, frequently passing large groups of police wearing riot gear. Dragan had told us the night before that no alcohol was on sale anywhere within a one kilometre radius of the stadium, which is south of the centre, and many pubs all over Belgrade were shut.

Kick off was at 5pm and we were in the ground by 4.15pm to soak up the atmosphere. It soon became clear that although the Grobari (Gravediggers), Partizan's ultras, were in the south stand and the Delije (Heroes), their Red Star counterparts in the north, the rest of the stadium was unsegregated. As we were nearer the south stand, it turned out that nearly everyone around us was Partizan - in more ways than one.

As the game approached kick off, the Grobari kicked into action, using black and white balloons and cards to create a spectacular display and unfurling a huge banner. The noise accompanying this was deafening, and they carried this on throughout the game with the occasional throwing of flares at the riot police keeping a watchful eye from a safe distance in front of the stand.

The football was average. Red Star looked poor and Partizan were denied a couple of times by the offside flag but to tell the truth it was hard to concentrate on what was unfolding on the pitch, especially after a quarter of an hour when the Delije found their voices. Dragan had previously promised me than "for the first 15 minutes - nothing. Then you will see how we do things here". He was right, both ends of the ground were now trying to outdo each other with noise, colour and not a little choreography. It was like nothing I had ever seen at a game before. The Grobari had the edge - their team was top of the league having won all six of their games before this, while Red Star - a European Cup winner less than 20 years ago - are a shadow of their former selves and languished in mid table. Partizan had a lot more to sing about.

Aside from the police being bombarded by flares by the Grobari (resulting in one fan getting a solid kicking from an irked copper), violence had not broken out, although it didn't seem far away. I felt a goal might change things, and sure enough one arrived within ten minutes of the restart. A Partizan striker finally got the better of the linesman and the Red Star defence to lift the ball over the advancing goalkeeper.

I can only describe what happened next as absolutely fucking mental. People jumped on top of one another, clambered to the front of the stand, and seats were flying like missiles past my head as the Partizan fans celebrated in the most animated way possible. The Grobari were just a seeting mass of thousands of bodies. Flares were lit up, smoke bombs thrown, and insulting songs directed at the Red Star fans, some of whom were sitting a few seats away from those bellowing out the words. I looked around - there wasn't a steward in sight.

The Delije were quiet - I was disappointed with them in truth, they were easily outsung by the away team - and the minutes ticked by before in injury time, Partizan broke away and scored again. I would put this celebration at 25 per cent more crazy than the first, but really, it was off the scale. Victory was secured and again the away fans danced, hurled themselves on top of each other and kicked seats from their fixings. We had to scarper for cover because of the constant raining down of missiles - these were not the light plastic type you get in England, they were reinforced and if one hit you on the head, you would be out cold, no question. It didn't feel remotely safe but we somehow got out of the stadium at the final whistle and once outside the ground, people mixed without incident as we walked back up to the city centre. I don't think I have ever regarded actually coming back from football alive as a personal victory, but I was mightily relieved when we closed the hostel door behind us.

Enough excitement for one destination, we thought, and visited the military museum on Monday, alliteration aside to look at some of the weaponry on display. Those Serbs really pack some heat. The museum contained a decent history of their battles with, well, just about anyone, and a small section was devoted to the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Serbia resulting from the problems in Kosovo. Included were a couple of disturbing photographs of dead bodies covered in blood following cluster bomb attacks. Unsurprisingly, there seemed to be an undercurrent of bias against NATO - a list of statistics detailed the amount of soldiers, aircraft and other military resources used against Serbia, as well as a map showing which countries got involved. Yes, the UK was on there, and yes, we did look around nervously. The Serbs are, rightly or wrongly, blamed for a lot of terrible things in the 1990s but it was an important reminder that innocent people suffered here too.

The following day we saw some bomb-damaged buildings in the city centre before venturing on to a market where I walked into a significant language barrier trying to buy some socks from an old woman. There was no price tag, I didn't understand what she was saying, she didn't know how many pairs I wanted, blah blah blah. But the confused dialogue lasted fully five minutes before I emerged with two pairs and 130 dinar lighter, with her words of "Katastroph!!" ringing in my ears. It was without doubt the most awkward language-related scenario of the trip, which illustrates how easy a lot of it has been.

We then walked on, getting only slightly lost, to see the cathedral and a couple of churches, before heading back to Trg Republike where some kind of demonstration was going on. A huge banner with the name of Radovan Karadzic written in cyrillic was dominating the square. The leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the early 1990s when Sarajevo came under siege, Karadzic is currently awaiting a war crimes trial at The Hague. Anti-EU and NATO placards were also on display, but the rally - if you can call it that - didn't seem to have much support. It is still a very sensitive issue all over the Balkans, but most people just want to move on now. The anti-west sentiment didn't stop Si from wading right in and taking photographs, despite looking more like a western tourist than anyone who has ever worn a backpack east of Vienna.

Dark fell and we looked up an Indian restaurant in the suburbs, deciding to take the 3km trip by taxi. We couldn't find it, so we trudged around a gloomy, unlit neighbourhood looking for the place and eventually admitted defeat, getting another taxi back to the hostel and making do with some pizza slices from a street vendor.

Feeling guilty at sidestepping the famous nightlife at the weekend, we grabbed our new friend Pedro from Portugal, who was also staying at the hostel, and headed to a club nearby. It was tucked away in an apartment block like many places in Belgrade and, after we got the lift up, looked around agape at some of the most beautiful women we had ever seen. And some mean-looking Serbian blokes, but you can't have everything. Unfortunately, two major flaws resulted in our initiating a relatively early abort. The first was that the bouncers did not understand the word "capacity", meaning we actually couldn't move. Worse, it seemed we were in the dreaded 'toilet to bar corridor' which you should never get yourself into in clubs, so people were constantly trying to push past us to get to one or the other. The second issue was that, although the girls were stunning, they certainly were aware of it. Nothing turns me off more than a bird that fancies herself more than you do, so we left, grabbed some food from a fantastic fast food place nearby, and called it a night at the relatively early time of 2am.

Our hostel had become like student halls to us with a regular group of characters we got on with hanging around 24/7 so it was a wrench to leave the following afternoon (I didn't surface until 1pm meaning it felt even more like being back at uni). But leave we had to do, Belgrade had been ticked off, and after shaking off a couple of cheeky souls asking us for money at the bus station, we were off on a seven hour trip to Sarajevo. The two cities used to be in the same country, but they couldn't seem further apart now.

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Photos

Bomb damage
Building damaged by Nato bombs in 1999.

Radovan Karadzic demonstration
A demonstration in Republic Square protesting at the leader of the Bosnian Serbs' arrest for war crimes.

Red Star v Partizan
Grobari throw flares at police.

Red Star v Partizan
Grobari prepare for the kick off