Advertisement
Published: November 6th 2008
Edit Blog Post
after taking a long deep look into the nicest eyes of sofia in casablanca i take a walk to the trainstation, enjoying myself and the last sunny afternoon in the city. i think round maria luiza i start missing my favorite company again, and at sunset over vitosha from the trainstations balcony it gets worse, so i immediately have to leave to dragoman to not change my direction:-)
dragoman is great. dark and cold as usual, and completely unchanged since 1995, i am more than impressed. if you miss old bulgaria on some days, this is the place for you. there's a new public telephone in town now, it's on the petrolstation on the national road, so i decide to phone my colleague lisa, that if would be very nice of her to work for me on friday, 'cause it seems rather unprobable to me to reach hachenburg within 46 hours. in the shop of the petrolstation the guys from the roadassistance ask me to join them for a party they are going to, and play some rolling stones for the locals, so i try to convince them that i am 2000km from work and being expected there on saturday,
so they let me go for this time and i promise to come back. leaving the station i finally meet two truckdrivers from stara zagora, who are going to italy, but tanio, the italianspeaking guy who takes me, is too scared to take passengers over the border, so i drive only 12km with them and then walk into serbia.
the customspeople are remarkably amused with someone with a guitar turning up by foot at 10p.m., so all the controlls are quite entertaining, and between two of the last stations of the borderpost some turkish truckdrivers from konia invite me for a tea. at the last controll i'm send on to the parking of the roadhouse, where an half hour later a serbian trucker called stefan takes me to half the way of belgrade. stefano is 'round 50, plays good bluesmusic on the trucks cd-player, loves to stop for a beer every hour or two, has a cool romanian cowboyhat and speaks some german and italian. he drives me trough a beautiful valley on the nationalroad and gives me my first introduction into serbia, sometimes he stops on construction-lights to go and let out the beer. on autoput 'round nis
i meet my first lukoil-station, offering russian speciallitys and russian petrol, i'm gladly back in the east finally. in a place named joy by the highway stefano leaves me behind, and after an hour chatting with the nightguardian i decide to go to sleep, there's millions of stars over yugoslavia. late at night in the forest just behind the motel a little dog barks me awake, apparently i'm in his district, but too cold to leave. after half an hour he's to hoarse to continue barking at me, and funny enough he keeps 20 metres of distance to me all the time, seems like sharing the house with a husky for five days gives you a respectable smell among fellow-streetdogs.
as the morningsun is defrosting me 'round ten, i walk down back to the parking, and in front of the restaurant tomi and zlato are prepearing two brandnew man-trucks for the way to slovenia. tomi speaks nicest austrian with a fun slav accent, and invites me for a slalomtour trough serbia by national road. since it's the first time i'm around without a war goin on, i want to see it of course. the southern province of serbia is
unbelievable, socialist lifestile and corruption and fresh agricultural merchandise as far as the eye can see, somethin about serbia must have been wrong on western media the last 16 years since we started bombing them for annually changing reasons, the people are great, old zastavas and turkish busses everywhere, and fields ready to harvest all along the river that gives the national road company for the next hour or two. my driver reports that more and more english pensioneers are settling here, and that he'd like to do so too, if he hadn't just started renovating a house back home in slovenia. i'm so fascinated by this country that i do even forget to take pictures, which is a shame, 'cause the rest of the midday we join a traffic-jam in front of an accident. 'round three the crane has lifted the bus off the road and the caronto the assistancetruck, and the ambulances have collected most people, and a 10km-jam kindly dissolves into the neighbourvillages. the first town in the mountains looks like it's the home of one guy from my youthclub, that i know from pictures, round sunset we stop at the roadhouse with the best beansoup of
this route. we have cabbagesalad that tastes as good as it came from the field an hour ago, cola, loads of fresh bread, the famous soup of the house, and a perfect turkish coffee for dessert, and leave the place stuffed with 22leva on the bill for all three of us together, beautiful travellingcountry, you have to come with me next time. in belgrade we cross some outskirts and then join the highway again, the 300km to zagreb are so boring that tomi starts playing national-lampoon-movies from his laptop. at 3.30 in the morning we arrive on the border to slovenia, and one and a half hours later we even cross it, after tomi and zlato have found that a screwdriver for bridging the electric starter of the first truck helps a lot to encourage its will to endure the last two hours of the journey. i leave them after 19 hours behind the border and promise to mail some pictures. the highway still is abandoned, and i'm halfdead, so i pass out behind the crahbarrier 'till 10.
on fridaymorning it's lousy cold, misty and cloudy, and a coffee in the e.u. costs a much as a decent meal
does in serbia. i'm not impressed at all. luckily the locals are stubborn useless bureaucratic northerners like home, so they refuse the roadtax-sticker of marian, who's on his way from croatia to switzerland in an old renault-van, and we have to drive back into croatia to be able to afford the trip. there's a beautiful district to see from zagreb to rijeka, after a long stripsearch of the car, 'cause croatian customs apparently think that croatian-german travellinggroups in swiss renaults are somehow suspicious. the seaside is great anyway, and the slovenian mediterranean coast is taxfree for driving, after another stripsearch from the croations upon departure. after another tankfill and another coffee and lots of mandarins from marians garden on the coast we arrive in italy, and just in time for the sunset in venice. the car has drowned a third of the tankfill after a good hour, so for the rest of italy we share the wind of a polish truck to arrive before runing broke. the dusk along the alps is marvelous, marian is sleeping on the passenger seat, and just in time for the last busses downtown and on to lecco we arrive on the swiss border in
como. i leave marian after 12 hours and rush to the local bus, which passes the center and then takes a 30minute break on the other end of town. an hour later we're back in the valley, i leave the bus, still with the strong urge to kill the lazy bastard who's driving it, and walk to the central busstation. the last bus to lecco has of course left 10 minutes ago, im too dead to walk for 30km, so i call my friends to announce myself for breakfast instead. after another hour of hopeless hitchin' i call it a day and find myself a boat on the lake to sleep on. it's called milano, it's big, old, and beautiful, and docked very close to the promenade:-) i enjoy the view across lago di como for the length of a greek cigarette before passing out, and only wake up once to find out that some lovers like the romantic view from milano too.
in the morning i catch the bus to lecco, write some postcards on the drive, and run into the neighbour of my friends on the busstop by the station. paolo drives me up to his neighbours
playing hair on the radio, we drive by marco on the way from the cigaretteshop next door, and he takes me in for coffee. he's playing the bass and goes mad when i tell him i've seen smv on monday, i leave the appartment at 9.30am with 9andahalf hours and 780km to go to hachenburg, with 300kg of best italian granite-stones in the back of the car and 2 swiss borders to cross...
there's a traffic-jam next to offenburg, of course:-)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.241s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 57; dbt: 0.0537s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb