Day 76 - Rila to Belgrade, Serbia

Driving in Bulgaria was a little tricky as there is a large police presence on the side of the road, presumably to catch people speeding but there aren't any speed signs on the road so all we could do was follow someone else and hope they were doing the right thing. Tailgating is also a very popular sport and BMW and Audi drivers enjoy passing at high speeds in high risk situations.

The high rise communist housing buildings are so ugly they make the Australian housing commission look like 5*.

The border crossing out of Bulgaria was a stay in your car type but the queues were long and at some stage people arrived on motor bikes who decided they didn't need to join the lengthy line and pushed in up front. When it was nearly our turn the guy in the booth left and went on his tea break, he was eventually replaced by someone else and quite some time later we were finally stamped out of Bulgaria, just so we could then join the Serbian line. An hour and a half from arrival we drove into Serbia and the rain, and at this stage one of the windscreen wipers decided it didn't like Serbia and flew off, the concern being that now it was just metal scraping on the glass when the wiper was moving.

We drove on to Nis and stopped there for a lunch break, luckily there was a money changer nearby who gave us a good rate for some euros, and we found a bakery. We visited the skull monument, which was from the battle of Cegar in 1809 where they had made a tower using the skulls of the people killed. 200 plus years on there are still a lot of skulls that had survived.

We finally made it to Serbia's capital Belgrade where we had booked to stay for three nights.