Day 79 - Belgrade to Sibiu, Romania

The first stop of the morning was a Ford service center to get the windscreen wiper fixed, luckily that was quite painless even though the man there didn't speak any English.

With that fixed we headed to the Romanian border. The border crossing was a quiet little outpost, the officers came out to the car, took our passports and asked to look in the boot. It seemed to take a while for them to come back with our passports and then the boom gate was lifted and we were across.

We drove to Timisoara, Romania's third largest city for a lunch break and found a park close to Unirii Square. From there a 10 minute walk took us through a number of different squares in the historical centre. Unirri is a large square with beautiful old buildings in different pastel colours.

Plata Victoriel was the last square where the buildings are 270 years older and architecturally different to many others we have seen. The colours are shades of brown and some are so large and dark they almost look frightening, although still interesting. The area had manicured garden beds and finished with the Romanian Orthodox Church with a patterned roof.

So far Romania seemed really interesting, though the rain drove us back to the car earlier than we would have liked. It would also have been nice to have spent a night in Timisoara to explore it more but we were running out of time until we needed to get back so we were travelling pretty quickly. 

Driving through the Romanian countryside and villages was interesting and there were some similarities to other countries we had visited in the last month or so with the ubiquitous sunflowers and the giant stork nests on top of power poles which now have multiple offspring testing their fledgling flying skills.

However, we also saw many women and girls in traditional clothes with full length skirts and cotton head scarves. The rain continued in patches on and off with breaks of sunshine. In April and May we had unseasonably hot weather and now in July we seemed to be getting unseasonable rain.

We kept pushing on to our destination for the night, Sibiu, this was one of the biggest driving days we have done on this trip and we didn't get to Sibiu until after 7pm. Our apartment was handy to the old town and we stopped at dinner next to the Bridge of Lies, myth has it that if you tell a lie while standing on the bridge it will collapse. M of course tried this just to prove it was a myth. Many of the buildings had tiny window like attics in their A frame roofs, the windows were shaped like eyes complete with eye lids.

Day 78 - Belgrade

One of M's friends from Melbourne was also holidaying in this part of the world and were only 26km away visiting family at Grocka. Unfortunately we had been warned not to move our car from its parking space on the street or it would be unlikely we would find another one so that meant we needed to catch the bus to Grocka.

We missed the planned bus by a few seconds so had to wait 45 minutes for the next one. It was surprising how we weren't very far out of Belgrade before we were in the countryside, we had imagined that 26km from the capital that we would just be in another suburb.

Unfortunately our sim card didn't have data in Serbia so making contact was difficult and when we arrived at the bus stop in the small town of Grocka there was no one to meet us. We waited a while and since they had shared their location some time earlier we set off on foot. As we passed the neighbours leant over their fences and watched us pick our way through muddy road works, when we reached the spot we had been directed to there was noone there!

We gave up (a bit angry by now) and headed to the bus station. Luckily someone gave us access to some wifi and we finally got in contact, we were collected just as we were considering taking the bus back to Belgrade.

We spent the afternoon on the large terrace of a restaurant on top of a hill looking over the river. The restaurant had been a holiday home of Tito's (we are sure he had lots of them in many countries) so held the prime position in the town. We had a very pleasant afternoon catching up while looking out over the Danube.

Getting in the car to go back to the bus stop we were trying to work out why the front seat belts were done up when they were empty - we were told it was to stop them beeping, but wouldn't it be easier to just put them on?

We wanted to catch the Lasta bus back to Belgrade as it was express and its final stop was near our apartment. We watched a few normal buses arrive and leave but after about half an hour in the cold we gave up waiting and hopped on the next bus. Meanwhile M received an email back from the car rental place about our missing windscreen wiper, they suggested we add water, obviously it was all lost in translation somewhere between Bulgarian and English.

As feared the bus dropped us off nowhere near where we needed to go but fortunately a tram came along that that stopped right near home. Also, as we couldn't work out how to buy the bus or tram tickets the return trip ended up being free.

Day 77 - Belgrade

We had been warned that we would be woken by the church bells that are rung loudly at 7.30am everyday so it was a pleasant surprise that on Sundays they aren't rung until 8.30am.

We went to the main square to join the culture and heritage walking tour and it was a small group of only five of us. We were a little concerned in the beginning that it was going to be a bit dry but our guide quickly warmed up and the small group made it very interactive and interesting and it ended up being one of the better walking tours we have been on.

We walked past many sites that were significant in the war that took place with the break up of Yugoslavia, it has been interesting to visit all of the resulting countries and to hear each side's perspective on who was in the right and who were the bad guys (no, they don't all agree!).

We visited the Church of St. Sava, one of the largest churches in the world, parts of which were still under construction.

After the tour we walked to the cute tourist strip of cafes and restaurants on the cobblestone strip of Skadarlija before continuing onto the fortress. We generally don't visit the fortresses as every town and city usually has one and they vary from being incredibly well restored to a pile of rubble, but Belgrade's fortress was known to have spectacular views.

The fortress is high up (as you would expect as having a good vantage point was obviously paramount for fighting off foreign invaders) and on the junction of the River Sava and the Danube. The view is superb and also takes in new Belgrade on the other side of the river making us realize that Belgrade was much larger than we thought. We hurried back from the fortress as black clouds gathered and we could hear thunder rumbling around us, we made it back to our apartment just before the rain set in.

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.

Day 75 - Sofia to Rila

We had booked a hire car to continue our trip through Serbia and Romania and for €10 they delivered it to our apartment which saved us having to get a taxi back to the airport.

Our destination today was the Rila National Park and we took the freeway out of Sofia. We weren't far out of Sofia when police diverted us off the freeway onto a local road. A bit further on we could see that there wasn't an accident but kilometer after kilometer of empty trucks parked on the freeway, obviously another protest about the transport changes.

The Rila National Park is known as Seven Rila Lakes and we drove up the mountain to the foot of the chair lift. There were lots of cars parked there, we had timed it so we wouldn't be there on a weekend as it is a popular day trip for people who live in Serbia. During winter it is a ski resort but in summer it is a popular hiking spot. It was lunch time when we arrived and we were surprised to find that there wasn't anywhere to buy something to eat.

We caught probably the longest chairlift ride we have ever taken, it was about 25 minutes to the start of the hiking trail. There was a lodge there so we hoped to get some lunch but there wasn't even a drink to be bought. We hiked up a steep incline for about 40 minutes and were rewarded with the picturesque view of three of the seven lakes plus many patches of snow. We would have needed to hike much further to the next spot but we weren't sure how much more time we'd need so we turned back. The weather was beautiful, an ideal day for a mountain walk, by the time we had come back down the mountain and were getting in the car we could hear thunder and there was the start of rain, so we felt smug that we had timed our return so well.

We then drove an hour or so to the Rila Monastery, where we had been warned that it was so popular with tourist buses that it was normal to have to park a few kilometres away from the entrance. Luckily when we arrived at 5pm there was only a handful of independent tourists left, so we parked right out the front. The monastery is very well maintained and the frescoes on the church were very reminiscent of the ones in Ethiopia, but very well restored.

We spent the night in the small town of Rila with trout on the menu for dinner.

Day 74 - Sofia

As we were coming closer to the end of our three month Eastern Europe trip and starting to run out of time to see everything on our map we spent some time doing some planning of our route through Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, as well as mundane things like getting some washing done.

The thunderstorm and rain from last night had cleared and improved the weather considerably as the humidity had been broken with the storm. This made it a more pleasant time to finish our time in Sofia. We walked around town and revisited some of the areas we'd been to on the walking tour, and finished the day at a local restaurant near our apartment which had an interesting way of presenting overcooked pork and beef strips (they called it something else though).

Day 73 - Sofia

Our walking tour guide was excellent and very engaging as he showed us around the city and explained some history. There was a loud protest going on outside the parliament building and lots of police present, later in the tour we came across the protesters again walking down a road.
When we arrived at the large church there was a large amount of buses parked there and the drivers all had their hands on their horns, protesting about a change in transport taxes.

The Russian Orthodox church is probably the most attractive church we have seen, with gold onion domes and painted intricately in shades of aqua.

Sofia is a bit of a mix of a city, it has some lovely buildings and even their own yellow brick road around the main areas. However, the footpaths in general are in a very bad state and there is a certain feel of griminess. It was also very humid which culminated in a thunderstorm that evening, so between the fact that our Airbnb was a bit of a walk from the city centre and the torrential rain we decided to stay inside and just have toast for dinner.

Day 72 - Budapest to Sofia, Bulgaria

We had to drop the hire car off at the airport by 9.30am but our flight wasn't until 1.40pm so we had lots of time to kill. The departure gate area was chaotic with people so we found a quiet coffee shop until our check in was open three hours before. When we joined the snaking queue we realised we should have lined up when we arrived and not been sitting in a cafe. We spent an hour in the queue fighting off late comers who seemed to think they could push in in front of us.

We finally reached the check in desk after letting people on early flights go ahead of us only to be told that we hadn't checked in. That's what we thought the check in desk was for, we were told we had to go to another counter to check in and that we also had to pay to check in! By the look of the angry and crying faces at the counter in front of us we weren't the only confused ones and it also looked like it was going to be expensive.

When we finally made it to the Wizz Air check in desk we were told we had to pay an extra €45 each (AUD$150 total) as we hadn't checked in online and it was now too late to do so. M showed the only email we had received that explicitly said that we did not have to contact the airline before our flight and we had not received any emails about checking in online. We were told it was in the T&C's and it was our fault we had not read all the T&C pages. Eventually we were rudely shown the T&C's and in the many pages there was a single (already) highlighted paragraph explaining the charge. We were then asked to move aside as we were holding up other passengers! Of course if we wanted to fly we had to pay, so we did. A New Zealand man behind us was charged €45 extra to purchase his ticket though an agency and then another €75 because he had purchased 10kg of luggage but had 17kg. Lesson learned ... we will never fly Wizz Air (what kind of a name is that anyway?) ever again!

We went back into the check-in desk to start the process again. Things didn't improve much on the other side, even though Budapest airport is large there aren't any toilets past the main area, none near the gates and quite incredibly, none after you pass through customs.

Things seemed to be looking up when we found that because we had purchased luggage we had priority check in but this too turned out to be a furphy, what it meant was that we were loaded onto the standing room only non air conditioned bus first. The plane was also a worry as it was old and the seats were so small that people with long legs were sticking their knees into the people's backs in front of them.

Other than that the flight was fine, apart from the continual flogging of in flight purchases, did they really think they were going to get more money out of us?

The taxi situation in Sofia airport was very strange, we joined a queue to book with a woman at a window office and she then proceeded to make a large amount of phone calls for the next 15 minutes, it seemed she was just phoning everyone she knew to see who could take this queue of tourists into the city. We were finally told we had a taxi and sure enough there was one waiting out the front for us, we're not sure how the others behind us got on, hopefully they made it into taxis as well.

After checking in to our nice Airbnb we walked into the city to find somewhere to eat, interestingly we passed a vegan restaurant with the same name and storefront as as one down the street from where we live, not what we'd expect in Sofia, Bulgaria!

Day 71 - Pecs to Budapest

It was time to head back to Budapest to return the car but we went via the town of Kecskemet for coffee and cake. There were two different sights on the drive that we were not used to. On top of some of the power poles were huge nests with large storks perched in them, one nest had three large birds.

The other sight was stranger and sadder on the way into and out of Kecskemet we saw young girls dressed skimpily standing by the side of the road plying their trade. We had also seen this in some country areas in Spain, how vulnerable these girls are standing on their own on country roads.

We were staying at a hotel close to the airport as we had a flight to Sofia, Bulgaria the next day. After checking in we caught a train into the city centre for dinner and a drink at a ruin bar.

Day 70 - Siofok to Pecs

We drove around Lake Batalan to the much busier town of Keszthely. We probably would have been better to have stayed here the previous night, it seemed prettier and had more going on. It was also Sunday so there were lots of people around enjoying the lake and the sunny weather.

We arrived into Pecs in time to explore the town, and we just happened to be there for their annual light festival, which is similar to Melbourne's White Night.