We had a huge dinner last night in the hotel restaurant, and I had too much beer and not enough water all day, so did feel slightly head-achy waking up today. Today, I would drink more water again because my plan to drink less alcohol lasted until 14.00, when I had a beer for lunch, and now I am sipping on a nice Vranac from Montenegro. The bottle says “experience Montenegro in a glass”. We turned off the coast of Croatia before reaching Montenegro, so I appreciate this.
Anyway, we did route planning for the next three days last night, and would stay here in Crvica, then Valjevo, and then Belgrade, where we booked a nice hotel for two rest days. We still have lots of time to reach the Black Sea, so there is no hurry and two rest days are nice because you can still do some bike maintenance and planning, and then still have a full day to rest and explore.
Due to a shortage of accommodation (at least of the online bookable kind), today would only be 45km / 28 miles, so we slept in until 8.00, and left by 10.00 after breakfast (corn porridge for me and more cheese burek for Liz, although she thought it would be something else from the description).
Despite the short distance, we had two hills to climb. From the hotel, we had about 300m/1000ft to climb, where at the top we had to go through a longer tunnel to reach the descent. Thankfully, the road was quite wide, so passing trucks were not an issue. There was not too much traffic anyway.
We still don’t like tunnels, but thanks to the little traffic there was, we could ride the road, only having to stop once and scoot to the side to let a truck pass. After, we enjoyed a nice longer downhill and flat section to approach the second and last climb of the day.
After a little bit into the second climb, we were passed by another cycle tourer, and started chatting with him. David is from the Czech Republic and loves cycling in Serbia. He spends all his holidays for the year, four weeks, to tour Serbia. He is wild-camping, so much more hardcore than we are with our pre-booked hotels for the night. In his estimate, he spends about 20€ per three days, including cigarettes. A pack of twenty costs 2.50€, but on another cycling trip David also found much cheaper cigarettes going east, with 2.00€ in Turkey, then 1€ in Georgia, and 0.50€ in Armenia, where he ended up smoking 40 cigarettes a day to make use of the cheap supply situation. Finally, he was pondering about how fast he could be on these climbs if he didn’t smoke.
David said that while there is a heat-wave in central Europe, Serbia has had rather bad weather so far, and that he got rained on about every other day. We hope for everyone that the weather is improving for the next week.
David had a very good pace, so we rather quickly climbed to the top, which was followed by a very nice, long, descent to Bajina Bašta.
We went for coffee together in the town, and then decided to buy stuff for a picnic lunch together at the river. We bought tomatoes, peppers, cucumber, a big watermelon, beers, cheese burek and some bread. Shortly after leaving town, David spotted a nice picnic area with tables, so we stopped and enjoyed the meal and a swim in the very fast flowing Drina river, which marks the Bosnian/Serbian border.
At lunch, we also discussed the Kosovo situation a bit, with David having much more knowledge from the Serbian perspective, i.e. that Kosovo is really the heartland of Serbia for historical reasons, but I remember from my days in northern Albania, that the Albanians also claim that it is their land for historical reasons. In any case, I should read up on this topic a bit more.
After lunch, we all cycled toward our place to stay. David said he would try and find another nice spot further downriver to set camp for the night. In the lunch sun, David just finished drying his shoes, which did not last long as we got drenched in a short but intense rain shower, while we were also trying to help a local with a flat tire. Hand-wavingly, he communicated to me that the tube is gone after I tried to pump it with both our and David’s pump.
We are staying in a nice place right at the river (for 20€, prompting David’s budget info earlier), with a washing machine which is always appreciated and a kitchen so we will make some nice pasta for dinner. With Vranac, cheers!
Total distance/elevation to date: 4712km/39’614m
Rest days: 16
Route and Stats
Relive Video
The 1948 Tour 
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