a rooster on the road to our first Serbian destination
With Zagreb having been disappointing, with no more museums of vital interest left, and with a seemingly never-ending rain, we drive ever further east. To where, according to the weather forecast, the sun is shining. Well, not today, just yet.
Look at the map of Croatia, and it looks a bit like a boomerang, folded around Bosnia in the middle. Look at where the tourist attractions are, and they are all in the south, along the coast. According to the resources I checked there is nothing of touristic value in the northern wing of Croatia. A motorway crosses from Zagreb to Belgrade, a road that I remember well from the 1980s, when I drove through what was then Yugoslavia, to Greece. It was known as death road, then, a long, two-lane affair with too many people too enthusiastically overtaking, resulting in lots of crashes, the remains of which were left along the road. Now it is a modern, four-to-six lane motorway. Which is wet, but otherwise comfortable driving.
the bridge over the Danube, the Donau, here called the Dunav, in the rain
the Dunav itself – it was too wet to get out of the car
On the left and on the right, nothing, just mostly flat agriculture land, and a bit of forest. We have lunch at a place called Nova Gradisca, the first small town we encounter, 150 km east of Zagreb. We then continue past Slavonski Brod, where we turn north, away from the Belgrade road – incidentally, Belgrade is almost never mentioned on the road signs, yet, that is where this road goes to, not to any other minor Croatian town on the way; any Serbian destination is obviously a dirty word. We now follow the signs for Osijek, on a new motorway even my GPS doesn’t recognise yet – and so do few Croats, because the road is almost empty. From Osijek we head to the Croatian border, then across the Danube – called the Dunav here -, and to the Serbian border post. Where we perform this by now rather unusual ritual in Europe, showing a passport, and receiving a stamp. Which took a while, as none of the border officials were in any hurry at all, resulting in long queues, especially for the traffic coming into Croatia.
trucks lined up to cross from Serbia into Croatia of the EU
bread country, and lots of grain silos along the road
many of the farms have wooden structures as barns
It is still raining, when we make our way into Serbia, on two-lane country roads not unlike that death road I described earlier – except that here were very few cars, and even fewer car wrecks; but still, quite a few crosses and flowers on the side of the road, where obviously something had gone wrong earlier. This is bread-country, all the trees have been chopped and the land has been transformed into endless agricultural flats, with grain as far as the eye can see – except that lots of it has been harvested already. We pass through small villages, and we cruise past huge grain silos. Attractive is different, even in bright sunshine, I reckon.
It was still pouring down when we arrived in Subotica. But to a pleasant surprise!
agriculture country, more than grain alone
Raining raining raining but the roads are much better than years ago!