Belgrade, Serbia

Going from Novi Sad to Belgrade is like going from San Francisco to Los Angeles, or from York to Leeds. Bigger is not necessarily better.

The first thing that catches your eye as you approach is the Western City Gate tower, a huge and monstrous piece of Soviet Modernism / Brutalism, and by far the single ugliest building I've ever seen in all my travels. I didn't manage to take a picture but you can check it out here. The photo doesn't even begin to do justice to how horrible it looks from below, under grey skies on a drizzly October afternoon.

Indeed it stayed grey and drizzly for pretty much the whole of my time here. I don't really mind, partly because I'm more comfortable when it's cooler, and partly because I look marginally less of a pillock in jeans than I do in shorts. But it makes for some rather drab photos, as you see below.

I took in a football match at Red Star Belgrade. It's hard to believe that they won the European Cup as recently as 1991. The attendance was only 7,315 - not exactly impressive in a city of over a million people - and a decent chunk of those were tourists like me. As well as the club shop selling the usual pointless merchandise, there was a weird secondary outlet devoted to hooligan gear: gas masks, hoodies, unsavoury T-shirts, etc. Almost the whole of the real home crowd was made up of these burly ultras, with their constant chanting and flares and banners and firecrackers. It's telling that when Red Star scored their opener, late into the first half, the ultras didn't bat an eyelid: they just kept on going with their song about killing Kosovans or burning Bosnians or whatever else it was. There was no spontaneity or humour, all the songs being orchestrated by a twerp with a drum and another twerp with a loudspeaker.

Quite frankly it didn't feel like being at a football match. It felt more like being at a Nazi rally with a kickabout going on in the background. So I left at half-time. Apparently this lot will be joining the EU just as we're leaving it...well, ships in the night, and all that.

Kneza Mihaila, the main shopping street in Belgrade.
I'm actually staying right on this street. But my room is at the top of many, many stairs...
...and in this case 'single occupancy' would be more aptly titled 'solitary confinement'.

Temple of St Sava
One of the world's largest Eastern Orthodox churches.
If you squint, it does kind of resemble an old Greek guy with a beard.

From the west bank of the Danube

Red Star Belgrade
This graffito relates to UEFA admitting Kosovo as a recognised national team. (Long story.)

National Assembly of Serbia

What The World Needs Now...

Edd vs Food #66
Burrito Madre
A fairly competent fast-food chain, exclusive to Belgrade.

Novi Sad, Serbia

We are now well and truly back into the world of Real Travelling. Eight hours on a rickety old bus, with nobody speaking English at either end, nor anywhere inbetween. I was the only tourist and thus the only person to get hauled off the bus at the Bosnian-Serbian border. The Serbian border guard had that characteristic look of forced civility, of suppressed violence, the bearing of a man who's inclined to shoot you in the head and resents you failing to appreciate the effort it's costing him not to do so.

But he waved me through, eventually. And so off we trundled into Serbia, the bus driver continuing to smoke like a chimney through his open window.  I wonder if he was communicating with oncoming drivers via smoke signals? Either that or he was attempting telepathy, because it was a very winding road and some of his high-speed overtaking manouevres were speculative to say the least. It made for an interesting journey.

Even though Novi Sad is relatively tourist-free, most of the locals speak pretty good English. I don't think the local food quite matches what I had in Bosnia, but the burgers and pizzas are excellent, and anyway the beer more than makes up for it. Serbia is home to several first-rate breweries, most notably Kabinet, whose wares I look forward to somebody importing to the UK at the earliest opportunity.

Novi Sad's old town has several really nice bars where you can pick up these and other local beers for the equivalent of two quid or so. It also has an eclectic mix of Islamic and Eastern Orthodox architecture, as well as a fair bit of evocative Warsaw Pact-era bleakness; nowadays the latter has a certain charm of its own, and anyway I think even the dullest Soviet-style stone cube is still preferable to the ravages of 1960s town planning back in the UK.

I freely confess that I had never heard of Novi Sad until I started researching my trip. But I'm glad I came. This place is a hidden treasure, an oasis, and it can't last forever - I have no doubt that in decades to come I will look back at this and thank God I got here when I did, before everyone else found out about it. As it is, now that I've been, I don't mind if you all check it out and I heartily recommend that you do so. Fly to Belgrade and then it's just one hour on a bus. Provided you don't mind the driver having a fag along the way.

Freedom Square

The Name of Mary Church

Bishop's Palace

Petrovaradin Fortress

Edd vs Food #65
At the Banjalučki Ćevap Grill
Don't know what it's called (no English menu, just Serbian & pictures)
Several animals were harmed in the making of this dish.

Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina

Sarajevo is of course the place where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914. If you get up crowd-dodgingly early on a morning, you can walk down to that riverside street corner and stand alone in quiet contemplation on the spot where it happened, and reflect that it pretty much all began here: both World Wars, the Cold War, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, the EU, Brexit, the whole lot. Though obviously the 20th century probably wouldn't have been trouble-free even if Gavrilo Princip had slept through his alarm clock that day.

Each morning here my own alarm clock is the day's first Islamic call to prayer. It arrives en masse: dozens of muezzins, thin reedy amplified voices echoing out across the hillsides surrounding the city, and the effect when they combine is really quite eerie, especially at dawn or at dusk, with city lights flickering under a crescent moon - of course! - and a hazy pink sky.

You can see the whole city from the top of the cable car, but the view from the top is partly obscured by trees and anyway one can't do it any kind of photographic justice without a wide-angle lens. Nonetheless the cable car is worth doing just for the ride itself. It's over a mile in length, so for most of the journey you're sufficiently far from either of the engine rooms that you're effectively gliding in silence.

Much of the old town is given over to tourist tat shops, which are harmless enough, and perhaps the Islamic influence shows in that there aren't too many places there serving alcohol. But you only need to keep going for a few blocks to find some really good bars. Once again I observe that our continental cousins seem to have mastered the art of drinking all evening to the accompaniment of nothing but conversation and laughter. Growing up in England, you assume that fighting, vomiting and yelling are the universal fruits of alcohol worldwide. Nope. It's just us. In fairness the Yanks and Aussies can be just as bad; but then where did they learn it from?

On the whole Sarajevo gets a huge thumbs-up from me, as did Mostar. Indeed it's an overall gold star for Bosnia & Herzegovina, or Benson & Hedges as I am wont to call it after one too many. The bar has been raised for the next country and they'd better not get complacent.

The river Miljacka

View from my hilltop digs as the sun starts to go down

Looking up at the cable car

Bakr-babina Dzamidja mosque

A stiff test for even the most skilful skateboarder 

Martyrs' Memorial cemetery for those killed 1992-5

Edd vs Food #63
This is bureg, pretty much the Bosnian national dish.
Meat and onions and spices, in pastry, with optional sour cream.

Edd vs Food #64
Chicken burrito and chips at Vucko.
Can't eat bureg all day, after all.

Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina

Mostar's famous Old Bridge is impressively tall and in a very picturesque setting for a quiet early morning stroll. By lunchtime, of course, it groans under the weight of guided-tour automatons and competitive selfie-takers. I'm resigned to the selfie stick, in the same way that I'm resigned to the Kardashians and my own mortality, but today I saw a surprising innovation in the shape of a selfie drone. Some guy was flying his drone out from the centre of the bridge and filming himself from it. Undoubtedly he was live-streaming it on InstaBook or whatever it's called.

I found a much quieter spot at the top of the Bell Tower, the tallest building in Mostar. It's only 3 quid or so to go up to the top and get some panoramic snaps. (I took the stairs, even though the lift is functioning and free, because I'm like that.) The bell itself is large and in active service, and it can be heard from quite some distance, as I learned when the blasted thing rang just as I was standing right next to it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I'm glad nobody was watching. It took a few minutes before I was sufficiently compos mentis for the walk back down.

But my general good humour is being kept up here by the food, which is fabulous. Dubrovnik was all about over-sugary pastries and expensive pizzas without quite enough Italian influence to be any good. Here in Mostar, there's much more of an Eastern Mediterranean feel to the cuisine - kebabs, salads, meatballs, spices, etc. If there's one thing that endears a place to me, it's an easy abundance of restaurants where you can eat like a king for a fiver. And the customer service is better here too. Actual eye contact!

Also there is the Black Dog pub, with classic rock on the jukebox and impressive local craft beers poured by a barmaid with black lipstick who could, in the words of Raymond Chandler, make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window...

Dubrovnik didn't make it into my top 50, but Mostar looks set for top 20 at least. Onwards and upwards.

The Old Bridge

Central Mostar, from atop the minaret of the Karadoz Bey mosque

The walk from my digs into town

Inside the Karadoz Bey mosque

The Muslibegovic House - a preserved Ottoman-era dwelling, now a posh hotel

Edd vs Food #61
Chicken salad with garlic bread at Nide Veze

Edd vs Food #62
Pretty much the full shebang, at Tima Irma

Dubrovnik, Croatia

Welcome to volume number 8 of Edd's Travels. It's 18 months since the last instalment. In the interim Sunderland have been relegated twice, and I've spent the last nine months living in Milton Keynes. You see how leaving the country acquires a certain appeal.

Here in Dubrovnik I have a very cosy one-bedroom apartment. Having my own kitchen has saved me fortunes compared to subsisting on the overpriced pizzas that are this city's staple diet. My apartment is only £20 a night because it's up on a very steep hill a few miles away from the Old Town. But I like my long walks, and frankly the air is fresher up here.

First impressions were mixed. Nice weather, lovely coastline, etc etc. However it's badly overcrowded and the air in town is thick with fumes, not just from cars & buses but also from huge cruise ships, vast carbuncular monstrosities that loom like gloss-painted Death Stars over the town and disgorge endless floods of dumb fat tourists into its hitherto sleepy streets. Worse still, the general level of customer service here is frankly rancid. No matter how easy you try to make it for the locals, no matter how meekly and uncomplainingly you stand in line with the correct change ready, almost every interaction still seems to result in tutting and vengeful scowls.

On the second morning I set my alarm for 5am and was wandering around the Old City before dawn; I was first to queue, an hour before the office opened, for tickets to walk the Walls; and when the time came I literally ran up those stone steps, just to put a clear furlong or two between me and the massed ranks of aged coach-trippers shuffling along behind. I'm fairly sure I heard people below laughing at me as I went (it's hard to run up a steep stone staircase with any kind of dignity) but who cares? I got the peace & quiet that I was looking for. See photos below.

There's no point in me complaining about places like this being too crowded. I'm a member of that crowd like any other. Time to step off the main tourist trail a little: watch this space.

The Old Town, seen from the fort to the west

Inside the Old Town at dawn, before everyone else shows up

As above

Splendid isolation up on the Walls

As above

Another view from the fort, this time from the top

The Old Town, seen from Fort Imperial, after a quick 400-metre scramble on foot up the hill.
(Cable car, schmable car.)

View to the west, of Babim Kuk (where I'm staying), from halfway up the hill.