All Things Being Equal: Mosquito camp to Belgrade

May 19, 2015

There is no distances on road signs here. Combined with not having a map it feels a little inelegant. I can't surmise how far it is to Belgrade, apart from using my computer, knowing I did one-hundred and twenty kilometres yesterday, after starting the day with around three-hundred to Belgrade, I must be starting the day at the one-eighty mark, meaning I should, all things being equal, reach the city tomorrow afternoon.

A positive is I've met lots of club cyclists, perhaps a sign of a country being wealthy. I imagine back in the nineteen-fifties as more and more people in Europe could effort cars, the car became a measure of status. If you went around in a car you had money and were respectable. And if you continued to ride a bike, most assumed you were poor and looked down upon you. How things have changed. Lots of healthy sporting people cycling everywhere is a sign of an effluence country.

I'm on the road at twenty to nine following the small byroad where I left off the evening before, passing small fields of new mown hay, it's sweet wilting grass-smell fills the air; and brown fields with green rows of vegetables. In one I see an old couple bent over with hoes weeding. It would be nice to continue on this road all day but, after three kilometres, it passes under the rail-lines out onto the main highway.

I'm not long on the highway when I say to myself, I'm getting sick of meeting these convoys of one or maybe two leaden trucks trundling along with a queue of cars behind, then nearly always without fail, a truck traveling on empty comes bearing down from behind. A situation like a ramrod down a gun barrel with me in the barrel, in the way. There isn't a shoulder, though I've found the Serbian truck drivers to be courteous; always they slow and the road seems wide enough to accommodate them passing me, with a small but safe berth, on their own side. But nonetheless the situation is hairy.

I stop about ten at a roadside café for second breakfast, omelette with bacon and a big bap of bread. The cappuccino is more chocolate than coffee. The only other diners are two thirty-something men sat opposite each other and a third more senor man sat at the end of the same table talking constantly to them while simultaneously eating and smoking a cigarette as the other two passively listen. He takes a final draw on the cigarette, then stumps the butt out in an ashtray. One of the others speaks while he grabbles with a cigarette packet for a new cigarette, placing it in his mouth, lights-up and draws on it deeply, then continues talking and eating in a haze of blue smoke.

I'm glad to reach the large town of Cacak approaching midday wherein is a plethora of banks with ATMs as I'm running low of the two-thousand I withdrew yesterday. This time I withdraw 5000. Then as it's warm I sit down at one of the many cafes in the central pedestrian street and have a cold beer for 130.

Later on the way out of town I stop at a supermarket and surprising find a litre bottle of alcohol-etanol marked 96%. Then further by a roundabout while finding the right road on, there's a big service station on the corner. The thought that petrol stations shops usually stock road maps enters my head, so I turn off down onto the forecourt. Indeed there's a range of maps, even one for the whole of the former Yugoslavia at ten kilometres to a centimetre, the one I decide to buy. I order a coffee as I spread the map out over a table in the cafeteria in one side of the shop. I see now that Serbia is much bigger than I envisaged and calculate there's still about a hundred and thirty kilometres to Belgrade.

Setting off again and turning on to the right road at another roundabout I pass a signboard: Belgrade 137 km, so with fifty-one kilometres done I should be there tomorrow.

By six I find a campsite down a laneway, in a gateway into a hay-meadow and set up the tent sweating, take off my tee-shirt, such has been the heat this afternoon. And those mosquito-bites have made my shins itches.

At last distances. This is the second one I see.

Notice the space these passing cars have given me.

At this point there are no more "Centar" signs and I've to work out for myself which way to the city centre.

Not sure about this. It may be a direct hit from the NATO airstrike in 1999.

Veg for dinner with a can of mixed kidney beans and corn in a mex-sauce, plus good bottle of Serbian red wine and a can of local beer for equivalent of six euros.

Today's ride: 185 km (115 miles)
Total: 4,574 km (2,840 miles)

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