When It Stops Raining: A Week in the White City-Belgrade, on the confluence of the Sava and Danbue.

May 26, 2015

The people in the tourist information office in Belgrade are wonderful. You couldn't ask for more helpful people. I ask where there's a hostel and the young guy not only marks four on the map, his colleague come over from behind her desk and recommends another called Bongo, then says wait, I'll phone them to check for availability. She smiles at me while holding the receive to her ear waiting for a reply, then come the reply "Mol-lin!........." She sounds positive while talking away in Serbo-Croat. When she put down the phone, she says they have space and marks the address on my street-map, Saying I continue further along the same street.

Never mind Homer: Bongo is the name of a moose in a book by Norwegian children's author Erlend Loe.

The receptionist Danniela is expecting me when I arrive and shows me round. The bike will go in the back-garden and while she takes my passport to check me in, I remove the panniers and wheel the bike through to the rear. Then take my clothes and toiletry pannier and have a good long shower, washing my shins and calves well to rid the sunburn skin of salty sweat, which is making the mosquito bites itch. I wash and rinse my clothes in the wash-basin and hang them out to dry. By now my room is ready to move into and Danniela hands me back my passport with a slip of paper she explains that I must not lose. A document that the police may ask to see when leaving Serbia.

The first few days here as I sit in getting the journal in shape, the hot weather continues; then there's a change at the weekend. Grey skies and eventually persistent drizzly rain. Having done with the journal at this point, I'm anxious to get out to the bike shop to get the bottom bracket replaced, but riding in an unfamiliar city in the rain, avoiding tramlines is unappealing. The bike shop "Planet Bike" is by Hotel Yugoslavia, quite a way away across the river in the modern city.

It has been raining three days now and the bike in the garden has orange oxidation on the rollers of my good Shimano XT chain and it feels like I've left it there and neglected it. It feels like I'll never have a fair day so get across to the bike shop. I even had a bad dream last night that the bike disappeared from the garden. Stolen. I felt traumatized until waking up.

Today I'm determined to get out and go on the free city walking tour. I shower and discover I could do with a shave and as there is time to kill before the appointed eleven o'clock meet up time, I shave before getting dressed, then get out my raincoat, which hasn't been worn since early March, put it on, prepared as I set off in a grey morning, it's not raining yet.

It rained heavily down in vertical leaks throughout the walk under umbrellas, but it was refreshing to be out. A charming Serbian girl takes me in under her umbrella so I don't get wet.

In the afternoon I'm determined to get across to the bike shop, rain or not. By four o'clock the rain has stopped and checking my street-map for the best route over there, set off with the bike. Much of the direct route is one-way traffic coming this way, so I wheel the bike along the pavement through the malaise of rush-hour pedestrians, until coming to two-way traffic where I can ride, whereupon the rain begins drizzling down, but it soon eases as I ride over the concrete communist era bridge. Coming off the other side I turn right upon a path to the side of a wide road with green riverbank park on the inside and a short way on, stop at a bus-stop and ask a young man is this the right way to Hotel Yugoslavia. He says yes, continue straight on.

The path continues rough broken concrete and there are small lake-sized puddles which I ride on muddy grass around.

When I get there, Planet Bike is obvious, taking up the full side of a block. Outside a doorway to the side of the long glass front display of bikes, two men that look like bike-mechanics sit smoking.

I wheel the bike through the side door into a workshop and ask one of the men that have come back inside, does he speak English. He replies a little and I explain simply that the bottom-bracket needs changing. "Change. You want done now" He says. It seem a quiet time of day, there's only a mountain bike in one bike-stand, newly serviced and two cardboard bike boxes from new bikes delivered and assembled earlier. So he lifts my bike and clamps it in another bike-stand and begins un-screwing the left-hand crank-arm.

Later when the job is done, I find there's a bike-path back on the riverside of the park.

Thursday sees a halo of sunshine in grey sky, and although the cloud cover doesn't give, it is an altogether brighter day without rain. Then Friday is gloriously sunny with fleecy broken cloud.

I washed the bike using the hosepipe in the garden. The receptionist gives me a sponge from the cleaning cupboard and I use washing up liquid from the kitchen. I adjust the brakes, oil the chain and return to Planet Bike and buy a Continental touring tyre and outside the shop, replace the worn rear tyre for it. So tomorrow I'm ready to get back on the road.

Republic Square. The man on the horse united Serbia in the nineteenth century when the Turks finally when home.

The national bird, called Vrabac, a kind of Swallow.

Not the original walls, but The Romans first settled here and build the original which were white. Then Slavic people came and were so impressed by the white castle, they gave it its present name Beograd in Serbian, the white city. Over the centuries the walls have been rebuilt and added to as the city is strategically located at the crossroads of the Balkans and central European plain and therefore has seen many wars. Belgrade was the first city to see hostilities at the outbreak of World War One, when Austro-Hungarian gun boats sailed down the Danube in July 1914 and bombarded the city. Retribution for the assassination of Fran Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo a mouth earlier.

Looking across at the modern city built during Tito's time, which some call Socialistic architecture, or even Brutilistic.

The original bridge here was built in the 1930s. but in 1940 the Serbian army blew it up to stall the advance of the German army and their Croat allies. However the Nazis soon took the city and built an iron-girder bridge to the right of this shot, which is still in use today.

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