Eger, Hungary

Sun 17th - Tues 19th Aug

Three days in Eger, Hungary. The three worst days of this trip for me – or at least I hope it never gets any worse than this.

It wasn't Eger's fault. The city is lovely and I highly recommend it as a day trip if you're in Budapest. There's a great old town with lots of shops and great architecture, but the main reason why people visit Eger is for the wine tasting. Now I'd always been under the impression that Hungarian wine was crap. I visited Budapest a few years ago with some girl friends and we'd been warned by Charlotte that it was terrible. We ordered one bottle and none of us could finish a glass – it tasted like vinegar gone bad. Not to mention that me sending back a glass of anything resembling wine is definitely a bad sign, because I'll drink just about anything.

Tourists exploring Eger's old town

But I was pleasantly surprised – there were quite a few good wineries here in Eger. Still a few that were terrible but the experience itself is well worth a visit. The wine region is a short 15 minute walk from the centre of town in a small valley where you walk from cellar to cellar sampling the wines for free. Even better – it's really cheap and there is NOTHING snooty about it. If you decide you'd like to buy a bottle of wine, you can either buy one of their glass bottles for around ₤5, or bring your own empty plastic 1.5 L water bottle and they'll fill it on the spot for around ₤2! We walked away with 7 litres of wine for a grand total of ₤10!

But instead of sipping on a glass of wine watching the sun set, I'm sitting here on pain killers with a lip swollen so large that it could easily be assumed that I've just had some dodgy collagen work done.

It all started on Sunday night. Bevan had a bad case of the squirts and we were both giggling, trying to figure out what may have caused it. Every few minutes we had to stop the movie while he dashed to the toilets in a limping 'so I don't soil my pants' sort of waddle.

The next morning I awoke with the same problem but assumed it was fairly minor so we ventured into town on our bikes. Big mistake... clearly I had eaten quite a bit more of the offending food item than Bevan (which I reckon was a dozen bad eggs from Tesco).

Feeling very sick. Big thanks to Bevan for documenting the experience!!

Two very important lessons I've learned over the past 2 days:

If you've ever had food poisoning than you'll know that it attacks on both fronts and you're forced to make some very risky decisions as to which end is going to take priority. Go for the seated position first, and you could wind up spraying the toilet door with your breakfast. Go for the 'praying to the porcelain god' position first and you could end up with very uncomfortable trousers. Personally, I've learned it's always wisest to go for the seated position first because you can always walk away fairly unsoiled, despite whatever disastrous mess you may leave behind.

Thank god for McDonald's toilets. If you ever find yourself on holiday with a bad case of the runs or food poisoning, your first port of call is to find a McDonald's or Starbucks with a good toilet. Nowadays most of them will require a code to open the door, which can be found at the bottom of your sales receipt. Buy yourself a Coca-Cola in the morning and memorise that code. You don't want to be digging for receipts when timing is critical, and just make sure you're always within a 10 minute dash of your chosen toilet(s).

I managed another hour of sight-seeing and dashing to various toilets before the big storm hit. After a final 30 embarrassing and acrobatic minutes at McDonald's, I somehow dragged my bike back to the camp site while Bevan cycled off in search of more toilet paper. The next 12 hours were spent lying in the back of the van, running across the camp site to the toilets, or lying next to the toilets in the grass when it was flowing too frequently to be outside of a 3 metre dash. It was the worst food poisoning of my life and all of my fellow female campers got to share in the entire experience thanks to the communal toilets.

Lying in the grass outside the camp site toilets

Tuesday morning I awoke with a much milder tummy ache and even managed a short walk around the city centre before lunch, with only one dash to McDonald's (warning - they change the code on a daily basis!). I had a long 2 hour nap and awoke feeling like a new woman – a new woman with a HUGE appetite. Just as I was wolfing down the last of the most delicious cheese sandwich and my first meal in 32 hours, I took a large swig of ice tea and felt something tickling inside my mouth. Was that a bug in my drink? Then suddenly searing pain as if someone had taken a lit cigarette and put it out on the inside of my lip. I screamed spraying ice tea all over the grass, reached into my mouth and threw a wriggling wasp onto the ground. Bevan just sat there staring at me as if he was watching a horror flick unfold before him.

Swelling from the wasp sting inside my upper lip

Tears spilling out of my eyes, I didn't know what else to do except hop around in a wild dance screaming that I'd been stung by f*$%#ing wasp. Bevan rushed me off to the toilets and I stood there crying with my top lip under the cold water tap as fellow toilet goers wondered 'what on earth could be wrong with that whining American this time'. (By the way, I highly recommend the cold water tap trick if you ever find yourself in a similar 'mouth on fire' situation.)

Me - 24 hours after the wasp sting

Since lunch time, I've rubbed Nurofen chewables on my gums and lips to ease the pain a bit but it's been nearly 5 hours and I still look like Lisa Rinna.

Lisa Rinna

Maramures, Romania

Thur 14th – Sat 16th Aug

I've heard such wonderful and terrible things about Romania. Most of the reviews have been terrible, including some fellow campervaners in Bulgaria who gladly threw their Romania road map at us yelling, “Keep it! We're never going back there again!”

We must have taken a different route because after the Black Sea, Transylvania and now Maramures, I still love Romania.

Pottery outside Maramures Village

Anyone who has travelled to Romania and missed Maramures... well you must plan to come back soon. Visting this small region is like stepping back into Medieval times where locals still live off the land in small wooden villages. Surrounded by mountains with very few roads, this small region has been literally cut off from the rest of the world. The women still wear traditional costume and nearly every home you pass is made of beautiful dark wood with large decoratively carved gates. As we trundled down the end of the mountain pass, it was immediately obvious that we had reached our destination, and Bevan and I swapped seats so he could snap photos outside the window while I drove towards the main town.

Haystacks in Maramures

The main tourist attraction in Maramures isn't a particular site, but instead just driving through the area. We stopped at the Maramures Village Museum which was basically a huge replica of the surrounding villages completely empty of tourists. We wandered through a deserted village as if we'd stepped into the Wild West ghost town of Eastern Europe and Bevan went a little crazy with the camera. It was incredible.

Wooden church in Maramures Village

But not only is Maramures home to the last Medieval lifestyle in Europe, it's also home to one of my University's most famous professors, Elie Wiesel. Professor Wiesel is a bit of a national hero in these parts, and his home in Sighet has been transformed into a Jewish Heritage Museum. In 1986 he won the Nobel Peace Prize, and he's best known for coining the term “Holocaust”, although he wishes he had never used the word as it overly simplifies the atrocities that occurred during this time.

During World War II, Professor Wiesel and his family were captured by the Nazis and shipped off to Auschwitz, where he lost his mother, father and sister. He and two sisters survived until the Russians liberated the death camp in 1945 but he refused to return to Romania after so much heartache. Instead he moved to Paris where he became a famous journalist covering injustices of human rights until his friends finally encouraged him to write about his experiences. Professor Wiesel became one of the first people to write such a vivid first-hand description of what had happened at Auschwitz. His book Night is an incredibly moving story that details his capture in Romania through to the liberation from the concentration camps. I read it in University , and again on this trip. I will never forget it.

Wiesel at Buchenwald Concentration Camp, second row and seventh from the left.

It was an honour to visit his home, and they've done an incredible job of explaining the dark history of what happened to the Jewish community in this region.

Elie Wiesel's home in Sighet

Our day ended on a slightly less sobering note, as our camp site was located just 2km up the road from the famous “Merry Cemetery”. The name says it all, and I only wish the rest of us could take such a positive outlook towards remembering our loved ones. Instead of dark, morose gravestones, this cemetery has bright blue wooden crosses with carved pictures of an important, funny or memorable moment in the deceased's life. It's all in Romanian so we didn't understand much but the pictures and giggles from the locals pretty much said it all.

The Merry Cemetary in Săpânţa, Romania

View Maramures Photo Album

Transylvania, Romania

Sat 9th – Thurs 14th Aug

Every morning I wake up with more and more bug bites, but this morning I was particularly worried when I found two bites on my neck. That whole Dracula thing is just fiction, right?

Well the neck biting and blood sucking part is myth, but I was terrified to find out that the character of Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel was based on an actual person, hence the thousands of fans who flock to his home town and castle here in Transylvania every year.

Bevan spots his first vampire

The story goes that his real name was Vlad Tepes, but he was known as Vlad the Impaler and Vlad Dracula. Let's just say that Vlad had a rather twisted imagination when it came to killing his prisoners. He liked to impale them on a wooden stake, making sure to miss any vital nerves so that they stayed alive for days. He then displayed them publicly to frighten his enemies and they estimate that he killed between 40,000 and 100,000 people this way. Now we know where Bram Stoker got the idea for killing vampires by driving a wooden stake through their heart.

The Dracula nickname came from Vlad's father who ruled Wallachia in Southern Romania. The Wallachian emblem was a dragon (drac in Romania), and Dracula means “son of the dragon”.

Dracula's birth place is the yellow building. Not so scary, is it?

Despite the mosquitoes who go for your neck, I've been pleasantly surprised with Transylvania. The scenery is incredible and lives up to it's folklore notoriety. Steep wooded mountains with ancient castle towers looming in the distance, all of which could easily pass as the home of a vampire. Even the tennis courts in Brasov had that eerie Transylvania architecture that conjures up images of haunted houses and werewolves. But instead of being shrouded in mist we've found nothing but vivid blue skies and sunshine.

Tennis courts in Brasov

You'd expect that visiting the towns around here would mean hundreds of tourist shops filled with Dracula and vampire memorabilia but interestingly the people of Transylvania don't seem to be hyping his notoriety as much as you might expect. You'll see more of him on the internet than you do here in his birth place, Sighisoara, but I hear they're building a Dracula Land theme park so that could all change very soon.

Camp site in Brasov

Instead, a visit to Transylvania means exploring beautiful Hapsburg style villages with colourful facades and driving past farmers in traditional Romanian dress trying to keep their sheep and goats out of the road. The place should be the setting for a fairytale rather than one of the most haunting legends.

Entrance to Sighisoara -- Birth place of Dracula

So despite the bats flying overhead as I write this, I'm fairly confident that I can sleep soundly in the van tonight. (After all we do have garlic in the cupboard.)

Tourists exploring Brasov. Check out that 'stache!

View Transylvania Photo Album

Black Sea, Romania

Tues 5th - Thurs 7th August

Bevan's tapping his foot and I'm dancing in my chair while Romania's hottest pop singers echo throughout the camp site. The holiday spirit here is infectious and I can't help wanting to jump up, gather my camp site neighbours into a circle and start dancing. (Or is that the 3rd beer that's talking??)

Regardless of my intoxication level, I've decided that I love Romania. And here's why:

The smaller your Speedo, the sexier the barbeque
It appears to be completely socially acceptable and even encouraged for men to barbecue in Speedos. T-shirts are optional but why wear extra clothes if you have to slave over a hot fire? Smoking a cigarette and swaying to the music while flipping the sausages is even hotter.

Romania is a CD hospice. All of your favourite one hit wonders come here to die.
Ace of Base, Huey Lewis and the News, and Vanilla Ice are still cool and belt out over the beach side speakers. I feel so young and hip!!

Neptun beach's Dino Expo is hot this season

Body shape is irrelevant. Everyone is allowed to wear a bikini.
I love that I can walk out to the beach without a single ounce of self conciousness. The women here fully embrace their beauty, no matter what their size or age. Wearing a thong swimsuit appears to be a symbol of feminity and it doesn't matter what age you are - just go for it. I'm not kidding. I've seen 2-years olds and 90-year olds crawling across the beach with their cracks on display, tanning it up. And best of all... none of the men are ogling.

Just do it. There's no shame.
Can't swim? No worries! Just strap some of those orange floaty inflatable wings to your arms and enjoy the waves. It doesn't matter if you're a 120kg man and 50 years old. No one gives a sh*t so just have a blast.

Love thy neighbour as thyself.
And get bloody used to them because you're going to have no privacy while you're on holiday. Just smile, wave and crank the music loud enough so that your neighbour can enjoy it as well.

Not much room for privacy at Romania's trendiest camp sites

Go ahead and look if you're curious.
Wondering why these white people speaking with funny accents are living in a purple van? Don't be shy - just take a good long stare and say a prayer that they finally find a proper home some day.

Worried about tan lines? Do the sensible thing.
How many times have you laid out on your back or tummy only to have your sides still completely white? Why on earth wouldn't you just stand up with your arms in the air and slowly spin like a rotisserie chicken?

Romania just makes sense.

Black Sea, Bulgaria

Sun 3rd – Mon 4th Aug

One of my main reasons for going on this trip was because I wanted to see Eastern Europe before there was a Starbucks on every street corner. Man... I would give anything for a Caramel Frappuccino with extra whip cream right now. Actually I take that back. I'd give anything just to use a Starbucks toilet right now.

BEFORE

Bevan after hours of trying to find a camp site along the Black Sea

AFTER

Bevan after a €1 pint of beer at the camp site (and before seeing the toilets)

Yowsers, I've been complaining a bit lately, haven't I? Let me set the record straight. Bulgaria is amazing but camping in Bulgaria, especially during the height of tourist season, is not so great. If I could hit a do-over button, I'd be driving around Eastern Europe in a car with better suspension, responsive power steering, and checking into 4-star hotels every night. Which thanks to how cheap everything is here, it's pretty feasible for anyone planning to visit for a few weeks.

Unfortunately since our money has to last for 6 months, we're saving anywhere we can and living in a very old van. Now back to my bitching.

A few observations about Bulgaria:

Drink...drive...die.
The first time you get caught drinking & driving, they throw you in prison for a few years. The second time you get caught, they shoot you. I'm not kidding! The sentence is death by firing squad.

Don't pet the cuddly animals.
Most of the street dogs appear harmless and just follow you home, but run in terror from any large packs of dogs. A British woman was attacked and killed by a pack of street dogs in Sofia not too long ago.

Land is cheaper than chips.
We saw 3-4 bedroom homes on sale for €4,000 – 6,000 and signs offering land for €3 per square metre. I still can't figure out why we were paying €10 for a camp site when we could have bought a pitch next door for the same price.

Rubbing your tummy and patting your head is easier than conversing with the locals.
Nodding your head means “no” and shaking your head from side to side means “yes”. Sounds simple enough but it is bloody confusing in practice.

It's all Cyrillic to me.
Navigation is definitely getting easier for Western tourists as we saw a lot of road signs near tourist hot spots that had both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabet. But let's face it, when you're lost it's because you're no where near a tourist hot spot and desperately need a sign in English, or a map in Cyrillic.



There really is no camping in Bulgaria.
There are lots of little camping symbols on our map, but either the camp sites were not sign posted on the highway, or they've all been ripped out and replaced with 5-star hotels.

We missed nearly the entire Black Sea coast trying to find a camp site until we finally spotted a camping sign along a deserted stretch of highway. Strangely we had stumbled across a massive hidden camping city – the lone camping survivors in Bulgaria. Buried in the trees along an isolated beach were literally thousands of Bulgarians on holiday, staying in bungalows, cars, tents and wooden shacks. There were entire streets of temporary shops, restaurants and night clubs made out of fairground style trailers that all appeared to be hiding in the trees from fear of being discovered by property developers. It was a great location with everything you could ever want in the world, not to mention huge cans of beer for only €0.60 and amazing food.

My only complaint was the toilets. For some strange reason, throughout Bulgaria the shower hangs over the toilet as if you were on a boat, meaning the water sprays all over the bathroom, including the sink, the dirty floor, the toilet, and the toilet paper! Now imagine over 50 men and women using the same toilet for 24 hours and how dirty and smelly it gets. Now picture trying to shower in that same room that smells so much like piss & poo that you gag even when trying to breathe through your mouth. Now add the fact that the tap water is slightly brown and smells like sulphur. I didn't shower for 3 days because that felt cleaner than bathing in those toilets.

Rila Monastery, Bulgaria

Thurs 31st July – Fri 1st Aug
A gorgeous camp site, friendly people and a stunning monastery set just outside a little mountain village. I have a funny feeling that Rila will be the highlight of our trip through Bulgaria because I just don't see how it can get any better than this.

After the horrendous driving experience in Sofia, we almost cut Rila from the trip but I'm happy to report that Sofia was the exception. The driving was smooth sailing with barely a pot hole in sight. Tourist numbers have definitely dwindled and the camping here was cheap and well worth the value. Our camp site even had an outdoor restaurant set along a little stream that served incredible local dishes by waiters in traditional Bulgarian costumes.

Rila Monastery, Bulgaria

There seems to be quite a bit of hiking in the area as well and we would have stuck around for longer had it not been being slightly unnerved when we were followed by packs of street dogs. They seemed friendly enough but they did look really hungry.

Frescoes inside the monastery

View Rila Photo Album

Sofia, Bulgaria

Tues 29th – Wed 30th July

“Camping? This is Bulgaria! There is no camping in Bulgaria!”

-- Policeman's response when we asked for directions

Lonely Planet had warned us that camp sites in Bulgaria were few and far between and often very run down and scoady. But we were pouring through the cash and frankly really missed camping. Our friends, Adam and Davina had visited Sofia two years ago and through multiple texts to Australia, we had general directions of how to find the only camp site for 100 kilometres.

Adam... your gift from our trip will be a bloody compass!

I shouldn't give them a hard time, because chances are we'll be texting Adam and Davina for more help over the next few weeks. Thanks guys for your help, but there was one key word which threw us off – WEST. First we thought we'd missed the intersection and tried to turn around but ended up in road works hell for nearly an hour trying to get back to the outskirts of the city. A very, very long 2 hours later we had driven literally ½ of the town and Bevan's patience had run its course. Traffic, dusty roads, maniac drivers and potholes large enough to drive the front of the van into had taken their toll and he was no longer responsive to anything other than the words, “I think that's a hotel ahead. We can stop there!”

View of the massive pot holes on Sofia's ring road

As we pulled into the car park, my heart sank as the massive landscaped gardens and enormous villas tucked behind the large casino came into view. There was no way we'd be able to afford this hotel, which meant another gruelling trip further up the ring road.

Only €57 per night for 4-star accommodation! Normally Bevan waits in the van while I run to reception to ask our list of questions and get a price for the night, but there was no need to confer. I walked out holding a key, a smile on my face and the relief in Bevan's eyes nearly poured out in tears.

That night we sat on comfy white lounge chairs next to the pool with cascading waterfalls, drinking ½ litres of beer for €1.50 and I secretly hoped that the van would break down again.

Fountain in Sofia's city park

But our transport adventure wasn't over yet. There was no way in hell Bevan was going to drive back into town, so the next morning we started walking to the bus stop. Either we missed the bus stop, or this part of the world has some very serious depth perception issues. Once again, a promised 500 metre walk turned into over 5km. We were on the bus for literally 7-8 minutes before it terminated well outside the range of our Lonely Planet map and we were on foot once again. After 1.5 hours of walking (yes – I actually do time these things!) we finally stumbled across Sofia's greatest pride – the Cathedral.

Watch out! Even the sidewalk has pot holes!

Now we've seen a lot of cathedrals on this trip and frankly I was starting to tire of them. It's unfortunate when you've been travelling so long that some of the most majestic churches in Europe just all start to look the same but it's a classic backpacking complaint. Sofia's cathedral will stand out in my memory because it was not only amazing, but it was so different from anything we'd seen in Western Europe. This cathedral summed up the reason why we'd driven so far to see Eastern Europe.

Sofia's pride: the cathedral

View Sofia photo album

Niš, Serbia

Tues 29th – Wed 30th July

Serbia was never really part of our initial plan as a place to visit, but with our fear of driving in Albania and the travel warnings for Kosovo, we didn't have much choice except to head east. Unfortunately most of the tourist spots are further north near Belgrade so our visit to Serbia was more of a breeze through the countryside until we finally reached Niš just outside the border with Bulgaria.

What little we saw of this country was pretty fascinating and unexpected. The border crossing took a little longer than others, and I was careful to hand over my Irish passport instead of my US one. I doubt it would have made much difference nowadays but anything to make border crossings a little smoother is a good thing in my book. The countryside was a mixture of modern homes, horse-drawn carts, crazy drivers, large sprawling farms, nuclear power plants and little old ladies pushing wheel barrows in the blistering sun.

Nuclear power plant along a Serbian highway

When we finally reached Nis it was again a drama to find a non-existent camp site so we opted for another hotel on the side of the highway. Strangely, I'm really starting to miss living in the van. Although the hotels are cheap at around €40/ night, they're straight out of 1973 and you can't help feeling like you're stuck in a cigarette smoke filled time warp.

Promotional photos for Hotel Nais. This must have been taken back in its glory days before the paint started to peel. But it was very cheap!!

The next morning we drove to the outskirts of Niš to visit Skull Tower, a pile of over 900 skulls built by the Turks in the 19th century as a warning to Serbian rebels. Although I obviously don't agree at all with the Serbian antics during the Balkan War, it did give some insight into why there is so much ethnic hatred and tension running through these countries. According to our tour guide, Serbs were categorised as 2nd class citizens unless they converted to Islam. Fed up with centuries of paying higher taxes and being persecuted for their Christian beliefs, thousands of Serbian rebels rose up against the Turkish Empire in the early 19th century. After some heroic battles, the Serbs failed to expel the Turks, leaving the Turks to build this monument of skulls collected during the battles as a warnful reminder against future uprisings. It's a highly gruesome memorial, and many skulls still bear the scars of war such as bullet holes and sword slashes.

Skulls cemented into Skull Tower. There used to be over 900 Serbian rebel skulls on the tower, but now only 58 skulls remain due to vandalism and souvenir hunters.

Exhausted from so much driving lately, we left Nis around 10:30am and decided to move on to Sofia with hopes of a relaxing lunch at a camp site. What ensued was one of the most hellish days of driving and our broken, starving asses checking into a 4-star hotel after 7pm that evening.

Serbian woman along the motorway

View Serbia photo album

Durmitor National Park, Montenegro

Sat 26th – Sun 27th July

Wild Beauty is the tourism slogan for Montenegro. All of the TV advertisements and local posters describe the country as being filled with majestic beauty... it's just a little wild. But rather than showing you images of horse back riding through the forests or sailing along the coast, what they should really show you are the mazes of unmarked roads, monstrous pot holes, and scowling waitresses.

Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh. Montenegro was an adventure I'll never forget and I would certainly never want to exclude the experience from our trip. The countryside itself is well worth a visit and for the most part, the people are really lovely. But we did run into a few rough patches.

Winding road through Durmitor National Park

Most of the main roads in Montenegro are in good shape, it's just trying to detour off the tourist beaten path that can create a problem. I wanted to see the Ostrog Monastery, so we took a slightly less travelled route from the coast to Durmitor National Park. Turns out that the road to Ostrog hugs a rather steep and vertically challenging cliff face with barely enough room for 2 cars to pass, much less a huge purple camper van. Fortunately we could see the road from the main village and I chickened out pretty much straight away. It just didn't seem worth dying for and there were plenty of post cards in the neighbouring shops to get the general idea of what it looked like. So we had driven nearly 2 hours out of our way for... nothing. God bless Bevan and his patience.

But my chickening out would haunt us for the rest of the day and we ended up on a tiny, pot hole road from hell that snaked through the mountains. It wasn't just the road, but the goats, cows and oncoming local traffic darting in front of the van which made the next 4 hours a white knuckle terrorising experience.

A minefield of potholes behind the van

We finally arrived in Žabljak late that evening and the next day it was all worth the effort as we found a gorgeous 5 hour hike to two of the most famous lakes, then made our way to a local pub to relax. Enter the nasty waitress. Now I don't speak Serbian, but I am going to pat myself on the back for at least learning how to say “Do you speak English?” and how to order 2 beers in a language I have literally never been exposed to before this trip and can't imagine that I'll encounter again after moving back to the states. Despite our language efforts, this waitress HATED us. You could never really tell if you'd ordered a beer or if you were just invisible. When the beers finally did turn up, there was ½ pint of foam on top but strangely none of the locals seemed to be going as thirsty. I'd like to chalk it up to a waitress just having a bad day, but sadly we encountered this attitude quite a bit in Durmitor.

We also learned that Montenegrins have an outstanding sense of direction because they don't need any road signs, GPS mapping or even paper maps! Aside from the black lake, the next must-see in Durmitor is Tara Canyon but sadly after 8 hours of searching we were never able to locate it. The Tourist Information Centre made it sound so simple, so we attempted to drive there in the van. After nearly 1.5 hours of trying various 4-wheel drive roads, we decided to drive back to Tourist Information to buy a map, but there were only large photo books about the National Park. So we decided to hire a taxi who would know how to get there. Unfortunately all of the taxis were already gone for the day, so we tried to hire a car. There were no ½ day rates available so the shop lady suggested that we hike the short 6km to the canyon. Six kilometres?? Turns out we'd been driving down the wrong road the entire time. She wrote the directions on to a tiny yellow post-it note, “Stay on main road. No turn left or right.”

Bevan standing at one of the many crossroads along our hike. All signs to Tara Canyon were in Serbian so we didn't stand much of a chance.

Two miles into the hike, it started to drizzle and we encountered a cross roads that was completely indecipherable as to which was the main road. We must have chosen incorrectly because 8 miles later, we finally turned around in the deserted forrest and gave up. It was 4:00pm and we'd accomplished nothing except drenching our clothing. We retired to our tiny 70's styled hotel room and proceeded to get very drunk.

Beautiful views on the road to Žabljak

View Durmitor National Park Photos