It’s almost like we planned it (which I can’t say we consciously did), but after our 400km bike packing trip, we had a week in one place. The first time since we’d left the UK, we’d be in the same place for more than 3 nights. We’d be staying at a place called ‘Mokrin House’ (more on who they are and what they do soon), doing a work exchange (again, details to follow).
First, however, we had to get there. We left Skopje early morning and got two buses, totalling 8 hours, to Belgrade. Like all good bus journeys, it was largely uneventful (apart from scrabbling to find 100 denar to pay for the toilet at the bus transfer station). We were only staying for a night this time (we’d be staying for longer at the end of our time in Serbia), and to say it was overwhelming was an understatement. It was about 6 p.m. and 30c (I’m not going to transfer to Fahrenheit for anyone using that system but hot), rush hour and therefore noisy. Our Airbnb was functional, albeit due to some creative photography, what looked like two rooms turned out to be a studio, and central. We found a nearby vegan/veggie restaurant called ‘Mayka’ and had burgers - something I’d been craving for days at that point - and an interesting pint of a beer called ‘Bip’ which was served with ice and a straw. We shared a brownie and left content,t nd returned to our Airbnb to watch ‘Catfish’. Not necessarily by choice, it was the only channel that seemed to work. An early night before another, albeit shorter, bus to Kikinda in the north of Serbia the next morning.
Another thankfully uneventful bus ride later, we were in Kikinda and met someone from Mokrin House, where we would stay for the next week. Mokrin House is a very cool and interesting place. It was started initially as a shared working space in rural Serbia to allow professionals to come and work on projects in a peaceful environment without distraction. There’s a kitchen and restaurant on site, laundry, a pool (which was being refurbished when we were there) and a team of incredibly helpful staff on hand to allow for these professionals and creatives to focus on their work. But why were we there? Well, they also have a small farm about 400m down the road from which they use a lot of the produce in the kitchen and sell the rest. We were there to help Dragan (the farmer) look after the farm. The deal was we would do about 4 hours work in the morning, starting at 7:30, breaking for breakfast at 8:30, starting up again around 9:00 and finishing at 12:00 -12:30 before lunch at 13:00. The day (a Thursday) we arrived they told us to settle in, unpack (the first time we’d fully unpacked for 6 weeks at that point) and relax. We’d start in the morning.
Morning rolls around, we do our allotted time and we’re told by Dragan - who kept claiming to not speak good English but understood when Elen made an ‘Only Fools and Horses’ reference so make of that what you will - that we didn’t need to work again until Monday as it was the weekend. Only 4 hours of work and we’d earned 2 days off. So, the next day we got a local taxi to Kikinda. When I say local taxi, I mean a local man in his ‘03 Renault Espace, who essentially would get as many people into his car from the village of Mokrin and drive us into Kikinda. We weren’t told this before booking, so when we stopped twice and picked up 2 very confused-looking locals as to why there were 2 British strangers in the car, it came as a surprise. The driver even gave us sweets! Well, more like a cough sweet in the ilk of a “Fisherman’s Friend” but still.
Kikinda wasn’t somewhere on our list before arriving in northern Serbia. It’s a fairly small town that is a little off the beaten track, but it turned out to be a very lovely surprise! We’d asked people at Mokrin House for suggestions, so we started at a coffee bar on the main street. We’d found out that they’d pedestrianised the city centre (much to a Serbian Alan Partridge’s dismay, I’m sure), which meant an ideal spot for some people watching. The schools had just broken up for the summer, er so the main drag was teaming with teenagers enjoying their first day of freedom. A few younger children out with their parents for an ice cream, and my personal favourite was a dad with two young daughters, both of whom were singing (bellowing?) into cardboard tubes as microphones. His face had the look of a man who knew he had a long, noisy summer ahead of him. We then started a tour of Kikinda which included a visit to the museum and their main attraction of a mamouth skeleton found in the early 90s which they’d named ‘Kika’ (the ‘Mamoth film’ was the real highlight), walking along the 15th most beautiful street in the world, visiting the city lake and viewing the terracota statues dotted around the city. We finished the night with food and drinks before meeting our normal taxi driver for a ride home.
The following few days saw us getting into our routine on the farm. Our farm work consisted of a mixture of pruning tomatoes in the greenhouse tent, planting peppers, ploughing (which I took to so well that Dragan called me a horse - which he clarified was a friendly joke), creating an irigation system and helping measure out wire for what would become a second greenhouse tent. It wasn’t the most strenuous work if truth be told - barring the heat - but it felt nice to do something that someone else had asked us to do. After a month and a half of travel at that point, having people make decisions on things like what to do and what to eat was a nice change of pace. Being outdoors and spending time with the two small dogs and the goat during our breaks was also welcomed.
A few days later, we were off on our travels again. A shortish journey of about 2 hours, and we arrived in Novi Sad. Most of the staff at Mokrin House spoke highly of the city, more so than Belgrade, so we were excited! Novi Sad felt like a small Mediterranean city with small bars, nice cafes and pastel coloured architecture. We’d hoped to do a free walking tour, but it seemed like no one turned up to do the tour, so instead we went to a few bars, and accidentally crashed an art gallery opening, much to the confused looks of many Serbian art critics’ faces.
Day 2 we’d dubbed ‘coffee, culture and craft (beer) day’. The plan was to loosely follow an app called ‘Street Art’ (no prizes for guessing what that one does), we’d found and visit coffee shops, museums and galleries and craft beer places along the way. The app had various murals and graffiti (some of which are pictured below) that we visited in conjunction with coffee shops and beer locations. It was nice to have a loose plan that was easy to adapt as we spotted things or decided we wanted to go into certain museums along the way.
A fascinating part of the day was when Novak Djokovic was playing in the French Open. I’d recently read David Byrne’s book “Bicycle Diaries” where he described the hush that came over Buenos Aires when Argentina are playing football, and whilst it wasn’t that extreme, all the bars had the match on and everyone in said bars was at very least keeping one eye on it. We’re lucky in the UK to have so many huge international sports stars across so many sports that it takes a fairly huge event for everyone to stop. We’d see several murals of Djokovic across the city, and he’s (as far as I’m aware) the most internationally known Serbian, so it can hardly be surprising. But again, when was the last time everyone from the bar staff in their early 20s to an elderly man on his 8th rollie in the 45 minutes we were in the bar was captivated by a tennis match in the UK? The day ended with a trip to a night market to sample more craft beer and some local food.
The following day was our visit to the fortress. This included a tour of the tunnels under the fortress (which was unintentionally a private tour as no one else had booked on), having to explain that we didn’t have cash and we’d need to come back later when we ordered a drink and most excitingly, a Reisling Wine festival. The premise was simple: you pay 200 denar to enter and another 50 denar deposit for the glass, and you could walk around having as many free samples as you wanted. It was probably one of the most glamorous moments on our trip. Essentially free wine, a gorgeous sunset over the Danube and lots of very glamorous people. We made friends with a Russian couple (one of whom was a wine blogger, which led to some interesting conversations about what they described as ‘most Russians’ feelings on the current regime, which was largely unfavourable. Serbia is one of the only countries that doesn’t require Russians to have visas for entry, and due to Russian and Serbian not being hugely dissimilar languages (and that one of the couple was a language teacher) meant it was straightforward to adapt to Serbian life. We ended the night with dinner and some more wine before heading off to our Airbnb.
Our next stop was Belgrade on the high-speed train. A large topic of conversation in our time in Serbia was some ongoing protests around government corruption and particularly their role in a collapsed train station roof in Novi Sad at the end of 2024 that left 16 people dead. We’d learn more about the protests in Belgrade, but what we hadn’t learnt (either from ourselves or people, not mentioning it) was that the entire station in Novi Sad was out of use. That meant hot footing it to the other station on the other side of the city to catch our train. We arrived in time and on a thankfully air-conditioned train to Belgrade. This delay in leaving meant we had a quick turnaround before our first activity in the city. A quick taxi driver for the Serbian equivalent of a ‘leave means leave’ taxi driver and checking in, we started our ‘Underground Secrets of Belgrade’ walking tour. We’ve done a fair few walking tours on this trip, and I’d say this was the most middling. It wasn’t super engaging, and unlike in Frankfurt, the guide didn’t seem to hate the city. We visited an underground well, a Cold War bunker, an old gunpowder store and an old wine cellar. We were gifted with some free wine before we headed for food and an early night in watching something on my laptop.
I can’t say either of us fell in love with Belgrade. We tried. We did. But it seemed like every time we saw or did something good, another irritation would occur. For example, the next day we rented e-bikes to cycle to a viewpoint about 16km out of town. Fun. Apart from when Elen’s gears weren’t changing properly, which made the hilly journey out more difficult. Similarly, once they’d started cooperating on the way back to the city, we arrived during rush hour, where all semblance of courtesy from other road users seemed to go out the window. We did end up on the pavement - with some angry looks and what I can imagine was swearing in Serbian - but that felt like a better choice than being run over. Our final activity for the day was a sunset kayak tour along the Danube. This was a fantastic way to end the day. A little tiring, sure, but such a unique way to see the city and sunset. Upon returning the bikes and mentioning the gears (mostly because he asked if there were any issues so he could fix them for the next rider), we were given a slight discount and three shots of rakija - all homemade by himself and his wife. The cherry was our favourite.
To continue our ongoing battle with Belgrade liking us or not, the next day we attempted to go to the Nikola Tesla museum, who, depending on who you ask, is the next most famous Serb. The contention comes from whether he was Serbian or Croatian. Something I couldn’t weigh in on even if I wanted to, as we couldn’t get into the museum as it was “full until 2 pm,” which was when we were booked onto a craft beer tour. Now, this tour was up there in terms of weird tours. Our guide arrived and said we were the only ones booked on, but he hadn’t mentioned this or tried to add more people, as he sometimes likes smaller tours. It started promisingly in terms of information about the city when he added some more depth to the ongoing protests, but quickly became strange when we arrived at the first pub. On similar tours we’d done, like the food tour in Sofia, we were given suggestions or something specific from a place. On this tour, we visited 4 pubs (all of which were fairly easy to find) and were told “get what you want” with little to no additional information when we asked for suggestions. Oh, and we appeared to be paying for his drinks and left a tip at the end. The guide was interesting on paper (an American who moved to Serbia to teach English and appeared to be well-travelled), but didn’t seem to elaborate or even engage in any of our stories and questions. This man has somehow managed to have a side hustle of visiting his favourite bars and having strangers pay for his drinks. Great work if you can get it.
Our final day in Belgrade saw us visiting some more galleries, enjoying some quiet time reading in the park and visiting th’Museum of Illusions’ before catching the overnight train to Bar in Montenegro. I’ll save that for the next update. We really tried to like Belgrade. Be it the fact that it was 30c plus the whole time or that it was the biggest and busiest city we’d been in for a while, but we just didn’t gel. We were looking forward to some quiet time by the sea in Montenegro.