Yugo diary Summer 2008 I - driving to Serbia

This will be the first in a series of blog entries discussing our trip to Serbia & Croatia this summer. And what a more fitting way to begin than the journey. It began with both of us desperately tired - circles under the eyes, just back from other travels - and some dread at the prospect of a 1400 km drive. We wanted to bring our Serbian dog home for a visit, and more selfishly wanted her with us, so driving was the only real option. We decided this time to drive via Vienna/Budapest rather than Zagreb. It is a six-in-one half-dozen-the-other kind of decision, but a change is as good as a rest, and what the hell. It was long, but easy enough to navigate. This last point gave me an interesting observation about borders and the former Yugoslavia.

The other two times that I drove to Serbia we did so via Croatia. Driving from Zagreb to Novi Sad is rather long (5 hours at least) and the terrain is a bit dull, unchanging. But one thing stands out: namely the absence, on the Croatian side, of any signs telling you what you are driving towards. There are dozens of signs for every major town/city on the way (e.g. Vukovar) in addition to every two-horse village seemingly, and one is always reminded where to turn in order to drive to Bosnia (BIH), but only 25 km from the border do you see the first (and I think only) sign that tells you that Belgrade, by the way, is also on this road. Throughout the journey I kept asking G. if she was sure this was the right way. Of course, any Serb who spent any time in Serbia in the last ten years knows that road signs are only a rough guide to directions, being more geographical, as-the-crow-flies indicators. During my first visits to Serbia, we were forever going in directions opposite to what signs said, usually because a bridge was still missing (having being destroyed by Nato in 1999). Typical driving instructions from a gas-station attendant would be "to get to Novi Sad you definitely don't drive towards Novi Sad, you follow signs for Ruma and then drive towards Zagreb".

But I digress. Almost no signs for Serbia on the road out of Croatia. Understandable, I guess, there are hard feelings there, and why remind people of the war? This made sense to me at first, and I then had the feeling that we were one of about ten cars in the past 15 years that had done this drive. I felt like a real pioneer. Leading the way towards reconciliation, etc. This overly proud feeling, however, evaporated when we reached the border. There were about a thousand trucks on each side, and we passed a queue several kilometers long. Surprisingly most of them seemed actually to be either Serb or Croat as opposed to transit of (say) Turkish or other trucks. Later, I was actually somewhat surprised to read that Serbia is Croatia's fourth or fifth largest trading partner, and the countries have a free-trade agreement. Understandably, then, the borders are completely clogged with goods traffic.

This gave me a kind of capitalist inspired feeling of confidence. It reminds me rather of all that is being said these days to justify trade with evil dictatorships with oil reserves. I heard, on the BBC, somebody from the state department last week saying that whether or not the US reopens an embassy in Tehran doesn't really depend on the Bellicose grumblings of the leaders, but more on the need for embassy operations, which are invariably mostly about trade. Germany makes similar noises now about Algeria; France about Libya. Now I'm not endorsing such things, but I do see the point that economic well being and the win-win situation that comes from the exchange of goods can do a great deal to cool political hot tempers.

Anyway, we'll drive this time back from Serbia to Croatia, and perhaps I can comment on the reverse trip, except that I can't as I just remembered that I won't be there. I have to fly to the UK, leaving from Belgrade flying back to Zagreb to meet G. and the dog. I wonder if the Croatian Airlines planes are re-painted JAT machines.