We are spending a lot of time in Novi Sad at the moment, for reasons that I won't get into here. As a consequence, I sometimes need to travel from Novi Sad to conferences, as I had to do yesterday when I traveled to Trieste. This is one of those funny distances (600km) that probably would be best to drive, but as I need to fly from Trieste to Germany, I couldn't take my own car; renting was impossible - no company seemed able to offer a pick-up in Serbia / drop-off in Italy option; the train options were insane: 19 hours and five changes; flying options were similarly crazy: 16 hours and two changes. The only thing left was the bus. We checked and yes, indeed, there are buses from Novi Sad to Trieste (every other day) and the journey is between 9 and 10 hours normally. How hard could it be? Coaches, at the best of times, are uncomfortable things, and they are worse when you are over 2 meters tall. The company said that the buses are pretty empty this time of year, so comfort wouldn't be a problem. Great, I thought. For a mere 50 Euros I got a ticket and arrived at the bus station in Novi Sad at 16.30; bottle of Knjaz Miloš and a couple of Viršle in pastry from the Pekara, I felt the right little Yugoslav Gastarbeiter.
Despite assurances to the contrary, the bus was stuffed to the gunnels - not one spare seat. Mixture of people of all ages, though no children at all. Everybody, and I do mean everybody smoked at every possible instant, though mercifully not on the bus. I'm not exaggerating either. Everybody. At one point I thought some older ladies who had, like me, sat on the bus to avoid the weather during one of the numerous pauza cigareta, were also not smoking, but in fact they too soon went outside for a fix. It's not that this surprises me particularly as most everybody smokes in Serbia, just not those in our circles, and I'm used to at least somebody not smoking in a crowd of nearly 50 people.
Anyway, the haze of smoke aside, the journey wasn't too bad. Bit uncomfortable, but endurable. It was very interesting to see the transition of people from the typical Balkan personalities to those of the subdued foreigners. In Serbia everybody was on their mobile phones and talking rather loudly, but by the time we did our first border crossings everybody got a whole lot quieter. Maybe it was just getting late, but I was pretty certain a timidness was creeping in to everybody's demeanor.
When we drive with a German car and EU passports across these borders we are very often just waved through without any check at all. The crossings yesterday, by stark contrast, were the longest I have every experienced. In a rather bizarre twist of Yugoslav fate, the only crossings needed are in the former Yugoslavia: first to Croatia and then from Croatia into Slovenia (and thus into the EU so none more required). Each crossing involved everybody getting off the bus twice (once to leave the old country and again to enter the new country), and twice we had to go with our luggage. We didn't stop at all in Croatia (not even to pee) which a fellow passenger told me was to help the border crossing out of Croatia being easier (i.e. to avoid questions). The border into Slovenia involved each bag being checked quite thoroughly and even a frisking of each person (or at least looking inside the coats). Nobody made any comments or complaints and I could see in peoples' faces as we waited this kind of nervousness and hope that everybody gets through lest we all have to wait for hours for one person to go through some kind of official rigmarole. The Slovenian woman doing the checks was ruder or at least brusquer than anybody I have had search me before, and I couldn't help but feel sorry for these people who are at the mercy of their former comrades for entry into a part of the world that essentially cannot exclude me. Not since I was travelling around eastern Europe in the mid 1980s did I experience border crossings like this. The journey time should have been six hours, but for these crossings it was nearly eleven hours.
My mother-in-law has made this journey (or at least one similar: Novi Sad to Heidelberg) about a dozen times to help us look after the kids. If anything, she prefers it to flying as at least she is in control of the ticket buying process (being savvy with neither internet bookings nor credit cards). Since yesterday I have a whole lot more respect for what she goes through each time.
