Will, Ben and Nevil

After a comfortable night discovering that Roshan snores in the Beograd Hostel we took a slow letsgetlost walk to the fort overlooking the confluence of Sava and Danube rivers. The dirty city traffic began to get to Emily’s lungs so we’ve decided to pursue some country air and get out via the sites.

On  my (Will’s) way back to get the van I ended up helping to push a nice Serbian lady’s fuelless car over the river Sava and into a petrol station. Alexandria gave me a very fast lift back to the van and I had an hour long battle into and out of Beograd via the Orthodox cathedral and several bombed-out buildings. The cathedral is massive and can be seen when driving into the city, what we hadn’t realised is that it is still being built! The inside is pretty much bare concrete and there was a guy with a pneumatic drill amending the shape of altar!

Roshan was surprised to hear that not only was there no shower fitted in the van but also that we didn’t have a drying rack, an in-house cleaner or a shoe rack (no jokes). Those following our blog who saw Roshan in London before he left will be glad to hear that his mat has been of great use and VITAL importance to our trip.

Not only has Roshan been moaning about our levels of cleanliness in the van (i.e. it’s not spotless), he has also been littering the Serbian countryside. Cleverly storing his supposedly smelly shoes (they’re nothing compared to Will’s) on the roof we then drove the next day onwards to the Romanian border only to find the roof wasn’t the best place to store them after all. Moral: one shoe isn’t as useful as two!

It’s getting dark noticeably earlier and we were forced to stop short of the Danube and national park in a wood previously inhabited (presumably) by gypsies. They’d kindly left us a stack of nice dry logs for our fire, a couple of wood-fired kilns and a semi-civilised toilet in the woods. Rosh beat me (Ben) at chess, but he plays like a girl and will pay for it soon.