Belgrade - Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro

Jump to the full
entry & travel map
Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro

The journey to Belgrade was to be my first experience of the overnight sleeper carriage and, as I sat there on the  cold platform in Budapest and watched the ancient-looking Beograd Express creak into view, a momentary wave of dread passed over me. Yet despite its inauspicious arrival, it was with great anticipation and excitement that I boarded the train, and as the attendant escorted me to my compartment he informed me I'd have the two-bed birth to myself. Though I'd been starved of company in Budapest, I was not unduly concerned by the continued solitude, as it was already approaching midnight and any potential conversation would quickly have been curtailed by the desire to sleep. The compact compartment had a cosy feel to it, with a bed that would be unsuitable for anyone taller than my 5'10 frame, a table and chair in one corner and a cleverly concealed sink in the other. It was also impeccably clean, and a goody bag of soaps, towels and refreshments had been left lovingly on the table. I collapsed into the chair and smiled contentedly - my previous train journeys had been fleeting affairs, but this was the romance of rail travel I had come in search of.
 
Though I was tired, I stayed up for a while in order to savour the experience; when I did finally retire to bed, the romance began to unravel. Under the hushed darkness of my bed-sheets, the carriage became like a furnace, and the hot air could neither be cooled nor turned off. I tried opening the window, but this only seemed to let in light and noise. My recumbent posture, meanwhile, seemed to absorb every twist and turn and brake of the train, yanking me unsubtly one way then the other like a favourite toy in the hands of an excitable child. After a restless few hours, a knock at my door drew me from my faux-slumber and signalled passport control. For a moment, as the imposingly-dressed Serbian border guard leafed suspiciously through my passport, I thought he was going to take issue with all my Arab visas. But, with a warm smile, he said simply "Welcome to Serbia", before disappearing to the next compartment. By the time the train arrived in Belgrade that morning, I had managed no more than a couple of hours sleep. Yet, the romance of the sleeper carriage would just about live on for now. 
 
                                                                    *
 
The walk to the hostel was a confusing one, as I was unable to match the street names that I'd scribbled down in my directions with the Cyrillic street names around me, and I owed my timely arrival to blind chance. Along the way, I passed by two bombed-out buildings, which lay like rotting carcasses of the war-ravaged Balkans of the 90s, and leant intrigue to an otherwise monochrome landscape of soulless office blocks and apartments. The hostel lay in the courtyard of just such an apartment block, and was similarly uninspiring. Inside, I found the receptionist asleep on the couch, strewn prostrate in the kind of drunken pose from which one rises with the surety of a hangover, his out-stretched arm suspended in rigour as if his last drunken action of reaching for the nearby ashtray had been frozen in time. Oh no, I thought, another bad hostel. Elsewhere there were no other signs of life, and I prepared myself for the probability of solitude in another capital. 
 
My exploration of the city that day was as frustrating as it was interesting, the Cyrillic signage perplexing me at every turn, yet punctuating my blind wanderings with serendipitous discovery. After several wrong turns I finally found myself in Republic Square, the focal point of Belgrade's pedestrianised city centre. As with much of the city, it seemed bereft of attractive architecture, the bland uniformity of the Communist era facades still clogging the cityscape like a dull sky on a drizzly day. Yet the streets were abuzz with local shoppers, vendors and eaters, and I could barely believe it was just a normal weekday morning, so vibrant was the scene. And the insipidity of the buildings, meanwhile, was more than compensated by the exotic beauty of Belgrade's women who flanked the sidewalks in improbable numbers, their dark, ethnically-mixed features launching me into involuntary bouts of lechery throughout the day.  


Further along, I came to Kalemegdan Citadel, the city's Celtic fortress. The grounds of the citadel revealed a delightful expanse of lawns, trees and walkways perched peacefully above the suburbs, but incongruously interspersed with scaled-down military memorabilia; and below lay a sweeping panorama of wintered forest through which the Sava and Danube rivers cut lazy zigzags before converging at the foot of the fortress. It was an unexpectedly bucolic scene, and for a while I sat contently amidst it, charmed by its easy silence, and spurred by the crispness in the air.
 
Back in the city, I found myself at a sports cafe where I harboured hopes of catching any of the Australian Open tennis semi-finals (three of the four involved Serbian players). I figured I'd grab a bite to eat, rest my limbs from the ludicrously hilly street-walking, and absorb some fervent, sporting patriotism all at once. Upon enquiring as to whether they might be showing such a match, the waiter replied simply, "I not know much of sport. I know only of women and money, my friend". How helpful, I thought, as I gazed around the sport-filled room to make sure I'd not stumbled into a brothel by mistake. I gave him the kind of laddish smile and pat on the back that such a comment craves then headed out for some street food instead.
 
Re-energised by pizza and burek, I headed down to the train station to buy my onward ticket for the next morning. Upon announcing my desire to travel on the Balkan Express to Sofia, the ticket lady gave me a rather disconcerting "are you sure?" look, but I persisted nonetheless. She quoted me a price and, realising how cheap the fare was going to be, I enquired as to whether there was a first class carriage. This time she shot me a wry smile that said "you'll be lucky if your carriage has wheels" before announcing in an embarrassed tone that there was no first class. While she processed my ticket, I enquired as to whether there was a dining car on the train, though by this stage I could have guessed the answer. Her wry smile had progressed to a barely contained snigger in response to the food question, and I felt it did not bode well for tomorrow's trip that the lady had found the concept of food or comfort so laughably at odds with whatever lay in stall for me on the Balkan Express. 
 

Back amid my blind wanderings, I took in a couple of churches and the parliament building before stumbling upon the Nicola Tesla museum. Now, my knowledge of Tesla (the real inventor of the radio who discovered, among other things, alternating current) had been shamefully minimal given the importance of his discoveries, and in fact derived almost exclusively from having watched the film 'The Prestige' in which Tesla is portrayed by a certain David Bowie (no really). The museum turned out to be an unexpected highlight, as it offered an interesting short biopic of Tesla, and an interactive array of his inventions made into simplified models for laymen like me. At the end of the tour, the guide gave each of the group an unattached fluorescent tube light and told us to hold it up in our hands while he switched on the Tesla machine (made famous in 'The Prestige'). Suddenly, crackling beams of electric lightening spewed forth from the top of the machine, like something from a sci-fi movie (or the opening credits of 'Quantum Leap'); then the bulbs in our hands began to glow by the power of our own bodies. It was all rather cool and, as I stood there waving my glowing fluorescent tube light in the air, I realised this was as close to a Star Wars light sabre fight as I was ever going to get.   
 
Back at the hostel that evening there were still no signs of backpacker life and, having spent my remaining local currency on food supplies for the train journey, I reluctantly decided to call it a night. As I reflected on my all-too-brief visit to Belgrade, I realised I would leave with mixed impressions. On the one hand, my appetite for grand old buildings had somewhat reached saturation, and so the city's fairly uninspiring and bleak architecture seemed insignificant in my overall assessment. What I had found most intriguing about Belgrade, though, was its vibrancy. Its streets - grey and lifeless at first glance - were in fact awash with people of all ages all out enjoying their city. It had had a carnival feel, yet I'd merely sampled a mid-winter's weekday like any other. And therein lay the frustration of my visit. Such vibrancy had hinted at the party atmosphere and nightlife scene for which Belgrade has become famous, but in my solitude I had failed to embrace it, and it too had failed to reach out to me. And so I would leave Serbia with tepid memories, but equally with the feeling that on another day I might just have had the craziest fun night of my trip. And that's enough to make me pencil into my imaginary diary a separate trip to the Balkans in the future.