(written 9/4/2007)
(Continued from
Macedonia.)
Compared with entering our first non-EU country Macedonia, we had an easy time getting through the border this time around, at Zlatarevo. The car's wheels got a bit of a bath as they attempted to get some kind of pest or other killed by getting us to drive through a couple of puddles, but then we were on our way.
Straight away the place seemed much prettier - nice trees, and noticably less garbage around the place.
But the roads. Oh lord, the roads. Truly crappy crappy roads, constantly keeping you on the ball to deal with whatever the next corner may throw at you. We'd checked before leaving Sydney that our car insurance actually covered driving through these Eastern Bloc countries, and only two leasing companies out of the five or so would actually let you do it. That's not to do with the crime - it's the quality of the roads. No matter, we had a piece of paper saying we were fine, and it was someone else's car!
As we bumped further into the country, out of the blue we saw a tortoise crossing road. The locals must have thought us rather strange, as I pulled the car over and Liz ran back to put the poor thing off the road, just saving it from huge truck charging down through the pot holes. No doubt he would have ploughed through it, happy for something to fill in a hole and smooth out his journey a bit.
Not far into the south-west corner of the country, we drove to
Melink, known as a wine town. There's no pretentiousness here, with the wine being sold in plastic jugs and widely claimed by the locals to be "hangover free". That was enough of an enticement for us to pick it as a place to spend our first night in this new country.
The town has a little creek down the middle with (crappy) roads down either side, and the whole thing is set deep inside of high sand cliffs. There was a little bit of a feeling of touristyness about the place, but not much compared to where we had been only a week or so earlier.
To stay, we picked a funny little place from Lonely Planet with rickety stairs and by far the entire trip's worst bed, but the owner gave us wine to welcome us there, as we struggled with a bit of German (more him than us, actually) to work out rates and the complexities of keys and the like, in what was obviously his house.
The bar downstairs proved popular with the locals, perhaps more for lack of competition at this time of year in such a tiny town, but it was cosy enough.
We spent the evening sitting outside on veranda drinking wine and eating local food, listening to conversations all around us in different languages, before heading upstairs to brave the bed. The matteress was shaped like a V - everyone in the middle!
upstairs to rickety bed