In rural Serbia, there’s no such things as tarmacked roads.
These endless gravel tracks wove in and out of golden, grassy hills, splitting off into even more networks of tracks which stretched to sparsely inhabited villages.
When travelling North to South this journey should have only taken an hour or so, but we’d chosen to detour through the mountainous realms of West Serbia.
This was a world away from the brutalist concrete jungle of Belgrade and the metropolitan city of Novi Sad, a place where elderly folks would pause in their work to crack a smile and wave as we passed.
It was safe to say that tourists seldom wandered through these parts, nor did the younger generations of Serbs. Most of the villages lay partly or entirely abandoned; schools closed for good, shops boarded up and houses with roofs falling in lined the road. Only the old folks remained, too stubborn or too poor to move into the suburbs.
We could drive for miles between villages, tyres bumping down washboard roads surrounded by unspoilt views in every direction. These mountains were remote, uncared for in a country with such a rapidly declining population, and we were free to roam as we pleased.
In the Balkans it was never a case of where you were allowed, only whether you and your vehicle could make it there, and we settled in for the night halfway up a mountain track pitted with holes and bumps, deciding not to push our van any harder than we already had.
