“So the restaurant owner said 'he's drunk, but it's safe'” Kat tells me.

 

Eight hours ago, in a mad dash through Sarajevo, we managed to reach the bus station in the nick of time. It is now 4 am, and we've just arrived in Herceg Novi, Montenegro: we're back on the Adriatic coast, south of Croatia. Kat's sharper than me – in general, but especially right now at 4 am after an eight hour bus ride – so I waited with the bikes while she walked into the restaurant next to the bus station to ask where we might find a place to sleep at this hour. A friend of the restaurant owner's who'd been drinking there all night has a room available in the unused bottom floor of his house – ours for the rest of the night for 20 euro.

 

“Huh. Well, did you get a creepy vibe, or does it seem OK to you?” I ask.

“Kind of a creepy vibe, but at 4 in the morning, I always get a creepy vibe” she says. “I think it's probably OK.”

“Sure – cool. I trust your judgement.” I tell her. Like I said: Kat's sharper than me on normal occasions, and right now I'm much too tired to dream up any other options.

 

Our host walks out of the restaurant and calls a cab – instantly I get the sense that this man is harmless and friendly, though indeed rather drunk. We follow the cab a few km to his home, where he shows us inside.

 

The languags spoken in Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia are very similar, and I've managed to pick up a few key words, so I understand when he asks us if we're sisters.

 

“Ne – moj prijatel,” I try to tell him (No, she's my friend).

 

But my weak attempt to communicate is followed up by a whole bunch of nodding, winking, and kissing noises on the part of our host. I'm at a loss, and for an instant, I worry that he has no plans of heading upstairs to his own room for the night. But then,to my relief, he winks and chuckles his way right on out the door leaving us to our own devices.

 

“I think he thinks we're lesbians,” says Kat.

 

“What? Really?” Naive as always, I'm slower on the uptake with this one. But it makes sense - that's what all the winking and nudging was about.

 

“I think so,” says Kat. “What are the views on homosexuality here?” she asks.

 

I hesitate for a moment – only a week before, a Pride Parade caused riots in Belgrade, capital of Serbia – a country with close political ties to Montenegro. And even at home, I have gay friends who feel safer hiding their sexual orientation while travelling in Canada and the US. But, I think to myself, it seems that to this particular guy (homophobic or not), as potential lesbians, we are much more a fantasy than a threat.

 

“I don't really know” I say. “But I think this might be one of the few situations where it's an advantage that we're girls.”

Some of the fantastic Montenegro scenery

The grey sky matches the wet pavement, and a fine mist of rain hangs in the cold air. I can see a cemetery, a minaret spikes out above the trees that line the grounds. Mountains loom, slopes covered in houses, peaks shrouded by the October fog. The nearest house is riddled with bullet holes. I'm looking out the window of Bojan's apartment while Bojan and Amin comment to each other in Bosnian over the news. There's a lull in the conversation, and call to prayer floats in the window.

October 14^th, Sarajevo, Bosnia.

It's a rainy morning in Dubrovnik, Croatia when Kat (a friend from Vancouver who joined me in Zadar, Croatia for the ride to Istanbul) and I part ways with Steve. Steve's adventure is for bikes only, so when Kat and I board the bus to visit Sarajevo, Steve continues to ride south down the coast towards Greece. For me, Sarajevo has always been a must-see city on the itinerary, and we need to take a bus due to time constraints: Kat flies out of Istanbul on November 3.

When you visit Sarajevo, make sure you stop by GIR Bike Rental - that's where Amin works. You can rent a bike, have a coffee, and meet some great people there: we certainly did! We found Amin on www.warmshowers.org, which is essentially the same thing as couch surfer's, but strictly for bicycle tourists. Amin already had visitors, but he arranged hosting for us with his friend Bojan. That's how Kat and I came to enjoy a few laid-back days doing the typical weekend stuff: drinking beer, hanging out, and even watching TV - such a treat when you're in the midst of riding your bike across a continent.

Amin and I in GIR Bike Rental and Kat and I outside GIR Bike Rental

Out for drinks on our first night in Sarajevo, I sit around a table between an Italian and a German, across from two Bosnians, a Slovenian, and an Englishman. Bojan carries on three conversations at once; one in Bosnian, one in English, and the third in Italian. My eyes smart from cigarette smoke, and between drags George, the Englishman, jokes that if Bosnia had an airline, it would be the only one to still allow smoking on board. George moved to Bosnia a year ago to put his logistics background to good use improving aid distribution.

On the way home from the bar, Bojan gives an impromptu tour of some of Sarajevo's sights:

“Over there is the largest mosque in Sarajevo.”

“Here is the Princip Bridge where Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, triggering the first world war.”

“See this red plastic in the ground? It's filling in a hole in the pavement where a shell exploded during the war.” A Sarajevo Rose.

Sarajevo was held under siege by Serb and Yugoslav forces from May 1992 to February 1996, the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. As part of a Serb ethnic cleansing campaign against Bosnians, civilians, including children, were attacked in their homes, in schools, and in hospitals. Casualties were so heavy that parks and other public spaces, including the sports complex built when the city hosted the 1984 winter Olympics, were turned to graveyards.

There they go, around the corner and down the highway, shouting and laughing. Three girls from Spain.

“Where you go?” one of them asks us.

“Zadar tomorrow” we reply.

“We too!” she shouts as they roll by, dreadlocks flying in the wind, rickety bicycles bouncing on out-of-true wheels, bongo drums dangling precariously attached by bits of twine to makeshift panniers made of cloth and used milk jugs.

 

And so Steve and I give up deciding which is right – the GPS or the map – and we follow the three girls from Spain. Blanca, Jema, and Christina are heading to Zadar by bike, just like us.

 

A few days prior, on September 30, Steve and I left Senj headed for Plitvice National Park in Croatia. We took a shortcut near the end of the ride, and popped back out on the highway near the park entrance facing a farm house with a room for rent, owner having a smoke out front. When we asked the owner where we might find camping, he offered to let us pitch our tents in his backyard. And then, as rain clouds loomed, he upgraded his offer and suggested we pitch in his shed; complete with chicken coop. We took him up on his offer.

Steve, among our temporary neighbors

 

For me, this trip has included a number of memorable free camping nights; including the backyard of a friendly Finnish family (see my second blog post); the front yard of a family's home in Slovenia; a restaurant parking lot in Hungary; a stressful road-side night in the Czech republic; and a campsite on the Croatian coast, already shut down for the season, where fishermen, coming away with their haul, gave us about a dozen small fish to have for dinner.

 

While scenery and fish on the Croatian Coast and a chicken coop near Plitvice are both high on the list of memorable campsites, I owe the credit for weirdest camping experience of my life thus-far to the three girls from Spain.

 

Steve and I catch up with Blanca, Jema, and Christina, and we ride on together towards Zadar. At sunset, we reach a small town about 60km from Zadar; a good place to stop for the night.

 

“I saw on the way in a five star hotel!” exclaims Blanca as we wait for Jema and Christina to catch up.

 

Blanca had already explained to Steve that their primary mode of accommodations on the trip is squatting. Five star hotel is a euphemism for abandoned house with roof intact.

 

Steve checks to make sure I'm comfortable with this. I'm not so sure about comfortable, but I am intrigued. I'll try most things once.

Steve enters the five star hotel through the only entrance point

 

An hour later, Steve and I are cooking dinner for the five of us in what was once a bathroom. Our tents are set up in what must be the living room, and the three girls pitched their tent in what is probably the bedroom. All in all, five stars indeed – except for the rat shit we have to avoid while pitching the tents and cooking!

You're from Canada?

Do you know Bob?

Or Jim?

They're from Canada too.

No?

Well how 'bout Mark?

 

Don't roll your eyes; take your time and have the conversation. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes, on the other side of the world, you experience a coincidence so fine that it feels eerily meant to be. A fated encounter, not a coincidence at all.

 

And as it turns out, I have met Mark from Canada.

 

Here's the story.

 

September 12^th, 8:00 am. I'm getting an early start to ride the 150km to Zagreb, capital of Croatia, from a town called Viruvitica in northeastern Croatia. As I'm heading the wrong way down the street, an elderly man enthusiastically waves me over; he wants to know where I'm from, where I've been, where I'm going. You know; the usual. So I pull over – if you've been following this blog, you know by now that the highlights of my trip have been meeting friendly strangers. After telling me that I'm headed the wrong way, Stjepan invites me in for coffee.

 

Stjepan speaks to me in a mix of Croatian and German, and when he finds out I'm Canadian, he gets excited – his neighbour around the corner is Canadian! So Stjepan tows me off to her house, where he knocks on the door, with me feeling foolish at his side; we're waking someone up so that we can have the “Do you know Bob from Canada?” conversation. Oh boy.

 

And so I'm delivered on Slava's doorstep, smiling awkwardly.

 

Slava's not fussed in the slightest over this unexpected wake-up call, and invites me in for coffee. Over another cup of coffee, I learn that Slava is Croatian born, but lived a major chunk of her life in Toronto and in Florida. She has a daughter two years younger than me and a son, two years older, who lives in Vancouver. Slava gives me her contact information, and invites me to stay a night with her on the Croatian coast in Senj; she has an apartment there too.

Ten days later, I'm in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with Steve. I'm cracked. Sheer time in the saddle combined with beginning each day not knowing where I'll sleep that night has caught up to me. I hurt, I'm tired, and I'm irritable (poor Steve!). I need a break. So when Slava writes me a note on Facebook telling that she's currently in Senj and will be for another week or so if I'd like to visit, I head south. Steve heads north to see more of Slovenia, and we plan to meet up somewhere on the Croatian coast in a week's time.

 

On September 25 I arrive on Slava's other doorstep, exhausted and soaked from riding 105 km in the rain.

 

“Stay as long as you need to.” Slava tells me.

 

It's hard to convey the sense of welcome and comfort I felt as soon as I set foot in Slava's apartment; I genuinely felt at home. Oddly so; this is a stranger who's presence feels so familiar, and finds the same of me. For this, I'll always be thankful.

 

Convinced I'm somehow connected to her son, Mark, who also lives in Vancouver, Slava logs onto Facebook and we go to Mark's page and start scrolling through pictures. I was sceptical, and Mark doesn't look all that familiar at first. But then:

 

“Oh my god – Heather!”

 

There's my friend Heather Armstrong, who I've known since I was 15 years old, pictured with Mark, staring out at us from the computer screen. Suddenly a vague memory of meeting some of Heather's friends at her birthday party comes to mind. Slava emails Mark, and two days later he confirms: I met him at Heather's birthday party a year and a half ago. It's uncanny. Serendipitous. It's tremendous good luck for me.

 

In the end, I stay put at Slava's for five nights. Slava is a spiritual teacher, and through a number of conversations, she helps me re-evaluate my trip.

 

“Feel free to do as little as you like” she tells me.

 

For four days I don't ride or even look at my bike, and for the first time on this trip, I actually relax. And when Steve turns up on September 30th, I take her advice on the road with me.

Sunset viewed from Slava's balcony in Senj

It's pissing rain: it has been for the past few days. The campsite is waterlogged, and we're hiding out under the covered area with the wash sinks making breakfast, watching the rain drops against the surface of the adjacent swimming pool. Steve's tent is around the corner under an over-hang, upended, left for now to “dry” in the damp air. My tent is doing the same thing in the women's washroom. Our stuff would be in the way, except that apart from us and a few retirement-aged German couples in motor-homes, the campsite is empty.

 

“Jeeze Steve. Why'd you pitch your tent in that lake, anyways? God.” I joke, taking pictres.

Steve's tent.  He woke up in two inches of water.

“I should just fly back to Australia,” Steve grumbles. “It doesn't rain there.”

The sad truth is that Steve's tent was there before the lake. My tent is in slightly better shape; I got lucky, and pitched on a patch of ground that must be imperceptibly higher, since it's now very obviously dryer than Steve's spot.

Back in late April, when I decided to do this trip, I started poking around the Companions Wanted adds on www.crazyguyonabike.com, a forum for bicycle tourers. That's where I found Steve, an Australian who spent the last year and a half working in Spain, who is now riding back to Australia. According to his posting, he was going to go through the Balkans to Istanbul at the same time as I planned to, so I answered the add, and after four months worth of emails, we met up at Lake Balaton in Hungary on September 17^th.

 

Within minutes of our first face-to-face meeting, we fail the most critical travel companion compatibility test of all: Steve does not drink coffee. Incidentally, Steve also abstains from drinking alcohol of any kind, making him a teetotaller, a term that I can now pronounce thanks to Briana and Kyle. For me, teetotallers are tolerable. But no coffee?  Come on!

Luckily Steve is patient, kind, and tolerant, like the older brother I never had, but always wanted.  And that is a good thing, because after Steve gives me a new nickname, I begin to play the part of his antagonistic, pain-in-the-ass younger sister that he never had (and frankly, probably never wanted).

 

“Wow,” exclaimed Steve, after watching me eat during dinner on our second night of camping in the rain in Hungary. “You're a Remorseless Eating Machine!”.

 

This new nickname immediately reminds me of a good friend of mine, who told me that her older brother used to call her “Thunder-thighs”, which he apparently sang to her to the tune of the AC/DC song Thunderstruck. In defence of Steve, Remorseless Eating Machine is an accurate description of the effect of bike touring on my metabolism, but paradoxically, the nickname actually makes me feel vaguely remorseful. But the main effect of the nickname is to completely convince me that we are in open season for uncensored mockery.

Poor Steve.

I set about mocking Steve like the pesky younger sibling I never was. In particular, I routinely harass him about his failure to share my addiction to coffee, and I wax on nostalgically about the frequent cappuccino breaks that were a key feature of travel with Insignificant Mass: five people who shared a love of coffee (“those were the good old days...” *sigh*).

 

Back at the swamped campsite in Hungary where this post started, I have another lonely coffee in the company of Steve, and then we pack up our wet tents, say goodbye to the retired German couples, and head for the Slovenian border. Everything is better in Slovenia, especially the weather, which finally clears. But after camping in the rain for three nights, all of our stuff is wet and beginning to smell mouldy, and our resolve to spend as little money as possible cracks. We check into a reasonably cheap family-run bed and breakfast, where we're allowed to hang up our went camping gear in their garage.

 

We sit down to breakfast in the morning, and I help myself to the thermos of coffee while Steve makes himself a hot chocolate with some of the pitcher of hot milk we've been served.

 

“I guess this is the one advantage to travelling with a non-coffee-drinking-freak like you,” I tell Steve, “I get this entire thermos of coffee to myself”.

“I like hot chocolate, does that count?” Steve asks.

“Hot chocolate is for pussies.” I tell him flatly.

 

When I finish my first mug of coffee, I make a big show of pouring a second, finishing off the coffee. After I've added a bit of the hot milk, Steve politely asks me if I'll be needing any more of the milk. When I tell him I'm done with the milk, he finishes it off, making himself a third hot chocolate.

 

“There.” Says Steve, in a self-satisfied voice. “That's my third hot chocolate. My three hot chocolates beat your two coffees.”

“Way to go, triple-pussy.” I sneer obnoxiously.

Steve laughs; he's a good sport. But then the laugh fades away as questions arise in his mind:

“Wait - is it better or worse to be a triple-pussy than just a regular pussy?”

And then “This isn't going on your blog, is it?”

 

Poor Steve.  He puts up with me patiently.

 

From Belgrade I head West into Croatia: I'm going to go check out Zagreb, the Croatian Capital, for a few days before I head back up into Hungary to meet up with my next travel buddy. I roll across the border and after 20km, a particularly intense rain storm rolls in. It's one of those storms where the visibility is close to zero, and it's only two hours before dark so I go to the nearest town and stay in the first hotel I find. Conveniently, the nearest town turns out to be the Heroic City of Vukovar, well worth a visit.

 

When Croatia began to move towards independance in 1991, the federal Yugoslavia attempted to sieze the city using military force, and most of the original residents of Vukovar fled, while some held out under siege for three months. I read in the Lonely Planet guide book that when Vukovar finally fell to the federal force, “Serb-Yugoslav soldiers entered Vukovar's hospital and removed 400 patients, staff and their families. Two hundred of these people were massacred” at a nearby village.”

 

Vukovar was returned to Croatia in 1998, and the city has been slowly repairing itself, but many scarred buildings remain as a testament to the violence of 1991. I take some time to explore the city the next day before continuing on my way. A few days later, I'm in Zagreb, couch-surfing with Kaja, a very cool woman my own age. I mention Vukovar, and Kaja tells me that the most tragic part about the Vukovar conflict was that the Croatian army wasn't deployed in time to stop it.

 

“Not everyone knows this,” Kaja tells me. “The war was very complicated. In some cases Croatian soldiers were actually sent into Bosnia to fight alongside Serb-Yugoslavs. This wasn't supposed to happen, but it did.”

 

This bombed water tower is now a symbol of Croatian resistance.

Water tower up close:

Marius and I are sitting in plastic chairs in front of a small, smokey, hole-in-the-wall bar across the street from the train station in a Romanian town called Drobeta Turnu Severin, a name so long I have to keep looking at my map to remember it. I'm supposed to be on the 2am train to Belgrade, but it's been delayed. It's 2:15am and I just told Kyle, who came down from the hotel room with me to help me onto the train, to go back to bed; I don't want to keep him up any longer, and besides, the room is just above the bar – if I need to for some reason, I can just shout up to him. Marius and I are chatting in French, our mutual second language.

 

“So you don't have much work tonight?” I ask Marius, who's a taxi driver.

“I'm not really a taxi driver,” he says.

“So what do you do, then?”

“I sell contraband.”
“What sort of contraband?”
“I traffic women.”

For a moment, he's straight-faced, but then he grins and laughs.

“I'm kidding you, I'm kidding you!” he says.

I laugh too.

It's just a joke.

 

And it's funny, really it is. Romania is unfairly stereotyped by Westerners as primitive and full of gypsies and thieves; the sort of place where you need to watch your back. The sort of place where, according to the Serbian guard who let us through the Serbian-Romanian border, you most certainly do not want to be a woman travelling alone. Marius is playing with this stereotype, and I need to show that I'm not afraid – that I know the stereotype is crap, and I can't devolve into a pathetic, scared Western woman; my fear would embarrass us both.

 

Eight hours earlier, Kyle, Briana, Yoshi and I make it to the train station by the Iron Gates dam in Romania. Andrew hurried ahead and caught his train to Bucharest, and I've got to get back to Hungary to meet my next travel companion, and I want a train back to Belgrade from here to facilitate that. But no one in the train station speaks English, and I can't figure out whether there's a train. As I'm telling my friends as much, Marius overhears and comes over to help me out.

 

Marius is my age. He's waiting around by his cab for customers, and apparently there aren't many at the moment. He speaks a bit of English and is fluent in French, so he becomes my translator, Romanian to French, and facilitates my purchase of a train ticket, and then helps us get a room at the hotel above the bar across the street. I offer to tip him and he declines, but I'm able to talk him into joining us for a beer. Non-alcoholic at his insistence: technically, he's working.

 

After dinner and beers, the four of us are in our hotel room. I'm organizing my stuff, and Kyle's reading a guide book. He reads a paragraph about safety in Romania out loud: Romania is safe for travellers, theft and scams are rare, with the exception of bus and train stations, where you should be wary of anyone offering you their help.

 

“You guys don't think Marius would scam us do you?” I ask. “I don't think he's sketchy... ...do you?”

“Nah, I think he's a good guy” Briana says, and Yoshi and Kyle agree.

And then I notice that my passport is missing.

 

“OK, don't freak out,” says Briana. “Where did you see it last?”

I think for a panicky moment, and then remember. “I gave it to the woman downstairs when we checked in,” I tell her, “I guess I forgot to get it back.”

 

Briana handles the situation. We go to the bar downstairs to see if the woman working there can help us. At first the language barrier gets in the way, but then a man comes over and says “Italiano?”

We're saved: Briana is fluent in Italian. Moments later, the bar maid has unlocked the reception area for us, and hands me back my passport in return for Briana's: it was being held as collateral for the hotel key, a detail that was lost on me when I checked us in. No identity theft, no scam: a simple communication breakdown, that's all.

 

In time for the train, Kyle helps me down to the platform. Marius meets us; he's still working. The three of us wait together, chatting in French. Marius tells us about his wife, and shows us a picture of his young son. At 2am, there's an announcement in Romanian.

“Oh!” exclaims Marius, with a smirk, “Your train's been delayed by 100 minutes!”.

 

And so I come to be hanging around a bar across from a train station in Romania, alone with a man I don't really know. A man who is joking around about trafficking women, and who keeps offering to let me nap in his cab while I wait for the train.

 

Marius really is joking: I mean, who tells you in advance that they traffic women, and then tries to abduct you? Seriously. But the trouble is that I've been awake since 6am, so at 2:15 am, my mind wants to be sleeping, not picking up clues from facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice to sort out whether I'm safe or not. Exhausted from a long day of riding in the hot sun, my mind wants to be unconscious, reviewing and organizing memories of all the dogs that chased us, the transport trucks we dodged, and the missing passport panic, in the form of nightmares. My mind does not want to focus on conversing with Marius in French, keeping my wits about me, continually politely declining his offers to let me sleep in his car until the train arrives. And so my mind gets back at me by wreaking havoc: it tries to force me to sleep, and weaves a strand of nightmarish paranoia into my waking reality when I refuse to let it rest: one moment I'm sure Marius is a good guy, who really just doesn't have much to do at the moment, other than joke around with me, the helpless foreign girl who's train's been delayed, and who doesn't speak Romanian. But the next moment, my sleepy mind starts to dream up all sorts of scenarios, paranoia seeps in, and I feel totally ill at ease.

 

At 3 am, two other men join us. One in is big and loud, the other is mousey and quite. Marius tells me the loud one is an off-duty train conductor, and the quite one is the station manager. The conductor takes an immediate interest in me. He asks me an emphatic string of questions in Romanian. I look at Marius, but he's laughing too hard to translate. I smile and nod. The conductor laughs, and buys me a coffee. He kisses my hand, and pinches my cheek. Marius laughs so hard he's in tears. The station manager smirks and shakes his head.

 

The station manager says something to Marius, who stops laughing, and tells me the train isn't coming. But would I like him to drive me to Belgrade? It'll only cost me 100 Euro. Just joking, of course. Just joking.

 

At 3:40, a whistle sounds. 100 minutes have elapsed, and a train, hopefully mine, has arrived. Marius and I head to the platform. There's only a few minutes – we have to be quick. Marius hops on the train, and I pass him my bags, then my bike. Marius hops off the train and I board.

"Thank-you so much!" I shout, in French.

Marius grins and waves. A perfect gentleman after all.

 

The train starts up and rolls out while we're still waving goodbye. I organize my stuff and head to my seat, full of a mixture of relief and shame at believing the Serbian border guard, and all the other things I'd heard about Romania. I was watching my back, and grudgingly I'll admit that I do have to watch my back when I'm travelling solo. But tonight Marius was watching my back too, and he was doing a much better job of it than I.

 

Andrew and Yoshi are stoked!
Look at them dance:

This is back on September 3, in the hostel in Belgrade. In part Andrew and Yoshi are happy because they're eating a tasty Serbian pastry. But mostly it's because tomorrow we'll all head out further down the Danube to the Iron Gates dam in Romania, which means that Insignificant Mass (the nickname that Briana gave to describe the five of us riding together: five does not a Critical Mass make, but we're a mass nonetheless) is staying together for another few days. And that means three more days of cappuccino breaks, impromtu brunches and lunches, random singing, and extreme silliness. Briana, Kyle, and I are stoked too, but at the time of the happy dance in the hostel in Belgrade (Capital of Serbia) we're too busy blogging and researching things on our computers to join in. Luckily my camera was within reach.

Originally, Insignificant Mass was going to break up after a few days in Belgrade, with Kyle, Briana and Yoshi heading on to the Black Sea, but with Andrew and I going our seperate ways. But then Kyle opens one of the guidebooks and reads us a few paragraphs describing the ride to the Iron Gates. Phrases like “road lined dramatically by cliffs” and “most beautiful section of the Danube” come out of his mouth, and I can't remember if it was Andrew or I who cracked first, but who cares: We're all going to the Iron Gates!

 

The next morning we're up early and we're rolling by 8:30. We ride out of Belgrade and head east towards Romania, and in Eastern Serbia we find ourselves riding through the friendliest villages any of us have been through so far: Everyone we pass smiles, waves, and shouts Dobre Dan (Good Day) to us. We ride on through rural scenery and find ourselves at a road that's being re-surfaced. The road work is almost completely finished, but the road is closed nonetheless. But not closed to us. The construction workers smile and wave us through, and we ride four abreast down brand new asphalt, 100% free of all other traffic for a 15km stretch.

 

After a final night spent camping in Serbia, we cross into Romania. We ride through towns and villages where the traffic consists of a quirky mix of taxi cabs and horse-drawn carts; in some cases friendly honks and waves are exchanged between the two. Dogs never seem to be tied here, and they come bounding out from front lawns and farm yards barking at us. Frightening, but fortunately all bark and no bite. 

And then we're passing through the scenery Kyle read to us about. We're on a road lined with cliffs on our left with the Danube on our right. Romania and the former Yugoslavia collaborated to build the Iron Gates dam in the early 1970s, and a number of settlements and historical sites were flooded in the processes.  We see fortresses poking out of the water like strange islands.

We pass a giant carving of the face of Decebalus, last king of the Dacians, who, legend has it, committed suicide when the Dacians were defeated by the Romans.  The carving is recent, and took 10 years to finish, created between 1994 and 2004.

We stop for a last drawn out lunch, and then Andrew has to rush ahead to Drobeta Turnu Severin, the town near the dam, to catch his train. The remaining four of us make our way through multiple construction zones and roll into town, ending my last ride as part of Insignificant Mass.

If Spanish God were Hungarian for a cake topping in Serbia, what would he/she be?

The morning after the luggage rescue mission we delay departing Baja in order to wait out some rain. The sky clears by noon and the wind picks up, aimed to blow us straight into Serbia. Mother Nature's walked the floor, and now she's batting for us. We look at the map and choose the closest border crossing – it's a limited border crossing, but there's no indication of what or who is limited. So we decide to be optimistic: this border is probably limited to small vehicles. You know – like mini vans. Honda civics. Smart cars. Bicycles. No transport trucks allowed. And then we pack up and make record time.

I've been anticipating this border crossing for a while, since it will take us out of the EU. And that means...

(drum roll)

...border guards! Someone is going to care that we're leaving Hungary, and someone else will care that we're going into Serbia. My passport will get stamped. I'll have to act serious. There will be a record of my having been somewhere in Europe other than Amsterdam, where I never left the airport.

We roll up to the border and a young female guard greets us with a perplexed expression on her face. She takes our passports and disappears into the office for a few minutes, and then comes back out and hands them back to us. I flip through mine looking for the stamp and come up with nothing. We put our passports away and proceed towards Serbia, but she stops us. At first we think we're just in the wrong lane, but then it becomes clear that we're not allowed across here. Limited border: limited to EU citizens only, so I guess even Serbians can't get into Serbia from here.

Thirty kilometers northeast of the failed border crossing we're at a new check point, 11Km from a Serbian city called Subotica, with an hour of daylight left. Luckily there's not much of a line, and the guards on both sides stamp us and let us through. I even get a smile and a chuckle from the Serbian guard, and at first I think he's just as excited as I am that I've arrived in his country. And then Kyle points out that he's having a laugh at a long strand of my hair that's wriggled loose through one of my helmet vents and is waving around in the wind.

An hour later we've found ourselves a hostel room in Subotica, and we're out on the town. Andrew spots a kiosk selling what he thinks are giant spit-roasted marshmallows coated in chocolate. We head over to have a look, and it turns out to be cakes: puffy white dough is being wrapped around spits and roasted over an open flame. Cooked tunnel-shaped cakes are then coated in one of five toppings, listed above the kiosk in Serbian with Hungarian translations. We recognize cinnamon, chocolate, vanilla, and coconut from the topping list. But we're not so sure about mysterious topping number five - the Serbian word is completely unfamiliar. We recognize the Hungarian word immediately, but it's completely out of context: Dios. The Spanish word for God.

We sit at by the fountain in the square in the middle of downtown Subotica, people watching and eating tunnel cake. The entire population of Subotica is out milling around: a band is set up in the square, and apparently they're very popular. We're savouring Dios-coated tunnel-cake, and we come to a consensus: according to Hungarians, the Spanish worship crushed walnuts mixed with sugar.

Field of cultivated flowers, Hungary, near the Serbian Border

Subotica, Serbia

Not my own.

My cousin Briana married Kyle on January 23rd, and they've been travelling ever since. After an extensive rock climbing trip in South East Asia, they headed to Europe, where they've been travelling around visiting friends and family. They did a trial bike tour for 11 days in France and Belgium on their tandem, and then they flew to Budapest to ride along the Danube to the Black Sea. They keep a much more detailed blog on their climbing and cycling adventures that you should check out here: www.rollglobal.com.

On August 25^th, my lonely days end when I meet up with Briana and Kyle in Budapest. We couch surf with a very cool Hungarian couple who live on the edge of the city. We meet up with old family friends who knew my mother and Briana's father when they were kids before they fled to Montreal during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.

We meet up with Andrew and Yoshi, who are joining Briana and Kyle on their tour south along the Danube, and we hang out at one of the city's oldest Baths. We drink a lot of coffee, and we have picnics in the park. It's so much fun to have friends again, that when they roll out on the 28^th, I decide to tag along. And it's even more fun than hanging out in the city.

We have picnics along the way.

We camp randomly for free.

We trade bikes for a few Km one afternoon, and I stoke the tandem behind Andrew while Briana rides my bike.

Andrew brought along a eukalaly, and we sing along whenever we're stopped for more than a few minutes, which is frequent.

All of this is photodocumented, but Posterous is taking a half an hour to upload each picture today, so you're just going to have to use your imagination.

On day three, 50Km from Baja, our destination that night, things begin to go sideways. Clouds roll in, the temperature drops nearly 10 degrees, and it starts to rain. Andrew flats on the side of the highway. After a quick change, we're on our way again, but in another 15km, he flats again. We stand around eating snack food and jumping up and down to stay warm. This time, Andrew extracts a pebble that had worked its way through his tire. Shivering, we roll out: it's now about an hour before dark, which is fine, since we only have 15 km to go.

And then 10km from Baja, as we're riding along a path through Gemenc National Park, we become acquainted with a very significant pothole. I'm riding alongside Briana and Kyle and we're chatting happily until we see it. But we see it too late: Kyle swerves the tandem, but not quite far enough, and one of the trailer wheels plunges in.

There's a crunch as the trailer axel snaps along a weld where it was previously mended. There's a thud and some loud scraping as the plastic suitcases made to attach to the trailer flip over and drag along the ground while the tandem squeals to a halt. Luckily Yoshi, who was bringing up the rear of the train, successfully dodges the rogue trailer wheel that comes flying at her.

Fuck. Shit. Fuck.

And then we rally and come up with a plan. First, we take the valuables and necessary items out of the suitcases, and distribute them across everyone's panniers. Then we hide the suitcases in the forest: we'll come back for them once the axle is fixed, whenever that is. And then we ride into Baja. The last 6km is on the highway, and it's getting dark. And then Andrew flats again.

Later, we're all crammed into a Baja hotel room with pizza and beer, taking turns in the shower. Briana and Kyle are trouble shooting: they're on skype to the company that made the trailer to get a new part ordered. They're on Couch Surfer's looking for someone to provide an address in Belgrade so that they can have the part shipped. They're generally doing a really good job of not freaking out.

And the next morning, the owner of the cafe next door offers to take care of the broken axle for them: he knows someone who fixes that sort of thing. We roll back to the Park and rescue the luggage.  It's a highly entertaining experience which we photodocumented in time-lapse photography: Stay tuned for an upcoming movie link!

When we get back to town that same afternoon after successfully rescuing the luggage,  a new part has already been made for the trailer axle! Once again, we've been saved by awesomely helpful strangers, and we're back on our way the next morning - we've only lost one day.