Hitchhiking in Serbia

ME WITH HITCHHIKING WITH MY WHITEBOARD

The day had started like most days hitching - with a long walk through a seemingly neverending mind numbingly dull walk past the industrial buildings and big chain stores that line the outskirts of any semi-sizable city. In this case, that city was Timișoara, a mid-sized Romanian city relatively close to the Serbian border. This was no coincidence, as the goal of the day was to reach Belgrade, the Serbian capital.

Strategically placed by the main road out of town, armed with a small portable whiteboard reading “SRB”, it didn’t take too long before a small car pulled over for me. It was low to the ground, and I had to crouch to see through the passenger side window. A man sat, cigarette in mouth, behind the wheel. He made it apparent that he could drive me more or less to the border, and I happily got in. 

Like I had experienced a few times already when hitching in Romania, the man spoke little English and seemed entirely uninterested in my attempts at communicating. He wasn’t giving me a ride for the conversation, merely because he happened to be going the right way and had the room. I didn’t mind. I’m perfectly happy silently watching a foreign landscape pass me by. 

He dropped me off, more or less wordlessly, in the tiny village of Moravița. By now, the sun had found its place high in the sky, and the air was scorching hot. With my pack weighing heavily on my back, I started walking the remaining few kilometres to Serbia. The small country road took me past a few abandoned and run-down buildings. They seemed as though they might’ve been left there since the dawn of time, with no one ever bothering to do any upkeep. I was intrigued by them, and briefly considered staying the night there; more so for the experience than for utility. I thought better of it and continued onwards.

The ground was brown and cracking. The cloudless sky had turned a greyish blue in the heat. Empty fields stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions, with nothing but a few scattered buildings and a bar gate breaking up the horizon. The checkpoint was seemingly as abandoned as the buildings I’d walked past earlier, and only after poking around for a while did a couple of border guards show up out of the official-looking structure. They seemed at first surprised to see me, and then even more so when they noted my lack of wheels. 

“No car?” one man said to me, clearly a bit sceptical about the whole thing.

“No car,” I replied as matter-of-factly as I could manage.

The two guards conversed for a bit in their own language, seemingly quite unsure as to how best to handle my strange leg-dependent mode of transportation. Eventually, there being no infrastructure for pedestrians, they decided to have me go through the whole process as though I were in a car. So, following their instructions, I stood in the middle of the road, walking through the car-centred checkpoints – even going as far as waiting patiently as the boom raised to let me pass.

Eventually, having gone through all the hoops expected of a car attempting to cross the border, I found myself in Serbia. It looked much the same as Romania, only now, with the border crossing behind me, there was nothing but the wavy heat to break up the otherwise flat horizon. 

With many kilometres to go before the nearest town, and very little traffic from which to expect a ride, I got to walking. Being a sucker for creating a fitting atmosphere in everything I do, I listened to Dylan’s nasally voice singing as I walked. “Well, I’m walkin’ down the highway, with my suitcase in my hand”. 

A few hours and many steps later, a beaten-up car drove past me. As though taken straight out of a movie, it stopped about a hundred metres further up, then quickly reversed back to where I was standing. The car was small and yellow, and clearly falling apart from many years of use. It had a very unique kind of charm to it. Inside sat an old man with the very same kind of charm. With a few friendly hand gestures and a big goofy grin, he invited me along for the ride. I got in, half expecting a big hole in the floor. 

I could barely fit inside the car, and we must’ve barely driven faster than I could’ve walked, but I was grateful to get a rest. The old man was folded in on himself and looked closer to a thousand than to twenty. Still, he had an exuberant energy about him that transcended the language barrier. He somehow managed to be almost aggressively friendly, while simultaneously scolding me for not being more able to communicate with him than I was. It was lovely.

After a short lunch break in the little Serbian town, at which the old man dropped me off, I was once again standing by the side of the road, thumb in the air. This time, it didn’t take long before a car violently threw itself to the side of the road, stopping just before hitting me. A young lady opened a door, and various tools came spilling out. A man – the lady’s husband – shouted at me from behind the wheel to get in, and so I promptly did, being careful to move the many appliances that filled the car.

In stark contrast to my last ride, this time we drove off as quickly as the car had stopped. As I hastened to fasten my seatbelt, the couple made conversation with me in perfect English. While I’ve always enjoyed the implicit challenge of overcoming language barriers, there was a nice respite in having a conversation go a little deeper than questions one might ask Cotton Eyed Joe. 

In my conversations with the couple, I learned that the man had once worked in Denmark, and so was delighted to have picked up a Danish hitchhiker. So delighted in fact, that he invited me to dinner with him and his son in their home town. I would be a poor hitchhiker if ever I refused such an offer, so of course I happily accepted his generosity, making it clear, however, that he really did not need to pay for my meal; I was much more interested in his company. 

When we reached their hometown, conveniently located right on the road to Belgrade, we drove past their house, dropped off the woman, picked up the son, and drove off. After a quick tour of their village, we stopped by a restaurant. Being a guest in their country and village, I told my new friend to please order something for me. I wanted to try something local, and sure enough, I was served dish after dish of traditional Serbian foods, half of which I couldn’t even make out the ingredients of, all of which I enjoyed immensely. My host and his son each had a large serving of French fries. 

While eating, we conversed about various topics, and I eventually learned that the Serbian man had not just worked any old job in Denmark, but had spent his days as a salesman on the infamous “Pusher Street” in “Freetown Christania”. I listened with great interest as he told me about the insides of this renowned part of my own country. Life as a drug dealer had not been a bad one, he explained, and he had in fact truly enjoyed the work and especially his colleagues. He regaled me, to my surprise, about the kindness of the Danish people and the true hospitality he had met in my country. This, he went on, was also why he was so eager to have the chance to repay the favour for a Dane in his home country.

All this being said, he had at that point laid his criminal days behind him. By the time he left Denmark, something had supposedly shifted in the environment in which he had worked. It had gotten increasingly more organised and violent, he explained, and he felt that he could no longer stay in such work. He had to think about his safety – not so much for his own sake, but for his family’s. He now worked as a long-haul truck driver. A job he enjoyed, although he wished it didn’t take him away from home as much as it did.

Having finished our meal and conversation, I thanked the Serbian man for his kindness, and we parted. It was beginning to get a little late, but I was anxious to get to Belgrade on that day. Luckily, it didn’t take long before another car stopped for my outstretched thumb.

In my final ride of the day, I met perhaps the strangest character who has ever picked me up. Speaking both English and Swedish, as he did, we had little issue communicating, and so we quickly skipped past all the usual niceties and into much more interesting conversation.

My driver for this ride was an older gentleman. He had a long beard and a distinct hippiey vibe about him. He told me about his heritage, though I struggled to make heads or tails of it. From what I could gather, he was half Serbian, half Croatian, had spent most of his life in Sweden, and worked for half of the year in Brazil. It seemed he didn’t spend much time in any given place, being on the road as much as possible, chasing certain “energies”.

Having stumbled upon yet another truly interesting person on that day, I was delighted to let him talk my ear off about his far-out beliefs. I’ll do my best to recount them as accurately as I can remember. Through his thick beard, the man explained to me that he believed that there were certain cosmic energies all around the world. At some points, they’re stronger. At others, they’re weaker. They are the absolute strongest at pyramids, which is why so many of them have been built. They are also particularly strong at one particular Greek nudist beach, which he makes a point to visit annually. What exactly these energies do, he never quite could explain, despite my pressing about it, but he was very clear that they were powerful.

So this man now spent his life travelling from pyramid to pyramid in search of these energies for half of the year. The other half he spent in the Amazon jungle, guiding tourists to a small indigenous tribe, where they would partake in shaman-led ayahuasca ceremonies. When he found the time to return to Sweden to visit his kids, I couldn’t make out.

As though the entire world were listening to the man’s tales, the landscape around us shifted from open desert to dense overgrown swamps, making me feel almost transported to the Amazon with him. The change in landscape came from us having reached the Danube River, heralding our imminent arrival in Belgrade. 

Sure enough, soon after, the world around us had once again changed from dense woods to tall buildings and trafficked roads. My newfound spiritual advisor - kind as he was - drove me all the way to the city centre before dropping me off. I was sad to depart with this interesting fellow, but I was also eager to have reached my destination. 

By the side of a large road, I stepped out of his car and gathered all my belongings in a hurry, being slightly stressed from all the fuss of the big city. The man leant out of his window, not at all minding the buildup of cars honking behind him to get a move on, and gave me some parting advice about pyramids and SIM cards. Then he drove off. I stood for a moment looking after his car. Then, I threw my pack on my back and started walking into the city.