Romania & Serbia - Week 24

We couldn’t come all this way without visiting Bran castle, the alleged home of Dracula. Loved it! Loved all the secret passages and all the information boards that were written in English as well as Romanian. A must visit castle in our opinion.

My boss has a dentist called Vlad. She calls him Vlad the descaler lol.

We drove back to Sibiu that evening as we’d had a message that the courier had delivered the paperwork we were waiting for.

When we entered Romania over a week ago, we were driving on a motorway. Not knowing the roads we stayed on it. It was pretty boring, just flat brown landscape for miles. Then, at one point, we were diverted onto a normal main road, as that part of the motorway was still under construction. The road deteriorated quite a bit but when, like us, you’ve driven on Lithuanian roads and use them as a bench mark, it wasn’t that bad. We were glad to get back on the motorway though later on. Luckily the road from Bran & Sighisoara to Sibiu was a decent road.

Driving through all these countries, you do notice the differences between them. Apart from all the stray dogs, litter (so much litter) and idiotic drivers that were about, what stood out the most, were the amount of flocks of sheep being looked after by shepherds. Wow what a boring job to have, standing around watching sheep nibble grass all day.

The villages looked very poor in places, with crumbling and derelict buildings in amongst some that you could see were looked after. All of them though, were painted in different colours and quite a few of the towns and villages had Romanian flags flying from every lamp post. They were obviously proud to be Romanian.

Arriving back in Timisoara, we (meaning Andy), negotiated the crazy traffic and called in to collect the paperwork at Autoklass. We must say a huge thanks to Rachel at Hymer Eriba for sorting this out for us.

We slept in the same secure car park and visited the same Starbucks to upload last weeks blog.

Before leaving Timisoara, we stopped at Lidl to stock up on essentials as we were heading for Serbia (for the second time). A guy pulled up in the car park next to us and said hello. He was Romanian but had lived & worked in London for 15 years. He’d spotted that Harriet was a right hand drive vehicle so wanted to talk to us and ask how we found his city. Told him we thought it was good but the traffic was crazy. He agreed and laughed.

We’d already downloaded the offline map of Serbia as our EE contract doesn’t include internet for the country & google maps has been an excellent sat nav so far.

So, Drum Bun Romania, farewell.

We headed for Novi Sad and as we arrived at the Romanian border, we handed the guard the V5 & passports and after checking them he let us through. We crossed the 200m of No Mans Land and had to do it all over again at the Serbian border. This time a lovely border guard asked if he could look inside. His English was excellent and after 2 minutes looking around the van he was happy and said thank you. We had an entry stamp in both passports and were on our way. Not only had we crossed the border but we’d crossed another time zone - again! This time gaining an hour.
Further down the road we found a garage selling LPG. The pump attendant ran inside to get his colleague when he found out we were English. What a lovely man he turned out to be. He’d been learning the English language in the hope of getting to Australia. He filled Harriet with gas for us (Andy usually does it himself), and told us that his English lessons cost him €10 an hour and his salary is only €250 a month. He’s got 2 children but only 1 wife lol. He seemed genuinely pleased to practice his English.

We carried on to Novi Sad passing lots of farmers fields covered in a couple of inches of snow. It’s the first of the white stuff we’d seen since leaving the Arctic circle.

We parked in the castle car park and the next morning, after making a chilli for later, we went into town. We needed to get some Serbian Dinars from an ATM.

Novi Sad is a nice town. Nothing really special but better than places we saw in Romania. It was strange though that every third or forth shop was a currency exchange. But when we tried to change some Romanian notes they didn’t want to know.

There was a small Christmas market in the centre of town just like many others we’ve seen.

The following morning, we walked around the fortress in the sunshine.

Leaving Novi Sad we headed for Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. The traffic going into the centre was horrendous but we found our camping spot outside the Yugoslavian Museum. We spent a quiet night there but struggled without internet. Having no paper maps or guide books we had no clue which way to go. We walked to the train station but the trains didn’t go any further into the city. It was cold and I felt pretty miserable. So it was decided we would head back to Harriet and visit the museum. Feeling a bit happier, we walked back up the hill. Problem was, the museum was closed for repairs. Defeated, we set off for Nis.

The main route through Serbia is a motorway and as it gets dark early at this time of year, a good road to drive. We pulled in to a service station with a McDonalds for a break and to use their free WiFi. Getting back in Harriet, the unthinkable happened, she wouldn’t start. It wasn’t the battery as the engine turned over fine, it just wouldn’t fire up. We did notice the amber management light on the dash though.

Serbia is one of the few countries where there isn’t any Fiat Assist, so Andy went to ask for help at the fuel station and 20 minutes later, a recovery truck turned up.

The mechanic told us there was a problem with the ECU and would have to be recovered to a garage to be plugged in.

So, not having any option we agreed. By the end of the evening, and quite a bit of money lighter, Harriet fired up and we were back on the road.

We slept on the motorway services that night and in the morning drove 270 miles into Bulgaria as we weren’t 100% sure it had been repaired. We didn’t want the headache of it happening again with no Fiat Assist as a backup.