Brnjica to Bzra Palanka Serbia - 77km 47miles
October 17, 2023
An interesting night with temperatures below 5°C, but up as usual at 0630h nonetheless! The dishes needed doing as they got left soaking in preference to getting to bed last night!!
The kittens were continuing to entertain us this morning until our departures at 0815 and 0845h. The now normal departure of Paul leaving first and me second seems to work well. I am still pedaling just marginally faster than Paul, so the gap gets closed little by little, but not much under these conditions of cold temperatures and busy roads!!
Today the roads threw a new twist at us, one we had not anticipated! The Twenty One Tunnels of Terror!! Try to imagine 21 tunnels anything between 50m and 300m in length. Now imagine them being curved in shape, and with no lighting. Now stir in buses, trucks, and cars, although I will allow you to imagine not as many vehicles as I have hitherto recounted as the roads are now mercifully quieter!
This was the stuff of true nightmares....but we each kept cool heads, looked for quiet opportunities to enter each tunnel, looked backwards as much as forwards and said quiet prayers before each. To be honest out of the 16 we went through there was only five that exceeded 250m, five too many though. They were as dark as pitch inside and due to their length and curvature one couldn't see either end of it for periods!!
To add atmosphere to the entire setting there was a continuous back drop of shrines dotted along the road. Shrines to Road Traffic Accident victims is all we can assume. Generally, men aged 25 to 40 years of age, and the shrines were in real 'no man's' land for anything but internal combustion engine powered vehicles! We didn't meet up until lunchtime in Donji Milanovac owing to these tunnels.
If you were astute, you'd have asked why we only cycled thru 16 of the Tunnels of Terror, and not the aforementioned 21? Well you see, Paul 'zoomed out' on the map and noticed the massive loop in the river, that if avoided, would not only shorten the day's journey, but also get us off that most treacherous road! I had seen this loop, but had not envisaged the circumstances that may coincide with it. Paul was apprehensive at first about suggesting the diversion, but he made an excellent point and I wholehearted agreed.... immediately, and thus we completed five less tunnels!!
Penultimate Day in Serbia
High Road Alternative lost 108 km of crazy busy roads with a 37km high route with 600m of climbing (in one hit!) and great views of the river on descent.
Upon further inspection this alternative had fabulous merit in not only traffic avoidance, and personal self preservation, but it would also won us one whole day against our schedule, and almost certainly another night of very cold wild camping, with perhaps little food options in this very outback region of Serbia! The route did however involve us in an immediate and certain 600 metres of climbing over 20km that took about 2½hrs of literally non stop pedaling at a grinding pace of 5 to 9km/hr. Not easy, but much better than the 'splat the rat' dodgem caper down on the main Danube riverside highway! We were in 7th heaven being on this quiet biway! And the 330m descent at the end of this diversion well over compensated for the initial grind up, and the other up&downs to make 900m climbing in total, as it offered fabulous views of the river on the descent.
The descent brought us near enough straight into Bzra Palanka, and to a campground which we paid for sight unseen.... once seen, we requested our money back, some of which was refunded, the rest was a victim of our hasty decision making whilst suffering with brain freeze! C'est la vie, one bad apple doesn't spoil the whole lot! We checked in at the local hotel for not much more money than the campsite!
We dined in the hotel dining room, and had a pleasant evening contemplating our next move! One definite decision we made was to consider our camping days to be over. With the night time temperatures now below 5-10 degC we felt we'd done our bit, and this northerly wind bringing in the cold air since Kovin seemed here to stay.... we reckoned our camping luck was spent with well over 40 nights in the tents!
And there, by the grace of God go us!!
Doug&Paul
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