Hotel Dragoman, where I stayed last night was just off the motorway at the edge of town. After packing up I headed to the town centre seeking out a place selling baked goods and coffee that I had visited last October. After an expresso style coffee, a drinking yoghurt and a savoury, fried dough affair I started out of Dragoman. The town is a mixture of a few smart houses, a ruin or two, not the pretty kind, and the majority of the houses which were somewhere in between. The condition of cars at the roadside was similar. Pavements were overgrown. Square, concrete paving slabs were pushed up by tree routes. Blossom on the trees added a little beauty, a contrast to the overcast skies and the light rain falling. A railway divides the town, and I planned to cross on a pedestrian bridge by the railway. However the bridge that was there last October had been removed. I inferred that this was due to the construction of a high speed railway, I noticed the work as we drove to Dragoman last night, with banks and cuttings creating a horizontal line with few bends.
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| Leaving Dragoman |
Leaving the town on farm tracks I rapidly accumulated overshoes of mud, and the earth, wetted by the rain, stuck to my soles. I passed fields and areas of rough scrub eventually reaching the tumbledown village of Dragoil. On a few dilapidated buildings I passed there were faded stickers marking the Sultans Trail. In the absence of an "E path", this was the trail I was following to Serbia. After Dragoil there was a climb up to a single track road that ran along a ridge, much of it by woodlands and conifer forests edged by birch.
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| Blackthorn in blossom |
As I descended down to the motorway and railway at the base of a high sided valley I was worried about how difficult crossing the border would be. First, I joined the main dual carriageway, fortunately no longer a motorway on which pedestrians might be prohibited. On approaching the border stalls a border policemen wordlessly pointed to the entries for cars. So after briefly waiting for one to complete the formalities I tendered my passport. The officer asked what I was planning to do in Serbia, I said I would be walking in the Stara Planina mountains. He wrongly claimed these were confined to Bulgaria, however the mountain range does not respect human borders and continues into Serbia which the Serbian border guard, on asking the same question, was perfectly aware of and wished me well on my journey. In the no-man's land between the two border posts I stopped to change my Bulgarian lev into Serbian Dinars, important as I had not been able to purchase diners in Britain.
Fortunately there was little traffic queuing up to leave Bulgaria, however in Serbia the queue of lorries on the motorway, trying to enter Bulgaria (and the EU) was kilometres long. To reach the town of Dmitrovgrad I walked along a local road from the border. Previously, walking in the opposite direction, I followed a smaller track. This brought me to the attention of a border police patrol, no doubt looking for illegal immigrants, so this time I stuck to the road. I arrived at the Happy Hotel a little before the earliest check-in, which was a 2 pm but the receptionist found a room that had been cleaned so I could settle in and complete a few chores. After a shower and washing a few items of clothing in the bathroom sink I discovered that I had used up my total "World Roaming Data Allowance", all £53 of it, in the few hours I had been in Serbia. In my planning I had overlooked that while my phone company gave reasonable rates in EU countries this did not apply to Serbia. At £2 a minute my call to my wife was rather short. Unfortunately the hotel's WiFi is not working or I could have used that. My next job was to visit the centre of Dmitrovgrad to pick up some food for the next few days when I will be wild camping.
This evening after dinner at the hotel I walked into town. On the far side of the valley a motorway viaduct was lit up with purple floodlights, making its long, concrete legs look elegant. I found a café-bar with WiFi. It was pretty nice to be able to catch up with my wife over a coffee with a call on WhatsApp without worrying about the mounting cost.
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| A street in Dmitrovgrad, a little smarter than those in Dragoman |
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