The next stage of our journey took us through Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia and Bulgaria but we just passed through without doing any sightseeing. For our first stop we made for a campsite across the border into Serbia. The road through Bosnia close to the border with Montenegro looked very windy (this means mountainous) so we started early.
The journey was fine and we stopped in a small campsite called Camping Viljamovka in Kremna (N43° 50′ 42″ E19° 34′ 26″) finding ourselves in a pear orchard managed by a very friendly chap called Jarko who insisted that we tried the pear brandy that he makes. The only other people staying were a Dutch couple on motorbikes travelling to Turkey.
The following day we again set off early and driving through Serbia saw a wonderful stork’s nest with youngsters craning their necks and lots of cows wandering on the roads which reminded us of India.
That second evening we reached Sofia in Bulgaria and managed to stay at a small motorhome stop in Park4Nite on 220 Bulevard. There are two MH stops in Sofia and this is the one in the back garden of an older couple. The gate was closed and padlocked but there was a bell to left. Eventually a very friendly man called Ivan welcomed us in. It’s a smallish area but he managed to pack in nine vans, and some pretty big. It was fairly basic but had everything we needed. By that time it was quite late and we asked Ivan if there was a restaurant nearby. He pointed towards a tower block and said we’d find everything there – restaurant, gym, swimming pool … We eventually found the restaurant, but it wasn’t the usual traditional type of restaurant in surroundings that we would normally seek out. Still, the people were friendly, someone spoke English and we had very tasty pizzas and salad.
Driving through the four countries we became aware of some of the differences. Croatia has a lot of tourism and people had wonderful gardens with beautiful flowers. In Bosnia Herzegovina any land around a house was given over to growing vegetables. Serbia had some amazingly ugly buildings. The part of Bulgaria that we drove through was very industrial with chimneys belching smoke and a pollution haze covering valleys, although the south west also had a forested national park and was very beautiful.
This was the first time we’d driven in the van outside western Europe and outside the EU/Schengen. We had forgotten about queues at borders!! It was quite usual to spend one to two hours waiting to get through the border, and having to show the van registration document and my driving licence. And for the lorries it was much much longer.
Autogas: virtually every garage sells GPL so no problems there.