Member Since: 11 May 2006
Location: Off again! :-)
Posts: 73121
I so know that feeling!!
25th Feb 2021 8:24 pm
noeyedear
Member Since: 28 Feb 2021
Location: Manchester
Posts: 2
Despite what some others have said, after seemingly never having visited the Balkans?
I've done uk - venice -patras -athens where I lived for a while and then after touring around Greece we headed back north winding our way around through the western/central Balkans roughly:
Greece - Albania - Macedonia - Albania - Kosovo - Montenegro - Croatia - B&H - Serbia - Croatia...
Then carried on towards Switzerland where we were heading, hence why we didn't go too far east into Bulgaria or Romania, so I can't comment on those.
But everywhere we did go to was absolutely fine, we were very obviously tourists as we were sleeping in a Honda Jazz with a bike on the back and GB plates Usually stopping in the end of nowhere and we always felt safe and slept with the windows down as it was a hot summer.
We were mooching around fairly slowly in general but it was quite easy to smash out a few hundred miles when we wanted to.
Insurance was bought on the borders and was relatively cheap. apart from Serbia where I tried to on entering and was told to visit a police station, where after a long conversation involving a random bloke on speakerphone translating, the outcome was basically 'do it the Serbian way' which was don't bother buying insurance! So on we went.
This was all in 2017.
5th Mar 2021 7:59 pm
jaqoda
Member Since: 23 Jan 2019
Location: Manchester
Posts: 167
^ exactly
My parents in their 70s have driven around both Bosnia and Albania with no problems at all. Only thing to watch out for is you need to buy insurance going into Albania, think it was around £50
6th Mar 2021 11:02 am
astonbuilder
Member Since: 29 Sep 2006
Location: MIDLANDS
Posts: 8147
We did a road trip in 2019 and went as far south as Montenegro. Had some 'concerns' about Bosnia & Hercegovina but never had a single issue or felt threatened in any way, one of our best holidays I'd say all in.
We took our Evoque rather than the more ostentatious RRS and it was still in the top ten 'best/newest/poshest' cars we saw once south of Slovakia. All our hotels had 'secure parking' but at its loosest this was on the roadside surrounded by big logs with a man-in-a-hut watching over it, at its best it was a brick garage with extra locks inside an underground garage with armed security at the entrance......
The culture/history we experienced from the 'in our lifetime' wars down there was sobering but well worth experiencing.
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