You’ve just got to love a castle on a hill on a river

I always had a thing about princesses and castles. Not the modern day, smartly-dressed, (un)consciously entitled variety, but the – yes I’ll admit it – stuff of fairytales. Early drawings at school were princesses in pointy cone-shaped headdresses with gauzy veils waving jauntily from the top, gowns with huge billowing sleeves and indecent bodices with a good expanse of bosom … all drawn of course with the innocence of a child. Even these days I thrill to a good princess story. I have devoured Phillippa Gregory’s Wars of the Roses and Tudor era novels  and binge-watched the Tudor series on TV. So it is with great joy that I discover (being somewhat of a travel pantser¹) that today we will not only come close to an ancient castle (all right, all right it is a fortress – but it looks like a castle to me), but will actually ride through the fortress gates as we head into the reputedly beautiful Iron Gate Gorge. I had read about the gorge prior to the trip, but reading about places does not often gel properly in my head until I actually arrive . So here we are, at Srebrno Jezero (Silver Lake), and poised to start on our way along the most beautiful part of the Danube.

We wake at Villa Lago, breakfast at the restaurant next door, and pack ourselves up ready to leave. Our bikes are filthy and the drive trains gritty so we perform our our occasional ritual of cleaning our bikes, drive trains and all, with baby wipes, to the amusement of passers by.

Our host, Tanja is most concerned that we have been treated well by her fellow Serbians, and cannot do enough for us. When I walk out the front door of the hotel early in the morning, iPad in hand, searching for wifi, she demands to know what I am looking for. When I say I am searching for accommodation at our next stopping point Donji Milanovac (we haven’t found much in the way of accommodation except for a roundly-dissed communist-style hotel) she tells me not to worry. Donji Milanovac is a “city” and there will be plenty of places to stay. (Read on, for it turns out our Donji Milanovac is no city and accommodation is hard to come by.)

She sticks around as we get ready to leave and helps me with my bike as I load it up. She talks about her life as a volleyball player – which makes me wonder if every tall Serbian woman we will meet will be a volleyball player – and tells us how her husband won gold  at the Sydney Olympics. Neil and I both think there is a good chance that we each may have seen him play – separately, as the Sydney Olympics pre-date “us”. Some later research suggests that her husband is Slobodan Kovač, who was born in this area, and is considered a legend of the game. It also looks like, as parents, they have created a next-generation volleyball player Davide Kovač. And to give credit where it is roundly due, her name is Tanja Bilbija Kovač. “She won seven titles and national cups of the country at the time. She was European champion, bronze medalist at the world club championship and a long-time member of the national team.”

We head off with her waving goodbye, and rejoin EV6 as it winds along a bike track beside the river, for a brief time before turning onto the streets of nearby town Veliko Gradište. We are riding along a busy-ish main street when a man calls out from his car window. It turns out he is the owner of the local bike shop, and wants to ask if we need anything. When we say no, we are OK, he asks where we are headed and starts suggesting places we might visit. We both really had the feeling that he was trying to be helpful rather than touting for business.

On we went, arriving into Golubac a lovely riverside town with a view of the very wide river, the Golubac fortress and the start of the gorge, where the river suddenly narrows from six kilometres across to just one kilometre. We stop for a drink and to take in the view, then set off again. I am pretty excited as this is shaping up to be a great day: the weather is brilliant, and we have the Iron Gate gorge in front of us. It is only 4km from the town to the fortress. Unfortunately for us, but I guess fortunately for future visitors, the fortress is being renovated, so has lots of scaffolding, workers and fluoro around it, but we still have the thrill of riding through the gates, as the road passes directly through. From the other side we have lovely views of the fortress (less construction-ey the further we get away from it) and the dramatically narrowed river. We are on the Serbian side of the river, with Romania maybe only a single kilometre away.

We bowl along the road, enjoying blue skies, sunshine and the lovely views. One feature of the road through the Iron Gate Gorge is a series of 21 tunnels, many of which we pass through today. Some are quite short so that you can see the daylight at the other end as soon as you enter. Others are longer – up to 200 or nearly 300m – and they are a bit more hairy. We are a little handicapped in our light situation. I don’t really have a front light as it doesn’t fit with my rig, which includes a bulky handlebar bag that holds my camera, and for some reason Neil doesn’t have a working rear light. We take all the tunnels on as a convoy, riding close together with Neil and his front light ahead and me with my rear light right on his wheel. Luckily we get through all the tunnels today without mishap, but is is a lesson to us both to be sure we have adequate lighting throughout the entire trip.

We stop in Dobra hoping to find lunch but, like so many other small villages in this part of the world, the best we can find is a bar where the men of the town drink and a young woman of the town serves them. We make do with soft drinks and peanuts (lots of peanuts) and hope we will find good food at our destination.

Back on the road we reach a junction. We can continue along the main road, or head down (and then up up UP again) to visit a museum that depicts findings of ancient people around here. After some deliberation we head down. First things first, we get ice cream from the little café there, then take a wander around down closer to the river. We decide against visiting the museum, as we have left our bikes and worldly goods back in the public car park near the café. The way we’ve been treated so far in Serbia, we’re almost expecting somebody to be there guarding our bikes after finishing a clean and polish on them!

We mount up, and have to ride a steep hill out of the car park, and round what turns into a bit of a goat track under a bridge (the main road) into a rather lovely gorge. The climb out of the gorge is steep and rather long, and we find ourselves back on the main road, but with an amazing view of the river, fields and hay ricks right in front of us. Even without visiting the museum (for which we are well admonished in a day or so’s time) the side trip was worth it, even taking into account the climb.

From here we have only a short 12km ride into Donji Milanovac. That is fairly uneventful, with an easy downhill run. This town is not city (thanks Tanja!) but a small, almost sleepy town. It has a central area nearby the river, but a distinct lack of obvious accommodation besides rooms in people’s houses. We are in two minds here – to stay two nights and do a cruise along the river, or to spend one night and continue on to Kladavo where we may also be able to take a river cruise, or even cross into Romania.

We head to the visitor information centre to find out about river cruises. There are not a plethora of these available. There is one. It is a small boat cruise (good), and costs 120 euro, for up to six people. The guy at the centre does his level best to talk us out of it, because he obviously thinks that is far too much to spend. He says he would try to find out if anybody else is interested as well, because, “It would be better to be four people paying 30 euro each rather than the two of you having to pay 120 euro”. He also says that he will be able to find us accommodation. We go off to think about what we want to do, and  find ourselves at a riverside Kafe Bar Teuta with very helpful wifi. We do some planning (and have a drink) and figure that we would really like to do the river cruise, so we will stay the two nights. We go back to the visitor centre and our very helpful man finds us a homestay. We will be spending the next two nights with Dragiča, who he says is a lovely lady and who has agreed to do our laundry. We will even get one of the treasured white slips for staying there, organised by the visitor centre.

So, off we go to find our place. We have several false starts, following the directions given, but do not find the place. Eventually our man at the visitor centre grows sick of us coming back to ask, and he walks part of the way with us. We find our hostess waiting for us in the street, and she takes us upstairs and inside. Then takes us to her living room, where two folding couches are set up for us. There is very little space for us and remember, we are travelling more lightly than the average traveller. We have to go through the polite formalities of coffee (Neil) and discussion, which is somewhat difficult given our limited Serbian and her limited English. Our conversation goes in fits and starts, and we have to do a lot of guessing (and making wrong guesses I might add). She also speaks Romanian, so we try a bit of that, but with no greater success. She starts to teach me some Romanian words and numbers, but that is only entertainment; it isn’t going to help us communicate any better!

Eventually we leave the house and head into town to find dinner. We have another drink at Kafe Bar Teuta, then go to the street that has a few restaurants, settling on one where the man working there comes out and is quite helpful. Being a vegetarian is still a tricky thing. I end up with cheese (not the fried kind, just slices of cheese), chips, and and the  ubiquitous Srpska salad (tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, with grated cheese on top). Just as well I love tomatoes! After dinner we go back to Kafe Bar Teuta again. We also go to the visitor centre and make a very loose arrangement for the boat trip tomorrow: we are to go down there at 8am and see what can be arranged.

We doss down on our couches in Dragiča’s house. I go to sleep thinking what a brilliant day I’ve had!

Notes:
1. Pantser is a term used by writers to describe somebody who doesn’t really plot, but writes “by the seat of their pants”. The opposite is a plotter, who outlines, plots and knows exactly where their story is going. I see travellers on a scale between plotters (rigid itinerary, schedules of what they will do each and every day) and pantsers (travel by the seat of their pants with no super fixed itinerary). I lean slightly more to the pantser style of travel, which means that occasionally I am surprised by what I come across because I haven’t read the guide book and, for example, had no idea I was going to ride my bike through a medieval fortress (that looks like a castle to me) today.

Stats for today:

• Distance: 80.4km
• Climb: 387m
• Average speed: 19.9km/h
• Average temperature: 27C
• Moving time: 4:02:08
• See our ride on Strava

The beer picture

At the end of a day’s ride, our tradition is to enjoy a beer, and to photograph it for posterity. Today’s beer picture was taken at Kafe Bar Teuta with a view of the Duna and, surprisingly enough, the town’s mammoth (мамут) sculpture. This mammoth is the town’s unofficial mascot. It turns out that remains of mammoths were found nearby the town.

Along the way today: