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 Here is the bike locked up outside the Hotel Car, although even in Cyrillic, I don't know what that first letter on the sign is supposed to be. Pretty much all the Serbian writing inside the hotel uses Roman letters. The choice of alphabet for anything seems pretty arbitrary. I would have to move the bike under cover later when a violent thunderstorm brought some of the heaviest rain I have ever seen. The woman running the hotel said it wasn't unusual to have weather like that here but even she looked alarmed to see water pouring out of an electrical conduit. The forecast did show heavy showers for the next few days. I hope they all happen at night. I liked the restaurant here. It didn't follow the normal format of choosing things from a menu. I was the only person eating there and whenever I was nearing the end of a course, if it looked like I wasn't full, the chap running the restaurant would suggest something else that he could heat up and have ready for me by the time my plate was empty. Some people might not like food which was so obviously pre-prepared but it got me fed quickly and remarkably cheaply and the texture of the meat was really quite good. The other odd thing about the hotel is that my room is two rooms knocked together. That means that it has plenty of space but, bizarrely, two en-suite bathrooms. It took me a while to work out what was going on when I walked into the second one. It wasn't easy to find the place though. It didn't help that the on-line description which I had read said the hotel was next to the river when it's actually a good kilometre away. Perhaps it just meant that the town is next to the river.Google Maps only show major roads in this region, my pocket atlas of Serbia isn't much better and I only found two large public maps of the town, one of which was printed so badly it was illegible. To make things worse, not many of the roads seem to have signs giving their names. At one stage, I was just going to number 64 of every road and looking if it was a hotel. In different parts of the town, I showed the address I wanted to a policeman and a taxi driver. They both had to think hard about it. They were probably trying to think how to explain it in English, rather than just getting the job done by gesturing and miming like an Italian would have done, but at the time it gave the worrying impression that it had been a long time since anybody had mentioned the Hotel Car to them. After more than an hour, I was struggling up one of the town's steeper hills and wondering whether to phone the hotel or just park the bike and get into a taxi when, of all things, a British car, something I haven't seen since Venice, pulled into a driveway immediately across the road from me. Its occupants confirmed that the hotel was just a few hundred metres away but I think we were al surprised to see each other. UTC Time: 17:36, Saturday 20 June 2009 Local Time: 19:36, Saturday 20 June 2009 Estimate of longitude: 20° 55' 54.25" E = 20.931736° Estimate of latitude: 44° 39' 21.28" N = 44.655911° Possible error on position estimate: 1000 metres | |