Nis

My Aussie pals and I had a fairly painful early start from the hostel followed by a long walk with the bags to Belgrade station. It was our own fault really, we'd hit the local beer pretty hard and at 7% I can assure you, it's not for the faint hearted! After a quick Burek (look it up, it's a very common and extremely unhealthy Slavic snack) we got on board a graffiti ridden train and left the city at between 3 and 4 miles per hour. No really, it went that slowly for about 20 minutes before hitting the open countryside where we trundled along at about 40 mph for about 5 hours. Once we had arrived at our destination we stored the bags at the station and jumped into an ancient Peugeot taxi that looked as if it wouldn't make it to the end of the street, never mind the bus station. With great surprise we arrived alive but shaken just outside Nis's main bus station where a number of things crossed our minds. Firstly for me was the squalor. This place was seriously disgusting, overflowing bins, begging children and pavement stalls selling low grade tools and spare parts. The looks on the faces of the people were drained and lifeless as they milled around smoking heavily and doing little else. The other thing that occurred to me was the plain, unnerved expressions on all of our faces which I later fathomed was mostly down to us not really knowing each other. I think that if I was with 2 people I knew well we would have turned back and missed out on the real Nis which was a little further along the street. I mentioned this later to Matt and Hans and they agreed, I guess it's one of the positive elements of traveling with unfamiliar people.

Our next task was to find a way to get to Kosovo as we'd only come here to get a connecting bus. The bus station was little help and so we walked back down scum alley and into the city to visit no less than 4 travel agents before finding a guy with near perfect English. He gave us our only 2 options which were to get a minibus to the border about 2 hours away and hope we could get some transport on the other side or get a longer bus that took us to Mitrovica where we would definitely get a connecting bus or cab. The prospect of another long bus journey wasn't to great but neither was getting marooned at one of the most controversial border crossings in Europe. As such we opted for the longer journey but decided to stay for the night at Nis's only hostel. The hostel was good and in between telling racist jokes, the hostel owner gave us a pretty decent rundown of Serbia's history and answered some of our questions as to why it is so hard to get into Kosovo.

The next day we took our early bus to Mitrovica and sat alongside a genetic accident of a family, the Father of which pretty much pissed us off the entire journey. When he wasn't complaining about Hans putting his feet up on the armrest in front, he was busy hurling rubbish out of the window at the request of his scrawny annoying son. In keeping with the IQ level of the bus as a whole, the driver took us due north for several hours before finally heading south and in the actual direction of Mitrovica. We finally arrived at the border crossing some 4 hours after having left Nis and as expected, had our passports taken off us for further inspection. The delay caused the bus to pull over just beyond the checkpoint whilst everyone waited for the 3 of us to be re-united with our passports. Having been through some pretty intense border crossings before, Hans and I at least, were expecting the usual miserable interaction with the guard and possibly some form of interrogation. Instead, the guard re-checked each passport individually before handing them back to us and proceeded to explain what our entry card was, where we can use it and finally said whilst smiling, "Welcome to Kosovo"!