Zagreb, Belgrade and Sofia (2022)

After rediscovering posts from my old ivodr.com blog, I decided to bring my travel stories back to life—making them accessible again and preserving the memories of an incredible journey I returned from just over two years ago.

This is Post #4. More stories to come!

📍 Find all my travel posts here.

Zagreb

I spent the first two days couchsurfing at Josip’s place. He is a super experienced traveller and I learned a lot from him. We reduced the weight of my luggage by about 3kg and he gave me a lot of advice about hitchhiking and traveling in general.

Then I moved to another couchsurfing host, Dunja. Dunja was super kind, we went for long walks with long conversations, practiced yoga and I even got to play guitar one evening.

It wasn’t easy to say goodby, but after four days in Zagreb I felt it was time to go, and decided to hitchhike to Belgrade.

Despite waiting for almost two hours at the toll station in Zagreb, the day was great and I hitched rides with four very kind people. Each of them went out of his way to help me: the first driver drove over 30 extra kilometers in order to bring me to the toll station, the second driver treated me for lunch and brought me to the Serbian border and the third picked up right after the crossing (without me even asking) and drove me over the Danube river to the first Serbian village. The last one picked me up within 5 minutes and brought me all the way to Belgrade (I had heavily underestimated how long it would take and without that ride I wouldn’t have made it) and told me what busses to take to get to the city center.

Belgrade

My first day in Belgrade was special, and it was the first time during this trip that I was outside my comfort zone. My host was a very kind person and had many exclusively positive references on couchsurfing, but his sexual jokes made me feel quite uncomfortable. His TV was permanently showing porn and he was smoking inside the house (which I knew from his profile description). All in all I still felt safe enough to stay with him. We had some good conversations where he shared a lot about his life and it was beautiful to observe how my initially quite reductive picture of him opened up, revealing that he too is just another human being that has gone through a lot and who only wants to be well. Despite feeling connected and relatively comfortable, I decided to move to a hostel for the next night.

During the next two days I explored the city, relaxed, practiced yoga and meditation and met some really nice people. The highlight was the last evening, where after having re-visited to Saint Sava Temple (my absolutely favorite place in Belgrade) and having found a bakery (I had been craving for pastry since a few days) on my way home I met Malika who couldn’t find her hostel. I brought her to mine and started sharing pastry. People came out of their rooms to join us and we ended up being 9 people from 9 nationalities having a super beautiful time together.

Malika decided to join me hitchhiking the day after, and we left after a spectacular Börek breakfast (Pekara Slavija) :D. Hitchhiking together was great, and we were super lucky with our rides. After a few hours we were in Niš already and decided to try going all the way to Sofia. Even more luck led to a turkish truck driver to stopping on the highway and to pick us up. Since we didn’t have internet and he couldn’t speak English we could hardly communicate, but we still exchanged a lot of warmth and it was amazing!!! At the border to Bulgaria, Malika and me left him and crossed the border by foot - taking the time to enjoy ice cream and the sunset!

Sofia

While still waiting at the border, a driver who had already passed the border called us and asked if he should take us to Sofia. We agreed and after waiting for us he drove us all the way to our hostel in Sofia. We stayed a the lovely Kooltoor hostel and explored the city during the day. I can definitely recommend the Sofia free food tour - arguably the first worldwide. In the evening we took a bus to Istanbul.

Appendix: A few notes about hitchhiking

• My main resource is hitchwiki.org. It contains useful information about hitchhiking in general and more importantly, for every city I visited it had detailed instructions on how to hitch out of it (for every major direction). This is incredibly useful because the place you wait is the major factor determining whether you will get a good ride ro not.
• Every hitchhiker I met so far told me hitchhiking is safe and they haven't had or heard of anyone who has had bad experiences with drivers.