AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE EVENTS IN THIS SECTION ALL TOOK PLACE IN 1986
THINGS ARE DIFFERENT NOW ALL THE COUNTRIES VISITED ARE IN THE EU NOW (2024) – NO VISAS ARE REQUIRED
THE BULK OF THE TEXT IS AS I WROTE IT THEN – SLIGHT ADJUSTMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN THE AID OF CLARITY NOW

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Sunday, July 20th, 1986

Distance travelled 939 kilometres

The next morning, I woke up (in another lay-by) to the impressive sight of mountains all around me. One of the things that most impressed me about continental motorways was the way they actively encouraged you to pull up for a rest and also offered some good facilities when you did.

I set off again through a series of impressive tunnels and, before very long, left the motorway to head into Yugoslavia. The road, from the Austrian town of Klagenfurt, that led to the Yugoslavian border was a bit on the hairy side. It was poorly surfaced, with hair-pin bends and many gradients marked as One in Three. Luckily, the BMW had bags of torque and made fairly light work of it. I was even able to overtake numerous cars and arrived at the border in a very short time.

For what was a Communist State, the Yugoslavian border formalities were minimal. I was soon heading south-eastwards again on a fairly good road. There was scarcely any traffic once I turned off of the road that led to the coast and I again made good progress.

During the morning, near Zagreb, I was caught up by a Yugoslav ride on a custom painted BMW RS. It was beautifully done and all of the chrome had been anodised a metallic blue. We rode together, at quite a high speed, for most of the morning and even shared a beer at a service area. Unfortunately, his command of English was the same as my command of Yugoslavian (which I now know to be principally called Serbo-Croatian), that is basically nil. So apart from making admiring noises about each other’s bikes, conversation between us was minimal.

When we got to the outskirts of Belgrade, he turned off of the road with a final wave of his hand and disappeared into the city.

I continued south. I headed towards Niš, where the E5 motorway forks and I intended to turn east towards Bulgaria. After a few miles, the sun disappeared and rain came down in torrents. This continued for the rest of the day. Once I had actually made the turn towards Bulgaria, conditions became quite desperately bad. Despite the fact that I was still on what was the main euro-highway, the riding conditions were appalling. There were long stretches where the road was flooded to the depth of several inches (which was practically up to my cylinder heads) and many other places where the invisible surface was treacherous with gravel.

In the conditions, I could not find anywhere to sleep outside so, when I finally spotted an hotel, in a town called Pirot,I went for it.

After the perplexed check-in staff had called the manager to examine my Passport, they let me stay. I gratefully crashed out, having turned on the radiator to dry my saturated over-suit.