Dobar dan !My serbian adventure started a couple of years ago when I decided to join the Meetup’s anglophile group for a biking tour from Lille to the Mosaic park in Houplin Ancoisne, so for the first time I met Neda, my serbian friend and Christophe, her boyfriend….

a fine spring day which continued with some of us in a bar along the Deule for a drink…and ended in a restaurant, I don’t remember its name, but the best, according to Christophe, for welsh, I agree with him, it was so “nourishing” that I never tried any other since that time.
So I want to introduce blueplum escape, the travelling organization created by Neda and Christophe based on ecotourism which proposes active holidays in the Tara National Park in Serbia and the best way is to go on with the pictures and comments in the following messages.

Meeting of the five “tourists” in Charleroi : our french-british, so french and sometimes so british  Bryony,

…Sandrine

..Patricia and Marcus (a German guy living in Lille)

2 hours later we arrive in Belgrade where Christophe welcomes us with the schedule for our following day in Belgrade and we join our respective guesthouses, Hostelbridge for Patrica and me, a very cosy and charming hostel hold by Ivana and Andrea.

Neda and Christophe had  made a reservation for a guided bike tour in Belgrade. Early in the morning, the temperature is already high when we arrive at our meeting point. Our guide informs us that we will visit new Belgrade which is the only flat part of Belgrade for biking, indeed ! So we start along the Danube which is really blue, probably due to the colour of the sky.

Our guide shows us from there the fortress with its most popular symbol, the Victor,

and then we take an elevator to arrive at the top of the bridge, and we cross it  to arrive in new Belgrade. We pass through some old public buildings, which are  the heritage of the communist period…and we arrive in the very nice quarter of Zemun, a small stop for a drink near the Danube, in a shady place, it was very nice !

Our comeback is hard due to a higher and higher temperature, and then, as recommended by our guide, we arrive in a small and typical serbian restaurant, and we appreciate the warm welcome (in a relatevly fresh place) of our host who suggests us some delicious dishes, specially the “dish of the day”, (stewed mutton, hmmmm !).

Then we get to the fortress area….

and each of us appreciate a stop in the bar for irish coffee, icecream, turkish coffee a..s.o…and then we wander the main street of Belgrade which is so peaceful, as much as the inhabitants,  before coming back to our guesthouse.

Now we have to leave the Tara Park area and come back to Belgrade.
Along the road, we visit a famous distillery and after the visit of the production plant (it is the period of the production of apricot rakia, it is smelling good), we are going to the commercial place where we have the opportunity to taste several kinds of rakias, our last alcoholic excess time !

We arrive in Belgrade in the afternoon and happy to return to Hostelbridge and for the dinner, we are going to the famous street of Belgrade in which each restaurant has its own music group (normally playing gypsie music) but we are wrong when we say that we are French,  their pleasure is playing French music for French people  !!