Wandergliding

November 8^th, 2026

My bus to Skopje left at 10:40 am from Niš and it was a pleasant trip…

The bus station in Niš.

So many people smoke cigarettes in Serbia...that even the buses do!

An impressive overpass crossing right through a small town in Serbia.

A typical town in Serbia.

…although there was a little stress crossing into North Macedonia. Our bus pulled up to the border crossing and stopped about 50 meters before the customs booth.

Approaching the border crossing.

A border guard came onboard and asked for everyone’s ID. I was near the front of the bus and presented my Canadian passport. He asked what my purpose of my visit was, “Tourist” I responded. “Where are you coming from?” “Niš”. “How much money do you have?”, to which I replied that I had about 100 Euros and $300 American. I later saw a sign about it being illegal to bring too much cash into the country, which seemed to be one of the border guards’ biggest concerns. Happy with my answers, he moved on to the next person.

The guy in the row behind me answered that he was on a business trip. The officer continued questioning the rest of the passengers and then returned to the businessman and he was asked to get off the bus and then I saw out of the window that he had to retrieve his luggage from the storage compartment of the bus. I thought, “Poor guy, that sucks to have be pulled aside at the border”.

While that was happening, the rest of us on the bus were instructed to get off the bus and walk up to the customs booth. One by one, people presented their passports and once cleared, were then told to walk to over to the other side of the lane, near the end of the covered border crossing area.

I walked up, gave the female officer my Canadian passport and she asked, “Do you have a hotel reservation?”. I pulled up a WhatsApp conversation and showed her the details of my accommodation in Skopje. She told me to stand on behind the booth, where another lady in her 50s was already standing. It seemed like we were both going to secondary questioning…oh dear.

The tall brunette border guard exited the booth, took us back to the bus to gather our belongings and then we followed her to a building off to the left of the lanes and custom booths. I was trying to figure out why I was singled out and I have to admit, my heart was pounding a little bit faster than normal, even though I knew that there was nothing that I should be worried about.

She opened a door inside the building, and it seemed to be the locker room of the staff. There were three male guards eating their lunch on a long table. Okay, this seems a bit weird. The guard first questioned the other woman, and it sounded like she was a janitor, but I wasn’t sure of her nationality, whether she was Serbian or North Macedonian. The officer did a cursory search of her bags and then told her to go and join the other passengers and the male guards got up and left as well.

Now it was my turn. I unzipped my backpack and opened it up. She asked me what my job was and knowing that it might be tough to explain, I’d already pulled up the Freedom Flight School’s webpage on my phone to show her what a paraglider was. She performed a basic search of my backpack and daypack. She found my money belt in my daypack and pulled out my British passport. “Why do you have two passports?” I explained that I was born in England. And that was it. She told me to pack up my bags and head out to the bus.

I’m not really sure what triggered the secondary treatment, perhaps it was random, but as Naomi later messaged to me, single men travelling by themselves can look suspicious…and you know us Canadians, we can be dodgy fellows…

Well, welcome to North Macedonia Dave! This is the last of the seven countries for me to visit that comprised the former Yugoslavia. The other six are Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, Kosovo and Serbia. I visited the first five back in 2010 when I had “Betty”, my troublesome campervan that I bought in England. If you look back in my blog back in August of 2010, you’ll see my trapse through that area.

Well, maybe not the best "first photo" to take of the country with what looks like a few power plant chimney stacks, but it is what it is.

As I’ve done for most of this trip, I decided to walk from the bus/train station to my accommodation. Google Maps showed me a few routes, and I decided to take the one that ran along the river. That was a good call. I must admit, I’d done next to no research about Skopje, and I was quite surprised what I found.

Some nice autumn coloured trees along the riverside.

The first thing that I saw along the river was this crazy looking, tall, brown sailing ship, which really didn’t look like it was seaworthy, and it most definitely wasn’t river-worthy, especially when the river is only 4-5 feet deep! It became obvious as I got closer that it was on stilts and it was or used to be a restaurant. It had definitely seen better days. There was another one further up stream that was still operational and the sign said that it was not only a restaurant but a hotel as well. Gosh, I couldn’t imagine wanting to stay there.

The surprises continued. Across the river where a couple of Neoclassical buildings, one with these massive white columns that looked like it belonged in Rome or Athens. I later found out that it was the Museum of Archaeology.

Then there were statues…and statues…and more statues. They were everywhere. I think I saw between 50-70 statues in my 10-minute walk through the center of the city. I did a search online later that evening and it turns out there may be upwards of 300 statues in this city!

A massive statue of Alexander the Great.

Since I hadn’t done any research before arriving in Skopje, but I have to say, my initial impressions were totally not what I expected.

I went out for dinner at a place called "Pub Porta".

Let’s see what I discover tomorrow as I take a walkabout the city centre.

November 5^th-6^th, 2026

My bus departed at 9 am from the Belgrade Bus Terminal, which was too far away to walk to from my accommodation. My destination was the third largest city in Serbia, Niš, with approximately 250,000 inhabitants. The place I had selected on Booking.com only accepted cash, and for some reason they preferred Euros over Serbian Dinars. I did a quick search online and found an ATM that I should be able to withdraw Euros, and it was on my route to the bus terminal but that meant I would have to take two different city buses. Unfortunately, it turned out that the ATM only dispensed dinars, but I figured that would have to do.

This is the only blue sky that I have seen in four days in Belgrade!

Google Maps took me towards a major highway which was near a bridge to cross the Sava River to New Belgrade, where the bus terminal was located. Well, Google was a bit wrong with its directions, and it took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to reach the bus stop that was located near an underpass. I was thankful that I had left early as I showed up at the terminal with 20 minutes to spare.

However, figuring out the bus terminal took a little while too. Even though I already had a ticket I had bought online, looking at the information screens, I wasn’t 100% sure which was my platform. So, I waited in the line for tickets, and it was a good thing as I needed a ticket, which only cost the equivalent of a couple of dollars, to access the platform. That’s a new one. You’d think that could be included in your bus ticket. There was also a complication with the turnstile to get into the men’s bathroom (which also cost a dollar) but I did make it to my bus.

The bus was quite full and initially I sat down in the middle seat, right at the back of the bus, but then a hefty man in his late 50s, sitting in the aisle seat one row ahead, gestured towards the window seat beside him. Not really thinking, I accepted his offer but initially regretted it as it was a tight fit with the guy in front of me fully reclined in his seat. The guy beside me said hello and stated that his English wasn’t very good. Well, it was a lot better than my Serbian I retorted, as all I knew was “hello” and “thank you” in his language.

One of my better shots of the Belgrade Tower as the bus motored down the expressway.

We chatted for the next twenty minutes as the bus pulled out of Belgrade. His name was Jovan (John in Serbian) and he was on his was to visit some friends in a town of around 40,000 people called Aleksinac, which was about a half an hour before my destination. He was an amateur photographer, and he was headed there to shoot some landscape. He was a super friendly guy, and I enjoyed our brief connection.

A suburb of Belgrade that Jovan said was called "Nuns", or at least that was the literal translation to English.

My new Serbian friend Jovan at our rest stop half way through the trip.

Arriving in Niš (pronounced “neesh”), I had a 15-minute walk to my accommodation. I had been told send a message via Booking.com when I arrived in the city, but when I showed up at the front door of the six-storey building, there was no one there. I had been sent some photos of the outside, the Wi-Fi password and a picture of a QR Code that was accompanied by some Serbian text.

Crossing the Nišava River on my way to my place.

The front door of the building was locked, and for some reason I thought that perhaps the QR Code opened the door, so I held it up to the keypad. After a few attempts, the door was open. I walked up the six floors and found the door that matched the photo I had…but there was no one there. I sent another message stating that I was at the apartment and about 10-minutes later I heard a guy running up the steps. He was probably around 60 years old, and now out of breath. Well, I’ll give him credit for his effort. It turned out that the place still needed to be cleaned so he asked if I could come back in 45 minutes. No problem I told him.

I took a walk towards the historic part of town and found “Tinker’s Alley”, a narrow, pedestrian-only strip with a few cafés and restaurants. I found a place for a drink while I waited, and again, I was inundated by the cigarette smoke of other patrons. I’m so glad we got rid of this in Canada!

An intersection near my place.

Tinker's Alley.

After settling in, I went for a slightly more extended walk around the center of town, but I needed to find a place for lunch. Searching online, an Irish pub called “Crazy Horse” caught my eye. I ended up staying there for a few hours as I caught up on some blogging. Afterwards, I grabbed some Indian food to take back to my nice apartment to watch a movie that evening.

A monument to the Liberators in King Milan's Square, which commemorates the struggles and liberation of Niš and Serbia from Ottoman rule and through the Balkan Wars and World War I.

A monument depicting Emperor Constantine the Great.

The entrance to the Niš Fortress, which I plan to visit tomorrow.

Inside the Crazy Horse Pub.

That's a rare sight to me in a pub...a big stack of ashtrays!

However, I did have some difficulty getting into the building. The QR Code that seemed to work earlier was not functioning now. After a number of attempts, and contemplating trying to contact the manager via Booking.com which I knew would take a while to receive a response, if I even received one, I decided to walk around the building and try the back door. Thankfully it was open. The following day I messaged the manager and it was only then that he told me that the code for the front door was 123#...that would have been nice to know sooner!

Check out my pad.

The next day, my full day in Niš, I had three items on my list for the day. Similar to Belgrade, the public transport in this city is free, which just makes things so simple as a visitor.

Number one on my list, was the “Skull Tower”. It sounded promising…well, it wasn’t too impressive. It is a stone structure embedded with human skulls which is now housed within a chapel. It was constructed by the Ottoman Empire following the Battle of Čegar of May 1809.

The chapel.

During the battle, Serbian rebels under the command of Stevan Sinđelić were surrounded by the Ottomans near Niš. Knowing that he and his fighters would be impaled if captured, Sinđelić detonated a powder magazine within the rebel entrenchment, killing himself, his subordinates and the encroaching Ottoman soldiers. A tower was made from the skulls of the fallen rebels. The tower is 4.5 metres high and originally contained 952 skulls embedded on four sides in 14 rows, but there aren’t many left now. I only spent about five minutes inside the chapel.

The tower inside the chapel.

This is thought to be the skull of the leader, Stevan Sinđelić.

Perhaps I’ve been “spoiled” as I’ve seen some more impressive displays/memorials/ossuaries of human bones such as the Sedlec Ossuary near Prague, a church with the bones of 40,000-70,000 people complete with a chandelier made from human bones or the stupa at the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Regardless, whenever I see something like this, I can’t help but look at a skull and think “I wonder what that person looked like? What kind of life did they have?” and other questions along those lines.

To keep this “upbeat, happy” theme going, why not visit the site of a former Nazi concentration camp?!? That was next on my list for the day. Known as the “Red Cross Concentration Camp” (Crveni Krst in the local language), it was operated by the German Gestapo and it was used to hold Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-Fascists during WWII. Established in October 1941, between 30,000 and 35,000 people were detained within it during the war.

A memorial outside of the camp.

Approaching the entrance.

Crveni Krst is one of the few Nazi concentration camps in Europe whose facilities have been preserved in their entirety, and the only one in the former Yugoslavia to hold this distinction.

In April of 1941, Nazi forces invaded Yugoslavia and although the Yugoslavian army was quickly defeated, there was some resistance by the Serbians. Unable to bring reinforcements due to the need to send soldiers to the Eastern Front, the Germans responded to the revolt by declaring that one-hundred Serbs would be executed for every German soldier killed and that fifty would be executed for every German soldier wounded. By October 1941, this policy had resulted in the deaths of 25,000 Serbs.

This is a wall where prisoners were lined up and shot. You can still see some bullet pockmarks on the wall.

A memorial for those executed here.

What the place looked like during the war.

It's hard to see, but there's straw on the floor around the perimeter of the wall. My guess was that was where the prisoners slept.

This is a depiction of an escape that occurred on February 12th, 1942. Almost 150 inmates attempted to escape by hurling themselves group after group against the barbed wire fences as they were under the impression that they were going to be executed in the following days. Forty-two were killed in the process, but the remaining 105 successfully managed to evade capture. It was one of the largest mass escapes from any Nazi camp. The Germans retaliated by executing the remaining prisoners.

A prisoner's garb.

The top floor of the main building had small cells for solitary confinement.

After the war, a memorial to the victims of the camp was erected at Bubanj, where many inmates were shot. I wasn’t aware of the memorial park while I was there and would have made an effort to go and see the stark and moving monument of three concrete fists thrusting into the sky.

A photo I found online of the memorial at Bubanj.

The concentration camp wasn’t too far from the bus station so I knew that I could walk back towards the town center, but taking a slightly different way so I would pass through the Niš Fortress. It rises on the right bank of the Nišava River, overlooking the area inhabited for longer than two millennia. Built between 1721-1723 by the Ottomans, it has eight bastion terraces and four massive gates. In the present day, most of the fort is a grassy park area, there is also an amphitheatre and a few cafés and souvenir stalls. I’m sure it’s a bustling place on a nice summer day.

This was a school near the concentration camp. It looked pretty run down and it's hard to see but just by the cars on the right are broken windows and rusted steel. To add to the direness of the spot, there was a dead puppy in the middle of the dirt road who had obviously been hit by a car.

I thought this was interesting...again, hard to see, but there are some basketball courts nestled in by the outer walls of the fortress, perhaps once where there was a moat.