26. Greece through Yugoslavia into Austria! 1970

We decided to push on to Thessaloniki, arriving at dusk.  I had told the people that were traveling with me about selling blood there a few weeks ago and two of the people decided to do that before they traveled on to Southern Greece.  The rest of us were heading north to Austria through Yugoslavia.  We spent the night at the youth hostel and were joined by two more people the next morning on our journey.  We headed north towards the Yugoslavia border.  We picked this way because the owner wanted to head directly to The Netherlands and also for my comfort.  If we went the straightest way we would have driven through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Hungary.  I had just completed a military tour of duty at an intelligence gathering site in Turkey that March.  Because of the security clearance I held, I was supposed to avoid all communist bloc countries for, I think, five years.  Although I was partly rebelling, I felt I could not completely ignore those rules, so we picked a route avoiding all those countries except Yugoslavia, which we felt we could argue was independent from the Soviet Union because Tito was their President and he maintained  his country was independent from the soviet bloc!  This way it was also only one border crossing from Greece into and one border crossing out of Yugoslavia into Austria.  Today in 2013, our route would take us from Greece into Macedonia, then through Serbia.  Then after crossing into Croatia we would have skirted the borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina alongside Croatia and finally into Slovenia before crossing into Austria. This took us two days.

I drew the short straw and had to sit in the front seat being pounded by the hot air from the broken heater.  Because we picked up two new riders and were not sure if they carried drugs, we all went through customs separately again. We crossed the border at Evznoi Greece to Gevgelija, Yugoslavia, now Gevgelija, Macedonia. There was not too much I remember from this portion of my trip.  The roads were usually paved but not all.  It seemed that we spent the first half of the day climbing over or through mountains and with the little Volkswagen engine it was hot and slow going.  I do remember after going through one pass we stopped at a petrol station and one of our company traded a tie dyed shirt along with a Janis Joplin and a Jimi Hendrix tee shirt for a tank of gas.

We knew we would be camping that night and after passing Belgrade we came across a farmers market in a small village and decided to shop for our supper.  We saw some vegetables we liked and went over to the farmer.  After traveling as long as we have, we always seemed to end up with a small handful of coins from all the countries we have visited.  Their language was completely "foreign" to us and no one spoke English.  I reached into my pocket and pulled out some small Turkish coins called kuruş and pointed to some potatoes.  The lady looked in my hand and picked out a coin, maybe a 25 kuruş coin, and started putting potatoes in my net bag.  There must have been close to three kilos.  I could not believe how many she gave me!  One of the girls with us was doing the same thing with tomatoes.  I remember nodding my head in thanks and starting to turn around and the woman grabbing my arm, reaching into her apron and giving me two other coins back!  I could have lived like a king there!!!

We got back on the road and about four or five miles from Zagreb on a side road, we stopped for the night and off to the side built a small cooking/bonfire.  We gorged ourselves on fresh tomatoes and fire baked potatoes.  The only downer to our trip through Yugoslavia was to come that night as we were trying to sleep.  It seemed to us that this part of the country was home to the worlds biggest and meanest mosquitoes.  We slept completely enclosed in our sleeping bags and yet they were still able to get to us by biting through the bags.  Needless to say, we got an early start the next day and circled around Zagreb into Austria.

What we had done was gradually climb up through the plateaus in Yugoslavia  and as we were crossing into Austria the mountain scenery was beautiful.  We actually got to see a lot of scenery that day because we spent a great deal of time walking.  The  Volkswagen van that we were riding in was completing its fourth  round trip circuit on the hippie trail and the engine was wearing out.  As we were crossing some of the alps, we actually got out twice going up the passes and walked next to the van with our backpacks chanting "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can" encouraging the little engine that could as the Volkswagen engine labored along.  As time passed we actually beat the van to the top of the pass once we were sure we would not have to push it.  The van made it up to the top of the pass to cheers of other people waiting to see if we would actually make it.  After that, it seemed almost all downhill to Salzberg Austria and the next youth hostel.