We had been dropped off a couple of kilometers outside Ivanovo by Zoran, who with his brother runs a "Executive Car Service" (comes highly recommend, Tel. 063 231 749) and has a little van, which is now our perfect option to get out of town with our bikes, and be picked up if and when the trains will let us down again! However ET still quickly feels "schlächt" in anything on four wheels, so the drop off point outside the village - she however managed a good 40km including through Pancevo, a town which was and still is heavily polluted by its local oil raffinery, and was also set on fire during the NATO bombings in 2000. So in the village shop we stack with cold drinks and then set off on the dykes, dams that follow both sides of the Sava and Danube river for 100s of kilometers!
This was also our first long stretch outside Belgrade on the Danube cycle path! We however met no other cyclists, as most travel with street bikes, and do not feel comfortable on the more gravelly and sandy tracks we love the most, and are the common cover of the trails on the dykes!
Also good, and at times very smooth and extremely fast are the more sandy pists next to the dams - here H2 set off at high speed!
Half way up to Kovin, in a little float bar which could hardly have been any more frugal (beer, coffee, coke, schweppes and rakja were on offer) we had a first stop for cold drinks and Turkish coffee! During our stay, the lunch soup was put to simmer - ingredients were half a kilo of onions, a head of a sheep, its liver and lungs! ET was not too unhappy about the prospect of a different lunch place when we set off, even though it was HOT at 10am in the morning already!
Lots of storch accompanying us along the way, and some were not afraid at all! Magnificient tall animals they are!
Serbian fishermen remain truthful to their business even in the hottest lunch time sun and strong winds - luckily they (the winds) were in our backs that day!
A Kormoran drying his feathers!
And here it is, the alternative to the sheep head soup! A absolutely fantastic Zander (called smud locally), better than any fried carp we ever had in the Jura (and they are good as well!) This was a great reward to ET and us, as the final kilometers into Kovin we had to endure some hardship: along open waste waters and endless rubish piles almost on the banks of the river, we tried to breathe a minimum and peddle as fast as we could, as it stanck horrendously! The little unpretendous restaurant right on the edge of Kovin's Marina was however quickly indicated to us by locals as THE place for food, and indeed it comes highly recommended! We do not know the name, but it is the only one right on the Marina, and be there in time, as it is popular to groups, too, and not big at all!
A fellow client in the restaurant introduced ET to bee keeping and breeding! Interested into everything as she always is, we had to identify the queen in every of the small boxes!
Then half way up to our overnight place in Dubovac we had to endure a strech of another kind of hardship: turned into a shipyard access road, the dams piste turned into a wide gravel road burning in the lunch time sun, but inter rupted by huge tubes put accross in order to stop lorries, while it demanded us to decent from the dam and climb up again on the other side! Shortly afterwards, on a local beach where the many of the nearby village went to swim into the sidearm of the Danube (the water was clear, and it would have been extremely tempting to join them! but after what we had seen a couple of kilometers further up, ET was not allowed to jump in!) we were rewarded with cold drinks and ice cream, and with the straw umbrellas, the old caravans, the shacks, but the patina and romantic touch it all came with, it could equally have been on Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan or on the Black sea in Ukraine...!
However, along huge wetlands with hundreds of sea birds we attacked our last stretch to Donuvac, at the end of the dam visible in the trees! A good 45 to 50km from our starting point we had reached this very local, typical holiday village right on the Danube, and Dragan expected us in his little house with a wonderful terrace right at the waters of the Danube! He also offered his kitchen for free use, and had cold beer and wine in the fridge ready for us! The mountains in the background are in Romania already.
While locals went for an evening swim and fishing trip...
...we raded the local village shop and made good use of Dragan's kitchen! His on the Danube terrace is equipped with all the essentials for life, boats to go fishing, an outdoor shower, music with loudspeakers! A man who knows to enjoy life with the little he has.
Dragan's friend with the early morning fish catch, while ET had her Papa made fresh Müsli eaten!
Sunday morning we set out into Deliblatska Pescara, a big protected area (unfortunately also much fenced in for hunting groups) with sandy soils and extensive Juniperus vegetations! Beautiful, but not easy to get orientated. We plan to return with a local guide, as there is also a resident wolf rudel which we would love to track!
And finally Dragan's contacts in Dubovac, as his place and company come highly recommended, too, particularly to anybody who does the Danube cycling! However do not forget a full bottle of Antibrum, as mosquitos are numerous, and unlike in Belgrade, where planes fly with whatever chemicals to be sprayed all over town, they are free to breed in Donuvac or anywhere else along the Danube in huge numbers! We cycle back to Kovin later on the Sunday afternoon when the biggest heat had passed, and were picked up by Zoran again who returned us safely home!
