hoboworld.to

After leaving the lakes and setting our destination to Zagreb the Capital of Croatia we arrived late in the afternoon. After about 2 hours of riding we found no accommodation at all. We thought we will pass Zagreb and head towards Budapest in Hungary… “There must be accommodation somewhere between Zagreb and Budapest… in Croatia”.. well we found out after riding for 6 hours that there was nothing worth talking about or even remotely worth staying at anywhere north of Zagreb towards Budapest.Although it must be said that Zagreb is a nice city and I would highly recommend going through there to anyone…

All the hotels wanted into the hundreds of euro’s per night for “4 star”.. which was more like minus 4 star in towns which would scare even clint eastwood away as dirty harry.. Many of the towns looked seriously like they are from some sort of movie set with all broken down factories and run down roads. I’m sure its not as bad as we are claiming here but at the time in storms and stuff it looked scary. We ended up riding all the way through to one of the termal pool towns close to the boarder in Hungary. The campsite was very nice and the area/town near it was very pretty. The difference between Croatia and Hungary was immediately evident. Only a few kilometers and everything was nice and tidy, the roads improved and the towns became clean. Its not that we didn’t like Croatia it just not really what we expected and the weather made it really terrible for riding. So after 4 days of terrible weather and reports saying it was to last for another 4-5 days we headed north to where the weather looked to improved.

The joys of different countries with different currencies.. It was something that we didn’t plan too well primarily because we didn’t expect to be out of croatia so soon. So we had to get Hungarian Florint.. Unfortunately no bank would take our UK cards to get money out.. and at 10pm at night the currency change places had closed hours ago. We only found this out after Heather had been left at the restraunt and ordered some pizzas and beers only to find out we had no money to pay for them about 20minutes later. I went to 9+ banks and 5 different shops etc to ask people about money. Unfortuantely nobody spoke english.. and none of the abnks took our money. It was a very embarrassing situation that was starting to brew.. No money.. lots of food and beer and no english or hungarian skills.. We ended up having a serious problem tryin to explain to the guy that we could only pay in Croatian or Euro’s.. He didn’t like that idea after intially saying yes he went back on it after we had eaten and drank all the beer… wow.. now we are properly screwed. In the end the bill was less than 8 euro’s including all the beers.. Because he didn’t have enough change and wouldn’t exchange anything we ended up having to pay 20 euro and just leaving him to sort it out himself.. We felt like real dickheads… although being a dickhead comes really naturally 🙂

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 8:43 am and is filed under croatia, Hungary, London to Sydney, motorcycle touring, Wild Camping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.