The next morning I rose, discovered someone had nicked $90 from my bag, left a passive aggressive note on the door, and caught the early train to Pozarevac. You may remember it as the birthplace of Slobodan Milosevic. Lovely little town, but with poor rail connections so it took a considerably long time to get there. Disembarking from the train with me was a student named Teja from Uzice who, incredulously, was also going to hitchhike his way to the Iron Gate. Which is exactly what I was going to do! And he's actually from there. I'm so local.
We walked through the town, out of the centaur*, and towards the turnoff to the Iron Gate where we caught a ride with a series of trucks and cars and were given loads of misleading advice by everyone (leading me to believe that no one, at any given time, actually knows anything), and finally made it to a town on the Danube. This was a pretty big deal for us, and the next car to pick us up happened to be a man who used to be the mayor of the the town of Veliko Gradiste. He told us all about the developments he implemented during his tenure, and admittedly it was a lovely community, especially during autumn. He drove us to the far end of town so we would have a better chance of getting picked up, which I thought was incredibly nice so he definitely has my vote in the future.
Our next ride was in some sort of ambulance, and I learned later from Teja that the driver had been on some popular Serbian reality TV show where he was reunited with his sister, whom he never knew he had. What a heartwarming tale. The next car was driven a by a bunch of old people who were delightful and happy to see us. I also noticed a lot of cars had Austrian plates, and Teja explained that most people went up to Austria to work. I decided not to bring up the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is something that I have learned I should never bring up, anywhere, even if it clearly was the best thing for this region, and would have made the visa process so much more simple. Even if Serbia proper had never been part of the Dual Monarchy, I'm sure there would have been a simplified visa regime. Austria was so progressive like that.
We arrived in Golubac and immediately descended upon a small store and bought all the provisions we needed to picnic at the ruins of the castle down the road at the entrance to the Iron Gate. For me this was some locally made sausage and some green apples. For Teja it was a huge tube of bologna, a bottle of ketchup, and some buns. To each his own. We got one final ride for about a kilometre to the castle, and we sat and ate and took pictures of the fairly impressive structure. After, we parted--he back to Belgrade and me through the Iron Gate and waited beyond--and I can only hope he's succeeding in life now.
I set off down the lonely road and was picked up by a Serb who worked in Austria (surprise!) who took me to the small village of Brnjica where I waited for what felt like a month by the side of the road for the bus. Everyone nearby made a bit of commotion regarding my existence, and when the bus finally arrived I slinked in through the back door and plopped myself into a seat because I was exhausted, the sun had just set, and I was expecting to be brought a Nestle instant cappuccino and pay my fare of 10 euros. This never came, and once I noticed the driver had breezed past the border and I screamed "STOP THIS BUS IMMEDIATELY!" I awkwardly shuffled myself and my bag out the back door. While retracing steps back towards the border, I had time to reflect on how it was nice I had saved 10 euros, I also didn'tt get a free Nestle instant cappuccino, and sometimes we need to ask ourselves what is more important**.
Once I got to the border I was forced to fend myself against an enormous lineup of cars all desperate to get into Romania, a far cry from the days of communism when it was the other way around. Long lines of cars have never been much of a formidable match against me, however, and I simply walked in front of them and presented my passport to the border guard. This backfired when the border guard rejected my attempts to leave Serbia and told me that pedestrians were not welcome here and could not cross. I asked him if it was only at this crossing and he just got annoyed at me and screamed, "You cannot walk across!" I can understand that if you only know three English phrases, that someone asking multiple questions in rapid-fire English is overwhelming, but he should have just made an exception for me in this case.
Anyway, I was forced into a car with two nice old Romanian men. We slowly inched through the crossing and onto the Romanian side of the Danube by 8:45pm. I had been planning on catching the night train from Drobeta Turno Severin to Filiasi at 9:23, and I could see from the line of cars and from the fact that I was way far from DTS that this wasn't going to happen. The men dropped me off at the turnoff towards the city, and I was on my own, back in Romania, and ready to make waves.
*Which, when you think about it, is hilarious. And by "think about it" I mean think about the word Centaur. If we lived in Ancient Greece, and in the Ancient Greece that included the wonderful mythology as reality instead of what I would assume was actually really a hot, smelly, and miserable reality for nearly everyone, then the idea of a sign telling me that a Centaur was to the right or left would be very useful in navigating myself through the city. The last thing I would want to run into would be a centaur. They are so warlike and, while noble and just, are nevertheless a woodland creature I would prefer to avoid at all costs.
**Obviously Nestle Instant cappuccino. It's not even available in North America because I have some sort of suspicion the US food checking agency has banned it and they let SO MUCH slips through the cracks so who even knows what they put in that stuff to make it so, so good.
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