I came across two separate stories today at about the same time, which seemed to be saying the same thing – if you’re visiting Serbia, a Green Card is compulsory. The first is about a British family travelling from the UK to Turkey. They were made to pay €143 for the Green Card, before being allowed to enter Serbia. “At the border the armed Serbian official confiscated our passports and demanded that we pay Green Card Tax. We’d never heard of it.” The other story is funny. It involves four Adventurers, Amanda, Hari, Tristan and Peretz, traveling across the Balkans and Asia. The story is so good that I ended up including the whole thing, because it’s too good not to read — but check out offsilkroadin.com site directly.
I had mentioned last time that we had some issues at the borders. Turns out one needs a ‘green card’ – essentially a proof of insurance in multiple languages. Although the car is insured, and we have a yellow piece of German paper to prove it, we didn’t appear to have been given the corresponding green card when the car was purchased. This wasn’t a problem until we reached the Serbian border, when we were told that we needed it. Further complicating matters, although there was a workaround (one can buy ‘border insurance’ to get through), the particular border that one could purchase the insurance was ~80 km to the north. While we were deciding how best to get into Serbia, we dug around in the car and found a green card – but it was for a previous owner, and the license plate # didn’t match our current plates. We tried again at the same border, but were turned back, as the Serbian border police checked our plates. At this point, we were starting to get some funny looks from the Bosnian border people, as they had seen us attempt to leave (and re-enter) their border twice. We were also starting to think about how best to actually obtain the document – it seemed like not having it would incur more complications further along the trip. Ideas ranged from trying to call the German agency that issued us the insurance to attempting to forge our current license plate # on the green card we had (possible with a photocopier and some green paper).
In any case, we decided to try the northern border, and had mentally prepared ourselves to pay whatever amount the Serbian police asked for border insurance. By this point, it was getting quite dark, and for once, the night worked in our favor. The Serbian border guards were either too lazy or too tired to get out of their booth to check the match between our plates and what was listed on the older green card in our possession, and the darkness meant that they couldn’t easily see the plates from their booth. We were waved through, after they checked that we had a green card. Lesson #1: driving through borders after hours can help if you lack the required papers!
The story has an amusing ending: although we later spent a few frustrating hours communicating with the German insurance company, and they refused to issue and send us a new green card to replace the one we thought they didn’t give us, it later turned out that we had the current green card after all! It was stuffed inside Tristan’s IDP (international driving permit, another document necessary to drive a car through Eurasia), and we just (ten minutes ago) found it, as we were pulled over by the Bulgarian police for speeding. Lesson #2: make sure you get and then *remember* where you put the green card.
So, if you are travelling around Eastern Europe and visiting Serbia, take a Green Card (a document provided by insurers) with you! That said, they all arrived safe and sound in Belgrade. The Bristh family found Belgrade to be a different city. “Belgrade was impressive (huge) and certainly the most “different” city that we had encountered. We lucked out on a lovely late-lunch spot but after a trip to the park just at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, and impatient to make progress, we decided to let the girls fall asleep in the car….” And the adventurers, Amanda, Hari, Tristan and Peretz, enjoyed their time in Belgrade “a fun city – lots of young people.”
