On most Spring and Summer mornings, if I am lucky enough to find myself in Belgrade, I like to start the day by cycling the bike path from Sports Centar 25 May to Ada, around the lake and back. It’s a round trip of around 20 km.
It’s a good workout, clears the head and helps to keep the waistline vaguely under control. It’s also a visual trip through history and a moving metaphor for life in Serbia.
History rolls past. Starting from the precise point where the Sava flows into the mighty Danube, the strategic confluence that is the very reason for Belgrade’s existence, you see the Austro-Hungarian border town of Zemun across the water, a reminder that you are riding along a geo-political fault line that has seen the ebb and flow of peoples and fortunes for thousands of years.
Turning onto the Sava path, you pass right underneath the towering walls of the Kalemedgan fortress, and maybe wonder what it must have been like to have been a soldier down here, trying to climb those steep cliffs and the imposing walls that top them, while other soliders inside the castle rained down all kinds of violence to thwart your ambitions. Now, as then, Belgrade warmly welcomes visitors, so long as they come in peace and behave themselves. Future Wizz Air passengers, please take note.
A little further, and you are on the Sava port side, which these days hosts only a pale ghost of the bustling commercial and passenger traffic that must once have embarked and disembarked here.
Further still, beneath Brankov Bridge, you’ll pass a ship graveyard, where rusting paddle steamers and hulks of all types gently rot at the water’s edge. They speak of better times and harder times. Each of them harbours stories; silent tales of travels, wars, illicit deals and wild parties. Tradegies and triumphs. Rusting.
Just before you arrive at Ada, you reach the huge construction site of the new bridge, towering confidently above the river, a symbol of a slighty more hopeful future for the city that has been levelled to the ground and risen from the ashes more than 40 times in its history.
The Ada lake, with its miraculous artificial beaches and expanses of green, open woodland testify to some of the better achievements during the communist years in ex-Jugoslavia.
But on reaching the lake itself, you are firmly back in the now. Thousands of Belgraders, especially the youth, full of hopes, dreams and, where the lads are concerned, a large dose of testosterone, pack the beaches all day, every day during the long, hot summer days.
Along with other people of all ages, vehicles and animals, they also pack the cycle paths around the lake, largely shunning the pedestrian-only pathways that have been put there just for them.
While the tourist organisations proudly boast about their dedicated cycle paths, most of the citizens of Belgrade do not recognise the concept at all, despite all the signs and markings. I have shared the path with vehicles of every kind. Cars and trucks both moving and parked, are quite common. I have even seen taxis speeding down the path. And, maybe most bizarrely of all, a driving school car, with the instructor teaching his grim-faced pupil the advanced art of avoiding the frequent jams of the ‘proper’ roads.
Motor bikes, scooters, and the horse and power-drawn carts of the Roma recyclers, seeking out cardboard, cans, bottles, maybe driftwood, all treat the cycle path as a useful highway.
There are other dangers too. I have been spectacularly unseated twice, so far. Once, by a volley ball that escaped from the playing court, landing in my face. The other by a mad dog that escaped from who knows where, making a suicidal dash right under my front wheel.
Food is of course an essential and important part of life in Serbia. Right on the cycle path, I have swerved to avoid barbeques, picnikers and one one memorable afternoon, an entire wedding feast, complete with spit-roast lamb, cauldrons of fish soup, musicians and people dancing.
No writing about Belgrade can safely ignore the city’s legendary pretty girls. Around the Ada path, some of the elite constantly patrol, wearing the skimpiest of bikinis as they pump their bodies into even greater perfection on their rollerblades, usually with a mobile phone stuck to one ear as they speed along. They demand to be noticed, admired, but immediately reflect disdain to anyone weak enough to give in to the temptation to look a fraction too long or too obviously.
Whatever mode of transport they use, all Serbian people on the cycle path share two significant traits; first, it is not considered cool or necessary to be looking in the same direction as you are travelling at anytime; and second, it’s important to maintain an attitude of detached indifference to the safety, reasonable expectations and even the existence of other users of the path.
This is not a vindictive attitude. It is just that they are doing what they are doing. That is no business of anyone else’s and nothing on earth will deflect them. Inat lurks here too – people would rather risk their own life and limb than concede that they really need to move out of the path of a speeding cyclist who is frantically and hopelessly ringing his bell. That said, indifference can kill just as surely as intention, as I very nearly discovered the day when the floods forced me off the relative safety of the path and onto the murderous main road past the railway station.
Yes, all of Balkan life is reflected there on that path. Steeped in history, struggling towards a better future and meantime, eating, drinking, flirting, hanging out, showing off and enthusiastically enjoying the now, with the absolute certainty that all rules clearly apply only to everybody else and that showing consideration is a weakness. And anything is better than showing weakness.
It’s challenging, fascinating, envigorating, maddening, kaleidoscopic, sometimes dangerous, always exciting. That’s the cycle path. And that’s the Balkans. I love it.
