In short, the plan was for Straja and myself to meet in Užice, Serbia and cycle down to Žabljak in Durmitor National Park in Montenegro, taking the usual torturous but stunning off-the-beaten track mountain roads we prefer. This was to be a 4 or 5 day trip, around 200km in length, taking in Zlatibor, Priboj and Pljevlje as the main towns on route. The main thing that made this trip different to any we had made before was to be that we would take all of our stuff with us on panniers, including tent, basic cooking equipment, not to mention stuff we would need once we got to Montenegro!

First some stats:

Distance covered: 300km (due to getting horribly lost once - see last day for details!)

Total climb: approx. 6800m total - well above a whole Kilimanjaro (5895m)!

GPS file: download our entire recorded track here if you want! Just don’t follow it too closely!

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And here is an outline of our trip, all linked up to the relevant story and gallery so you can get at least a little taste of the experience:

Day 1, 4th August - Užice - Gostilje - (pictures)

Day 2, 5th August - Gostilje - Zlatibor - Dobroselice (Tornik) - (pictures)

Day 3, 6th August - Tornik - Uvac - Priboj - (pictures)

Day 4, 7th August - Priboj - Sastavci - Bučje - (pictures)

Day 5, 8th August - Bučje - Pljevlja - (ko zna gde) - Kanjon Tare -
ŽABLJAK - (pictures)

All in all this was quite a learning experience and a great adventure too. I learnt a few things along the way that I plan to share with you in the near future, like “How to get lost, even with a GPS” and “How to cram 20kgs of tent onto your bike and then climb 1000m in a morning”. But in the meantime, we still somehow have amazing weather here in October in Serbia, so I have a bike to ride..!

P.S.I would love to hear of other people’s stories of mountain bike trips like this one, wherever you are in the world. So why not let us know below in the comments section, and maybe I could do some kind of summary in the near future.

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Now it is impossible to ride in the woods, it’s just way too muddy, though I may still try it. It’s also just too cold to be enjoyable riding on the roads, and anyway, I don’t WANT to ride on the road!

So now I am suddenly faced with that awful choice:

What to do in winter when you can’t ride your bike?

The options boil down to the following, and I don’t know which of these I find less appealing:

- cross-training: running. Thoroughly un-enjoyable, and doesn’t help with mountain-biking very much.

- cross-training: swimming. Did it all last winter, dull as ditchwater, just ploughing up and down, plus even less use than running.

- cross-training: anything else that’s not biking. Not interested!

- joining a gym: well, maybe. It’s an extra expense, but they DO have exercise bikes I suppose, with quite elaborate programs which simulate most types of riding. Could close my eyes and think of summer…

- buying a bike trainer: spinning the wheels in the comfort of my own home. Less flexible though than a full-featured exercise bike, and money better spent on my bike!

- tinkering with the bike all winter. Lots of people use winter to buy a new bike, sell their old one (e.g. see here for 2008 Cannondale stuff), upgrade parts etc. Frankly, I haven’t got the budget for that, and anyway, that’s no substitute…

- just go out and ride anyway. Despite the cold, this seems like the most appealing option right now. I will keep you posted!

How are you going to cope with winter?

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WWW.MTBSERBIA.COM !!

Since this is probably the one site, out of all my various little Internet ventures, that I have invested the most work in, it made sense for it to have its own domain. It’s just taken a very long time for me to actually do it, and I should count myself lucky that the domain was available!

Quite frankly, I am amazed how easily it went, considering the large amount of complicated content there was to migrate, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is the odd hiccup to come.

But in the meantime, the site should do all the redirecting by itself, so any old links you have pointing this way will just get forwarded to the new domain, while of course you should use links starting with www.mtbserbia.com in future. If you’re a feed subscriber you shouldn’t need to change anything.

By the way, my MTB-Serbia cheap bike listings do still reside (at time of press) at the old address while I decide what to do with them.

So, WELCOME to MTBSerbia.com! I hope to keep building the site and adding more useful information on mountain biking, especially in Serbia, but also in general - and to keep writing on my amateur attempts to improve in the sport, in the hope it might help someone else too!

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Perhaps he was buoyed by his recent performance in the Leadville 100 mile MTB race in which he came second with a time of 6:47:41 (the time it takes me to do precisely half that distance!), or perhaps having watched this year’s competition he was left with the distinct impression he could give them a run for their money at the age of 37 (there’s hope for us all!).

Either way, if the Armstrong comeback rumours are true, next year’s Tour de France is set to be an interesting one - or a dull one, depending on which way you look at it…

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Today’s ride could in some respects be termed a disaster if Straja and I weren’t such optimistic types! We had already realised we had to do 90km, the most riding in any one day, if we were to make Žabljak before sundown. So we got up early, messed around for three hours and finally got going around 9 am, having vacated the grounds of the disused school where we had camped.

The first hurdle, heading south, was to cross the newly-established Montenegrin border post - a formality, as we suspected. Then it was downhill into the murky, smoggy depths of Plevlja to grab some food to eat along the way (we did not want to get delayed by the big city lights!)

Disaster strikes

This was where disaster struck, with 65km to go to Žabljak. I don’t know WHY I didn’t worry too much about our road diverging from the GPS track I had programmed in! I think I thought it was just another example of a new road taking a divergent route from an old one. There would have been a signpost indicating a turning to Žabljak, right? Wrong.

We happily rode westwards, stopping at a picturesque spot to eat our sandwiches and continuing for a full 25km - without too much climbing, blessedly. It was only when we reached a a small village with a 90-degree turn in the road that Straja saw a car with Belgrade plates stop suddenly and turn round, got suspicious that there might be something wrong, and thought to ask some locals if we were on the right road to Žabljak…

I will not recount the surprise on their faces, or my livid expression at having been such an idiot as to ignore the GPS, rely on Montenegrin signposting and assume the locals we had spoken to en route out of Plevlja would think to tell us where the turn-off was. I will also not tell the tale of our hell-for-leather ride back to Pljevlja. All I can say is that a 50km diversion on fully-laden mountain bikes is a serious blow to your plans!

Back on track

What to do? This put the possibility of reaching Žabljak today in serious doubt. It was already gone 4 in the afternoon as we headed out to Žabljak, having found the un-signed turnoff we had missed. Even if we covered the 40km to the Tara Canyon in reasonable time (along a main road - no time left for mountain-malarkey), there was still the small matter of a 22km climb from the 700m above sea level, where the famous Tara Canyon bridge sist, up to the 1450 m asl where our destination lay, and that after an exhausting 100+km for the day.

Tara Canyon and bridge

An uneventful trip to Đurđevića Tara (village where the bridge is located) got us there some time after 7pm, with me racing down the hill to the bridge in the hope of catching it before darkness fell, as I had never seen it before and wanted a photo for the blog! It certainly is spectacular: the Tara Canyon bridge was built in the late 1930’s by engineer Mijat Trojanović, its 5 arches stretching 365m at a height of 170m above the River Tara, in its time the largest bridge of its kind in Europe and still quite a sight to behold, never mind cross over.

The dilemma

Now came the dilemma - darkness was falling, Žabljak was a looong climb away (over 3 hours, for sure) and we were exhausted. But I had promised Mrs. D. we would be meeting up that evening in Žabljak! And I don’t like to disappoint! Though Straja initially, quite wisely, decided to camp down at the Tara bridge and do the climb in the morning, for some reason I never fathomed, at the last minute he decided to accompany me on my suicidal bid.

The climb was every bit as hard as we expected - almost complete darkness (hooray for lights and reflective clothing), no bike-sized vehicles willing to stop and drive us up (we would have settled for that by then), serious exhaustion setting in, water supplies low and a never-ending ascent to tackle.

THE END

How we made it I am still not quite sure, but I don’t think I could have pedalled another 100m by the time we hit Žabljak some 3.5 hours later. We had made it, later than scheduled, but at least on the same day we had planned, having made a total of 300km instead of the 200km I had planned for the 4 and a half days…

Was it worth it? Of course it was. I’ve learned plenty from this trip - and I hope I can share some of these amazing insights with you soon (like, “look at the GPS sometimes”, for example), but in the meantime this is the end of the Užice Žabljak mountain bike trek. Look out for a little wrap-up soon, giving you some stats you might be interested in, as well as a complete GPS record.

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Does tyre pressure matter?

Thought I actually try and learn something about this, so have had a quick look around various biking resources. Basically it boils down to a trade-off:

higher pressure = less friction, easier pedalling, easier progress, but also less traction, poorer control

lower pressure = more friction, harder pedalling, more energy expended, but better control, especially downhill, on technical stuff etc.

Seems at the end of the day that it’s a matter of riding style, like everything else, together with a question of taste. Probably if you are a fearless downhill rider who doesn’t expect to make up much time on the climbs, then you will be happy with a lower pressure. If you are a lily-livered coward on the downhills, like me, but have got some fitness for those uphills (or you are mostly riding on the flat, or on tarmac), you might be better off with a higher pressure that will help you eat up those climbs. So it seems it does matter. The advice seems to be: start with a fairly high pressure, like over 3 bar, and then gradually let off the pressure bit by bit to find the highest pressure that suits your riding style.

Benefit of hindsight

So, had a go today, pumped up to around 3 bar (about 40 psi, I think, seemed incredibly hard compared to how I had had it before!) and went off to try my favourite training hill (from Paragovo on the approach to Fruška gora, up to the first official marathon checkpoint at Stolovi, quite an evil climb). Shaved my time down from just under 27 minutes for the climb, to about 25m 30s! So I was well impressed with my new discovery! If only I had thought a bit more about this early on in the year, I might have found all those epic treks across Serbia a tad easier! But then you could see it as a sort of effective resistance training too..!

I must also add that I then tackled a rather steep and rutted descent and could definitely feel the loss of traction, but then I would probably take it easy anyway down those.

Update: I tried a real tricky, steep descent with a sharp turn at the bottom a day later and discovered that I WILL have to let the pressure off a little! I couldn’t descend too fast because of the turn, but the high pressure in the tyres was making them bounce around all over the place, especially as I was braking, and I really lost traction. It was quite hair-raising, since I HAD to maintain a higher speed in order to keep control of the bike, but that turn at the bottom nearly wiped me out…!

So I have definitely learned something this week - erm, pump up your tyres, but not too hard! More words of wisdom soon!

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The plan was to forego the fire and breakfast and everything in the morning and just pack up and zoom down to Priboj, where we could have a proper cup of coffee from a proper coffee pot and get some breakfast too. This we duly did, after another wheel-rim-scorching descent of more than 10k.

After stocking up on supplies we headed back out and up another fearsome hill which offered spectacular views back towards Priboj and which would take us west towards the Bosnian border and the village of Sastavci right in a “corner” of Serbia. One of these days I will share some interesting insights into mountain-biking with panniers - just a clue: there IS a weight issue. This was another pretty wild section, only the beginning and end asphalted and with nary a soul around, just the way I like it, with some really epic landscape. Once again, the importance of taking plenty of water was impressed on us as we encountered a number of dry springs along the way.

Sastavci and the Goleša

Having in the non-descript village of Sastavci, downed enough water to drown a Bactrian and refreshed ourselves with ice-cream we now hit the tarmac south towards the Montenegrin border. Before that, though, we had to wind our way between the Goleša - two great, facing rocks called the Pribojska and the Hercegovačka Goleša, which made for spectacular riding, which this video does no justice at all:

Bučje

Then it was yet another uphill slog as day began to fail and we decided to stop at a small logging community called Bučje, in the grounds of another of those dead village schools in which Serbia sadly abounds. At least, I hope the school was abandoned, else we’ve just left the burning ruins of our campfire in the middle of the school football field.

We got the fire lit just in time, as the very ominous and rumblings turned into deafening crashes of thunder and a good old downpour. It’s a lot easier keeping a fire going in the rain than it is starting one. And we were very glad for our raincoats too.

Tomorrow we need to get our passports ready - it’s time to make the crossing into Montenegro, and because we are seriously lagging thanks to a couple of missed turns (heaven forbid we take any wrong turns tomorrow!) we need to make 90km tomorrow, including the climb up from the Tara canyon to Žabljak, our destination!

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(see the gallery here)

We leave the orchard where we camped the previous night, somewhere halfway up Tornik, and head downhill into a gully, where the locals invite us for the obligatory rakija, and tell us that some crazy Englishman passed through there a couple of years ago on his bike, alone. If that was you, we’d definitely love to hear how you managed to get there, and whether you got lost like us!

Thence we have to climb again up onto a sizeable ridge. Sadly, we miss yet another turn (not the worst detour on this trip, that’s still to come) and end up having to clamber up a very steep hill through assorted meadows and orchards, pushing our not-inconsiderable loads.

Eventually we hit the ridge, and after a fairly flat section we reach the point where we have to head down, according to the map through a magnesium ore quarry. Having got down to the quarry, it becomes clear that there is no way to continue down - things have changed round here - and we have to climb up again to a turn we missed and begin the actual descent to the Uvac monastery. I don’t suppose I will ever really know how much time we lost, or excess mileage or climbage we made during this trip…

Down to Uvac monastery

The descent to the Uvac monastery is a pretty long, rocky one and our v-brakes began to show their limitations. In case you don’t know what happens, the continual friction from braking (yes, you do have to brake) between the pad and the wheel rim means things get VERY hot around the rim. This causes several problems - one being brake fade, whereby the friction level just curves off and the brakes get very ineffective, but equally worrying, the possibility of the huge heat actually damaging, even bursting the inner tube or tyre. This is one of the arguments in favour of disc brakes, since the danger to the tyres is theoretically eliminated. Maybe on my next bike…

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We eventually reach the Uvac monastery, and very tiny it is too, with just two monks in residence since 1999, when the monastery was restored to use. It really is in a very picturesque, if remote location though, snuggled at the bottom of the Uvac valley, next to the river Uvac, which can only be forded here and nowhere else for miles and miles in either direction.

Climbing up again

After a quick rakija with the monk, we set off along the valley to find the ford, and after getting our feet wet, we head off uphill again, this time for a ridge overlooking Priboj where we plan to camp. However, this entails quite a climb, and we are definitely back to pushing by now. We finally reach the ridge and find a completely unlikely but very nicely concealed spot to camp, where the only disturbances are an incredibly noisy logging truck trundling past during the evening, and a pack of dogs seemingly roaming the woods around our camp…

Tomorrow we get to race down to Priboj and get a proper cup of coffee (the taste of campfire-cooked smokey-flavoured coffee is beginning to get to me).

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Day 1 - Užice to Gostilje

Day 2 - Gostilje-Zlatibor-Tornik

You can also read the accompanying stories that were posted live from the road:

Day 1 report

Day 2 report

Photos and a write-up of the rest of the trip are coming soon. Honest!

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Water-skiing is one of those things you see people doing a fair bit, if you spend any time near lakes or the sea, but it is very easy to go through your entire life and never actually try it. However, Belgrade’s Ada Ciganlija, basically an artificial lake, has a cable-water ski installation in one corner - a system of cables whips you off a platform and round a circuit of, I guess, around 600m, presumably recreating the experience of being towed by a boat to a great extent.

Whyski? Whynotski?

Well, this was one of those, “why not?!” moments - only 650 din (8 EUR) for an hour’s session, including a quick lesson (5 minutes!) with an instructor, and I was on my way! Having tried to take on board the instructor’s all-too-brief instructions, I found myself whisked off the starting platform and… actually staying on! Wow! After a few rounds I realised I could actually straighten up, and also that I could start steering and working up huge amounts of angular momentum to go hurtling into and out of the corners, but also that my arms began to ache unbearably as I discovered yet another set of muscles that I didn’t know I didn’t have. I also discovered why you still need to crouch into the corners, as I wiped out a few times after getting over-confident and straightening up into the scary bends.
The video supplied above was after a bit of practice, and is supposed to show (apart from me hurtling out of the last bend and trying to gracefully end my session) that if I can do this then… just about anyone can. It’s true, you definitely need some upper-body strength - I am no muscle-man, but I do keep fit and I am not kidding about the aching arms - I can hardly lift them right now! But if you happen to get offered the chance to try this and you’re in reasonable form - go for it! The feeling of speed is awesome and it’s another way of skiving off biking!

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