Vehicles in the Balkans

What a delight to arrive in Serbia.. The familiar sound of the 3 cylinder 35.. Yes this is the home of IMT who for the past 30 years or so have been building the MF35, Everyone has one too, gone are the horses and carts now the chugging of the 35. interestingly enough they have also in their time reproduced not only the MF65 but I also saw a MF 4840 with the IMT badge on it!!! this of course has the V8 diesel engine producing around 300 hp.
As for cars the Zastava is the main manufacturer here, they produce old fiats... 120 series but also the collectors favorite the Yugo.. they also build the Iveco vehicles under the zastava name, that is the old range up to the 7.5 tonne size vans and chassis.
Now in Montenegro we find that all the old VW diesels have migrated here for their retirement.
That's enough vehicles for now... now the trip.

We got across the boarder no problem and to our great amazement met another cyclist!! he was from Austrian and was cycling the Danube, not knowing much about it we asked him what it was like!! anyway we decided to give it a go. so off we went when.... puncture No 2... fixed and on our way.. see the picture.. Next we met another cyclist.. Bruce from Canada, he was also cycling the Danube on a 3 week trip. we swapped money and info then on our way.
The one thing we have found out about Serbia is that people are so helpful! Cycling through the towns we have been offered breakfast coffee lunch, bed / just about everything.
One of these days we were passing through a quite big town (home of the Zastava) when a guy stopped us and offered us a drink and the use of his internet, he owned a bike shop and was interested in our trip..talking bikes etc he said he had an idea.. it was international no car day and if we would join him and his club for a short ride to celebrate he would buy ud lunch.. how could we refuse, it also turned out that he was training the Serbian national MTB champ for the Olympics in London.. Sorry
The computer will not seem to load any more pics.. we had some lovely pics of the people we have met here but you will just have to believe us that they were lovely!!

Its not always that easy to keep the blog up to date cos contrary to pop belief every little town does not have internet, and also hooray cos macdonalds has not taken over eastern europe at all so jon.s free wi/fi options seem a bit limited. Then also we are often not only off road but also off map heading up some dirt track hoping we will meet someone who can cope with the sight of us.
Luckily when jon suggested today that maybe he should strip to his underpants when cycling uphill , cos he sweats so much , i said ., I think not .. So hopefully there will be no more developments in this area. I have probs with cyrillic keyboards ,,,can.t find brackets and all sorts. .

Ill see if jon wants to have another try at the photos. . We don,t have hardly any of serbia, cos it was the people that overwhelmed us more than the landscape.We left fully loaded with plums, tomatoes, a bottle of serbian herbal alcohol,,,,