Day 26: No be sad

Backa Palanka to Novi Sad (40km)

We were on the river early, aiming to beat the day’s heat and arrive in Novi Sad with plenty of time to relax. The morning passed without incident and again we found a nice spot for lunch. Once again, there was a restaurant. This time the guys decided to cook their own lunch, while I headed inside and enjoyed an unbelievably similar meal to that which I had yesterday, tasty once again.

Just before reaching Novi Sad, we paddled passed a raft containing 5 particularly dirty hippies. They had built the raft themselves in Budapest and had sailed down the river, travelling only as fast as the river takes you (which isn’t fast). Their final destination was Novi Sad, where upon arrival, they would ‘recycle the raft and hitchhike back to Switzerland’.

We arrived in Novi Sad in the early afternoon. I had been put in contact with a woman called Sanja, who advised us to pull into the marina and park our boats there. As we did, we were called over by a man sitting on a boat, enjoying an afternoon Rakija (a bit like Schnapps). Sanja had told him to expect us and he very warmly welcomed us onto the boat. He spoke absolutely no English and we didn’t ever find out his real name, so we called him Captain. Captain phoned Sanja, who explained that we were welcome to stay on the boat and that she would arrive in a couple of hours. Just across the marina was a lively beach area, after a couple of beers, we swam over and relaxed for a bit. I then decided to swim over to the other side of the river, which despite being only around 500m, was quite taxing due to the deceptively strong current. When I returned, Sanja had arrived and gave us lots of useful advice. We went for dinner with Sanja before returning to the boat just in time for the sunset cruise. The catamaran offers nightly cruises along the river and we were very kindly offered to join. The cruise was amazing, this part of the river bends perfectly for the sun to simply drop into it, resulting in a magnificent sunset.

After the cruise, we headed into town to explore the Novi Sad nightlife. Either we were unable to find it or there simply wasn’t any, but we were left a little disappointed by the whole experience. Anyway, it was now waaaaaay past our bedtime, so we headed back to the boat for a good night’s sleep.