Automotive

My presence on the site has been somewhat lacking in the past weeks due to personal issues that needed resolving. But as driving remains a fun pastime, here another entry. 

Recently I again had the opportunity to traverse the E75 between Zagreb and Belgrade, the so called former M1, Highway of Brotherhood and Unity. Originally built shortly after WW2 through voluntary youth work actions, the whole length went from Jesenice at the Austrian border, via Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, past Skopje and all the way to Gevgelija on the Greek border and spanned 734 miles (1182 km).

I am still old enough to remember it as a dual carriageway (one lane in each direction), home of epic overtaking maneuvers and for the time dizzying speeds. At some point it got turned into a regular motorway with two lanes plus emergency lane in each direction, which drastically lowered the accident and mortality rates. In the past it was a much frequented route of guest workers from places in the Nordics and the German speaking countries returning to Greece or Turkey (many of them past limits of exhaustion from the long drives and similarly long waits at border crossings). 

With the Yugoslav wars the traffic came to almost a standstill in the early 1990s. The first time I was behind the wheel driving it was in 1999 and between just out of Zagreb and just before Belgrade we encountered 2 cars on a stretch of almost 250 miles. This also led to appropriate speeds 🏁😉

I actually got stopped by a lone traffic policeman, whom I completely overlooked (it was all so deserted that I stopped expecting anything such), so I stopped more than 100m past where he was standing 😂 Got off with a friendly warning about it probably being the sunshine, which made me overlook him and a reminder of the speed limits. 

While in the 2000s you had to be highly concentrated on ensuring you did not get swallowed whole by the odd unmarked pothole of gargantuan proportions, nowadays it’s largely in very good shape on both sides of the border. 



As this stretch traverses the Panonian Plains, it was easy to build long straight stretches - the first proper mountain range to the East of the road being the Urals 😉

So you get probably one of the few approximations of something like Ehra Lessien (Volkswagen’s test track with probably the longest straight of a test track globally) available to the general public in Europe. 

And while I would never advocate breaking speed limits, in years past this would have ‘theoretically’ allowed speeds probably impossible even on the longer stretches of unlimited autobahns in Germany (the A94 linked to at the top of the post being one). 

There’s not much difference between the Croat and Serbian sides with the small exception of the signage being only in Latin script in Croatia and in both Latin and Cyrillic in Serbia. The police also tends to be a tad more lenient in Serbia generally in case one is to mistakenly misjudge the speed. 

Overall the highway is not a Nordschleiffe - or Kasseler Berge - style roller coaster of a ride, rather it’s long utterly straight stretches with the occasional sweeper or viaduct thrown in for variety. In the right car and at the right time it can certainly be hugely entertaining. 

And it connects two capitals that will both provide you with a broad range of truly exquisite cuisine, for meat lovers certainly but also spectacular sea / river food and some of the tastiest vegetables available in Europe (the picture below tends to err on the side of meat 😂).

While the endless agricultural fields and the odd plantation of the formerly famous Slavonian oak might not make your passengers ooh and aah at the sights, from behind the wheel it’s certainly a treat I can highly recommend. And if you appropriately feed the passengers at the start and end of the journey they will hopefully complain less 😉

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