A Week In Novi Sad Serbia

In 2019, we traveled from Mongolia to France (mostly) overland. On that journey, one of the places we spent time in was Belgrade. We really enjoyed the several weeks we spent in the Serbian capital, so when planning this trip through Eastern Europe, Serbia was a definite choice.

On the day of departure, we were up early and headed for our 8:30 a.m. bus to Novi Sad in northern Serbia. After a quick metro ride, we were on our FlixBus heading south.

Once outside the suburbs of Budapest, we traveled through rolling countryside with vast fields of corn and sunflowers. The sunflowers were not quite in bloom, but in a few more weeks, it would be a spectacular sight of endless kilometers of yellow sunflowers.

At the border, we got off the bus and headed into Hungarian immigration and border control, where we queued for a while before being stamped out of Hungary and the EU. It was then back on the bus and down the road a couple of kilometers to do it all again at the Serbian border control, this time to be stamped into Serbia.

With the official part of the journey taken care of, we continued on our way toward Novi Sad through more fields of corn and sunflowers, stopping a few times at small towns to pick up and drop off passengers.

We arrived at the Novi Sad Central Bus Station at about 1 p.m. and caught a taxi to our Airbnb on the edge of the old town. The apartment was lovely, really comfortable, and in a great neighborhood with a local supermarket nearby. Best of all and most importantly, there was a fantastic café just up the road.

Our apartment was just a short 10-minute walk to the center of the old town, where numerous restaurants and bars are set up along the pedestrianized main thoroughfare. We didn’t eat at any of these—the pizza, pasta, and hamburgers being served at every single one of them most certainly did not appeal. We did find an excellent Thai restaurant owned and run by a Thai lady and her Serbian husband. The entire kitchen crew was Thai, and the food was very good. The Thai owner was fascinated to find two Australians in her small restaurant in a northern town in Serbia. We often encounter this reaction. Our travel style is to try and avoid places with high tourist traffic, and if we do end up in a tourist center, we attempt to find places where the locals eat and drink—places down lanes and in back streets where there is little or no English and local dishes are served.

Every day, we would enjoy our morning coffee in our local café and then wander off to do our daily errands or explore a little of Novi Sad. We explored the fortress perched high on the banks of the river. It’s impressive today, but in its prime, it must have been majestic. We also explored the old town and spent time in Danube Park, a lovely park in the center of town.

We enjoyed our time in Novi Sad and have marked it as a place we could spend a month or so in. However, on this trip, we only had a week, so in what seemed a very short amount of time, we were heading to the bus station to get the bus south.

We had an early bus, so we were up at 6 a.m. and hiking to the bus station by 7 a.m. Like bus stations the world over, it was chaotic and crowded with little to zero communication. In the end, our bus was canceled, and we had to wait another two hours for the next bus. Fortunately, there was a café serving damn good Turkish coffee. Finally, we departed Novi Sad, headed for Niš in southern Serbia with a stop and bus change in Belgrade.

Join us in Niš!