Preparing to Go to Serbia

You know you are in for a different vacation when you cannot find a decent guide book for the place you are going. It is a little disconcerting, especially if you are like me. I try to merge all the available information available ahead of time from sources that I am familiar with, so I can self guide my trip successfully. Usually I use Fodor's for restaurant suggestions, Rick Steve for picking out the essential sites to see (I really wish he was more of a foodie because it would be a guidebook I would actually bring with me if the restaurant selections were any good), the Rough Guide for a thorough description of most towns in most regions, the Lonely Planet because I share their sensibilities and I like their 'essential things to see' preambles to the actual guidebook, and then anything else that I can find to help guide my trip.

So, what did I find?
The Lonely Planet has a book of the Western Balkans which includes Serbia, but I chose to just get it out of the library and photocopy the handful of pages that related to Serbia. It was a meager coverage, and completely out of date. I did finally stumble on one guidebook, published by Brandt, which I was unfamiliar with, and the author starts the guidebook out by explaining that he decided to write the book because there were no decent guidebooks to the area. True that. This one does do a good job of describing the places that he covers, but I had a hard time thinking about planning a trip from it, and the one place that I was definitely going, Zlatibor (where my husband's meeting took place) he dismissed out of hand as a tourist site inhabited by Serbs--well, true, but there are very few non-Serbs touring Serbia, so a little more detail on what was better and worse about the lace would have helped.

Then, to make matters worse, I did another thing I try to do pre-travel. I read about the place. Well, Serbia got a lot of bad press during the 1990's and I wanted to read something that had more of a positive spin on it about the people and the region. Both Dervla Murphy ('Through the Embers of Chais') and Asne Seierstad ('With Their Backs to the World') wrote with a sympathy to the one-sided Western press that Serbia received, and told first person accounts of their experiences in the Balkans over the past 20 years. If this is what my allies say, I don't want to hear the enemy's account is the general feeling I had at the end of each book. The best that can be said is that there is plenty of blame to go around, that all sides were violent and intolerant, and that religion is a shared problem in the region. I decided early on that I would neither discuss religion nor would I disclose my own at any point in the trip, but otherwise try to get along and learn from the experience.