Against All Oddities: The Penultimate Balkan Road Trip Story and Why My Yugo Matters

As frequent readers by now know, I bought a Yugo. It does not run. I own it solely as a piece of sculpture. I did it for no purpose other than to have it sit there and make my foundry-cum-car-storage-commune look like a Sarajevo housing project. Since, I have come to the conclusion that:

1) I need help

and

2) I’m nostalgic for the great Hobby 600 camper adventure of 2022.

One thing I learned on my travels? Cars can be an important part of the landscape. Ok, maybe I already knew that. But the Balkans just took that to another level, making that belief part of my soul.

In case you need a refresher, or if you just happened upon this regular column of insanity, details can all be found in this series. If you’d prefer to save the binge-reading for later, the story goes like this: I quit my engineering job in Germany and set out on an adventure with my wife and our Romanian street dog rescue (Luka). The three of us hopped in a 1993 Fiat Hobby 600 camper (another rescue of sorts) and traveled southern Europe for 3 months. Hilarity ensued! But after moving back to the States and generating all sorts of other stories to tell, we kinda parked the camper, which effectively stopped the series.

So where did we leave off? Well, I had hired the services of a metalworker on the East Coast of Spain, and then, by way of the magical Balkan car battery and a possibly stolen, mafia-run vessel with Norwegian flags on it, we landed in Vlorë, Albania. There, we managed to find my wife’s family in a mountain village. I became the locale’s temporary indentured mechanic, just like in my dreams, and after a few days of service, we bribed our way into North Macedonia.

That final leg produced many fun tales, but for now, we’re talking about my current state of communist car yard art.

The stories are relevant-ish, so all will become clear. As river water, maybe.

The day we got into North Macedonia was about two years ago, and it was an exhausting experience from the start. After getting rejected at the eastern border crossing, at Lake Ohrid, we got sent back to Albania. I had been walking around Pogradec for the better part of two hours, trying to find someone to sell me car insurance that would allow me to enter North Macedonia. (I had insurance already but not, ahem, insurance. Read: Cash.) Ultimately, I just said vidhosni atë (screw it) and figured I’d just roll to the North Macedonian border on the opposite side of the lake to see what would happen.

We rocked up to the very unfriendly looking Граничен премин „Ќафасан“ (Border Crossing Kafesan), a large, communist-era administrative building with a sizeable staff of stray dogs. Dozens of them. Traffic flow was equally chaotic, with a decent selection of abandoned vehicles gumming up the works. Were there Yugos, you ask? No, not yet but I’m getting there. Patience!

I parked outside a toll booth and told my wife, Dana, that maybe it would be best to just take a nap while I tried to make sense of the situation. After getting no attention at the gate, I entered the border building itself, wandering the linoleum and florescent-lit halls of the complex until a tall, red-headed woman in a green wool suit flagged me down.

“Entschuldigung – was machen Sie hier?” came the query. Drat, how did she know I spoke German? I was even more offended than if I were asked what the hell I was doing in English.

In German, neither of our mother tongues, I explained the situation to the best of my ability. Someone told me I needed special North Macedonian car insurance. (And then, in my head: Heaven forbid I ever have to make a claim. To whom? And wouldn’t it all be determined my fault anyway?) Finally, roughly an hour after entering, I paid some exorbitant fee and woke Dana up with the clattering our the camper’s Iveco diesel.

We were on the road again and in a new land full of wonderful old vehicles. Lord knows I love a good Soviet military truck built in China on license, or a probably stolen W123-generation Benz on its 40th owner, so Albania required many time and patience-consuming off-route excursions in the name of automotive photography. Upon crossing into North Macedonia, the former Yugoslavia, the car scene got immensely more interesting. Old Zastava, TAM, and Ladas littered the landscape. Massive potential for driving productivity loss!

Clearly inspired by the border checkpoint bureaucracy, Dana came up with a rule that was limiting, yet admittedly still generous to my shitbox-seeking proclivities. Rule as stated:

Rule 1, Section 1: At the entry to each new county-sized country, three passes will be given to allow the turning around or altering route of said Hobby 600 for the purposes of inspecting or photographing a vehicle(s).

Rule 1, Section 2: Unused passes do not carry over into neighboring lands and do not reset upon intentional or accidental re-entry into the aforementioned land.

Rule 1, Section 3: If a vehicle has been spotted directly en route and can be accessed without changing present direction of travel, there are no limits placed.

It was a long day already, so I didn’t fight the regime’s new decree.

Nary a dozen miles after said policy rollout, I was hit with my first rule-in-effect, and Мајко мила was it a big one! A pile—literally a hill—of communist-era cars whipped by my window. All brain functions stopped. I almost choked on one of my breakfast sardines. As my brain became starved for oxygen, it wondered if it was worth cashing in one of my three allocated stops… and continued to contemplate that problem for approximately 5 miles. “I think we have to go back…” I sheepishly stated, pushing the bounds of what was reasonable within the new legal framework.

The regime granted my request.

The Hobby camper crunched into the pothole-filled driveway of a garage directly across the street from a local branch office of the North Macedonian Forest Ministry. Had they just pulled these cars out of the woods? Were they abandoned post-Yugoslavian breakup and turned into a beautiful monument? I had so many questions and so little local language skills. I tried to build up my courage and memorize some phrases from my phone, then finally approached two gentlemen pushing a Lada Niva.

Me: Zdravo! jas sum Amerikanec! (that’s where I forgot everything and started rattling off cars and pointing in various directions) Zastava, Lada, Yugo, Polonez!

Forest Service Man: Amerikanski! ehhhh…Polonez?! (the two men look at each other and start laughing)

Me: UAZ (taps on hood)! Niva (slaps door)! I have Moskvich!

Forest Service Delegates: confused shaking of heads

Me: uuhhhhh…camera photos?!

Forest Service Man #1: Da.

Me: Hvala (wrong Yugoslavian language) very, very much!

The cars were stacked so haphazardly that it invited infinite questions as to how and why they ended up there. The Jenga-esque method of stacking made parts removal far too risky, at least for me, but probably not for the locals. Though they appeared heavily vandalized, none of them really looked “rode hard and put away wet” like most Yugos still on the road in the Balkans. Were these cars just chucked in a pile once Western competition entered the market? Wonder as I may, there would be no way to hold the Q&A session that I so desired. Best to just smile, wave, and hit the road.

Although I didn’t use any more turnaround passes in North Macedonia, our adventures didn’t stop there. I bought some Hella driving lights at a flea market, plus a mystery cure-all tincture from some vagrants in a Kia Pride, and then we overnighted in the parking lot of a winery. We made friends, eventually leaving the next day with several bottles of homemade Raki.

All this nostalgia boils down to the following: Having that stupid Yugo in my yard in America brings me back to all of our wild experiences, every time I lay eyes on it. So even if it never runs, who cares? $300 well spent, I say.