Zlatibor Infographics
Some of you might have caught it, but I was on vacation for past 2 weeks, and spent some time on Zlatibor. The thing I was most impressed with is the clean mountain air. So, after 2 weeks, I’ve almost forgotten how to operate the mouse and pen, as well as type on keyboards. I thought I’d introduce you to Zlatibor, and also get back into shape doing my thing.
At approximately 1000m, the place called Zlatibor, located on the plateau on the mountain with the same name, has the perfect altitude for air tourism. The air is still not too thin at these heights (roughly 90% of sea-level oxygen is available at this altitude) and it’s very clean thanks to the many winds that blow over the Zlatibor region.
Zlatibor is located some 216km from Belgrade. That’s a 4-hour bus ride (probably around 3.5 hours by car). Route via Belgrade is recommended for all tourists coming to Zlatibor from the West, as the Western-Serbian roads are not very good. Best way into Zlatibor is via Lazarevac, Čačak, Požega, and Užice. This route passes through some of the most beautiful parts of Serbia, so you won’t regret it.
The town closest to Zlatibor, Užice, also has rail connection with Belgrade, and a bus for Zlatibor runs to and fro this town regularly. It’s 30-minute ride from Užice to Zlatibor, and the scenery is truly magnificent in Summer.
Once you arrive, you want to secure a shelter for the duration of your stay. You have a choice of hotels and villas. Hotels range anywhere from 2-star to 4-star, but from my experience, you shouldn’t expect them to offer the rated level of service. Most hotels are usually overrated by 1 or 2 stars. They are not expensive, though. One 2-star hotel I’ve checked out offers bed, breakfast and lunch for under €25.00 a day, which is not too much even for Serbian standards. It seemed clean, well-maintained, and has a great restaurant.
Villas are usually converted private residences. You can’t really rate them and compare them to hotels, since the service is different. They usually have inferior services in some areas (for example, your room is not thoroughly cleaned every day), and better in others. The main two advantages you get from a villa is that they are more willing to accommodate for non-standard services without additional costs, and that they usually also offer plenty of space for kids. The latter point should be one of the main concerns for parents such as myself. If I know the kids are playing in the beautiful fenced-off backyard with a shallow rubber pool, I can go back to my room to get some sleep when I feel like it. Villas seem to be somewhere around €30.00 for a room with breakfast and lunch, but I’m sure the price varies wildly.
The place I was staying at was a villa. It had the kind of backyard I described earlier, and it has great food. (In fact, it offered so much food each meal that I really couldn’t eat it all. Or at least so I thought in the beginning…) Apart from food, Zlatibor has plenty in store for outdoors-lovers, but I don’t belong to that group. I am more of a comfy-room-plus-TV type of guy, and I really enjoyed the fact that I could get plenty of sleep and eat well. Speaking of TV, you tend to get poor reception when weather is poor. This is outright stupid, since you want TV the most when weather is bad. But knowing how cable companies work in Serbia, I’d say this would apply to the entire Zlatibor area, since local competition between different operators is nearly non-existent.
I’ve seen pools, basketball and tennis courts, all over Zlatibor, and there are other entertaining endeavours to undertake such as riding the Shargan 8 train, which costs something like 500 Dinars (less than €5.00) without the tour guide.
I also visited the Mećavnik hotel also known as wooden city, built by Emir Kusturica. There’s not much to tell. They don’t serve Coke, which is my favourite drink. For political reasons. And what they do serve is something that equals the stupidity of not serving Coke. Really. The hotel itself is pretty expensive compared to other hotels and villas on Zlatibor, and the nearby ski center is said to be non-operational most of the winter. That was probably one of the most disappointing parts of my stay on Zlatibor. I don’t even ski, but if I did, I suppose Mećavnik would be equally disappointing.
Zlatibor’s natural beauty is astonishing. The clean air is, as the title of this post says: breathgiving. Air therapy is one of the hot things on Zlatibor, and there are specialized clinics there. I don’t doubt they are successful. You don’t notice this until you go back to city life, mind you. It all comes natural to us humans. We simply get used to anything…
I ate a lot. The key to healthy diet is to eat regularly. With a breakfast-and-lunch setup, you are forced to eat at least 2 meals a day. No cheating! I came to Zlatibor from a 1-meal-per-day regime, and I left on 3 and a half meals per day, as you can observe from my personal apetite graph above. There were a couple of great restaurants just a few hundred meters from my villa, and they were not very expensive. Stay away from Miris dunje, though. Their service is butt-slow and food is crap. I wonder why the place is so popular. Bad taste?
When I got back to Belgrade, I started to notice how good the Zlatibor air was. I was literally suffocating in the polluted city air. (At least I now know Belgrade’s got something in common with Tokyo.) Even after a full day, I can still smell various bits and pieces of dirt that are found all over the place. It’s amazing how much better my nose senses these things after just two weeks in mountain climate.
I’m really sorry that the photos from the trip are not up to my usual standard. The Samsung phone was a bit of a disappointment in that area, although I must say I did not expect much from a 1.3Mpx bottom-of-the-range cell phone. :) So, no photos. Sorry. However, I hope you enjoyed the infographics I’ve made for you. Fonts used in the infographics are called Sansation. The infographics SVG sources are available on my server (fonts are not included). They were created using Inkscape.
