We wait patiently for a while, watching the weirdness, and eventually pull up to the gate. The guard stamps our passports quickly, barely looking at them and lets us go through, but I still have to get special paperwork stamped at the border for all of our equipment. I walk inside the customs office to do that and the guy tells me we have to turn back and go through again, but in a different lane, he can’t stamp it here. I can’t find where to turn around so I ask a guard outside, he says something in Hungarian and walks away, leaving me standing around wondering what’s going on. I eventually find the first guy again, he walks out with me and opens up a gate and tells us to drive head on back into the lineup we just came through! Only way out! So we start going, have to get a couple cars to move out of the way and then there’s a break in a fence that we squeeze through to get on the other side of the road, and drive in the right direction with traffic.

We come around again, go down the proper lane and everything very slowly comes together. I had to wait inside the office for a while where I observed things like flies everywhere, old books and water bottles being used to prop open windows, and paperwork being bundled up with string to be filed away. After some time, a guy walks out, looks at our van and we move on.

Then on the Serbian side, the first guard goes through all our passports, all good, then asks for our “International Motor Car Insurance.” We don’t have such a thing, just have the regular insurance everyone else has. He insisted we buy this insurance, and informed me that he would keep my passport until I could show proof of it. At 3am, it’s not easy to sort out… So I go inside the customs building, get the runaround from a handful of guys (all of whom looked over all my paperwork with seeming authority, none of whom actually had a border guard uniform), and then I get this one dude who will “help” me. Barely speaks a word of English. Brings me to 3 different offices to talk to people, all of whom insist I have to come back and check with them after every step, to make sure I’m “following protocol”. But none of them know about this supposed auto insurance!

So after about 30mins of that, this helper gets a police officer to escort me back to Hungary, and he comes along to “broker my deal” because it seems they’ve decided that I can get insurance on the Hungarian side and come back. We walk through a few fences and gates and go to an office in “no man’s land” between the borders, where there’s a woman at a counter selling “Green Card Insurance”. Before they told me the price, they tried to get me to use my credit cards to withdraw loads of Serbian Dinars (as in thousands), which I refused. I somehow got them to give me prices for “insurance” before I took out any cash, as they wouldn’t accept credit. They also wanted to charge me €2,000 to insure a full size big rig truck, but I got them down to €215 to insure our van and trailer. The promise of Marlboro’s helped with that.

That done, I take the insurance certificate, get escorted back into Serbia. Go back in the customs building, get everyone to approve my insurance slip (even though they don’t know what it actually is), and I go back to the first border guard who scrutinizes the thing for 15mins and then reluctantly gives me my passport only when he finds out we’re a band because that makes us cool. Asks for promotional goods, I don’t have any. Thankfully I got my passport before I broke the news. Go back inside, everyone signs off on me having my passport, then I have to get our carnet stamped to import all our equipment.

Go to the carnet counter, and the woman wasn’t going to let me through because our gear list wasn’t written in Serbian. English wasn’t acceptable. So my “helper” chats with her for a couple minutes and then ran out the building with the carnet, leaving me wondering what the hell just happened. The woman told me not to go anywhere. By this time it’s well after 4am and we’d been on the road since 9am.

Dude comes back after a few minutes with photocopies of the whole carnet and the woman agrees to accept it for a €3 charge. So the guy gets it all stamped and we go back to one of the “protocol” offices. The guy there insists we absolutely have to come through his office and see him when we leave the country the next day. I said maybe, we’d try, but we have a schedule to keep, may have to cross somewhere else. He was getting pretty forceful, saying no other border station would let us cross, they’d send us here anyways, etc… He couldn’t really tell me why, so I asked him if there was a “service charge” I could pay to avoid the possible inconvenience. €10 later we were sorted out, I could cross where I wanted.

Now my “helper” takes me back outside to the van to get it inspected by the actual customs officer, who is actually wearing a uniform other than jeans and a t-shirt. The “helper” asks for promotional goods, still don’t have any, so I offer him some smokes. We’d been told to expect them asking for smokes, so we had picked up a couple packs on the way in. So I grab the pack of Marlboro, he gets all excited, then I open it to offer him one and he gets scared off. Has to be fresh, unopened. One of the other guys had a fresh pack of Benson and Hedges, so I gave him that, and even then, he ran behind the trailer so the border guard wouldn’t see him receive it. Shook my hand and left. Quickly. We’re finally able to drive away. It was 5:30am when we finally got out.