The story appears on

Page A9

July 22, 2019

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

HomeWorld

A 鈥榮ea鈥 of beer and flamingos

Having no natural access to sea does not stop Serbs from organizing a regatta: Thousands last weekend boarded a motley fleet of craft floating on river waters for the 鈥淩egatta on Drina.鈥

The annual celebration of exuberance and excess started with pallets of beer, often consumed before the improvised fleet casts off by the end of the morning in the western Serbian town of Bajina Basta on the Drina river, a natural border with Bosnia.

With Serbian flags fluttering in the wind and 鈥渢urbo-folk鈥 music cranked up, hundreds of inflatable dinghies, makeshift rafts, lorry inner-tubes, even giant inflatable flamingos and the occasional boat floated and rowed for hours on the Drina cheered on by the crowds and bands on the bank.

The flotilla was lit up by torches and flares that covered the river with a multicolored mist amid the boom of firecrackers.

Tying their boats together, participants created dancing podiums, floating slowly toward the foot of the Bosnian mountains.

Serbia cannot claim to be a tourism power like neighboring Croatia with its spectacular Dalmatian coast but it had 3.4 million tourists in 2018 and half of them are foreigners.


 

Copyright 漏 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

娌叕缃戝畨澶 31010602000204鍙

Email this to your friend