Last parts on familiar grounds

Hello! I've arrived in Plovdiv, Bulgaria now, yet another few hundreds of kilometers closer to my destination. This leaves only.... 13000km to Xiamen!! easy peasy! I'm staying here with a couchsurfer, Hristo, for two nights, before moving on to Istanbul (450km away).
But let me tell you shortly (I hope) what has happened so far since me and Hanne left Ljubljana.

We left Eva's place at a relaxed pace in the morning around 10:30, to go to the highway. We didn't have to wait very long for a ride from a rather quiet Slovenian woman to Brezice, a town close to the Slovenian/Croatian border. We weren't planning on staying there, but I wanted to go into the town to look for a man who had given me a ride in March, straight from Slovenia to the Netherlands when me and Will Bibby came back from the hitchhiking competition to Ljubljana. When I told this man that I was going to hitchhike to China and probably passing Brezice on the way he gave me his email-address so I could contact him and tell him about my trip. The problem was, however, that I lost the email-address... So we were looking for a man in a Slovenian town, and the only thing I knew, basically, was that he was Dutch and that he lived there with his wife who was Slovenian. It felt a bit like we were in one of those shows on TV where they try to find long lost people, as we went past the local administration office, the towns pubs and old people on the street who would maybe know anything about the existence of such a person. Actually, we didn't have to look very long, about half an hour, when we were directed to a place on the edge of the town. We hitched a ride there, actually, and found the place, but as fate would have it the man wasn't there. I was anticipating that this might be the case, so the disappointment wasn't too big, but it was a shame anyway. I wrote a note for him, explaining the situation, and we left again.

After a short ride to the gas station close to the border we found a Bosnian boxer (not the dog, the sport...) who was driving to Sarajevo in his fast blingbling car. Zemir, as he was called, had been to a lot of different places in Europe for his boxing tournaments, and even knew a few words in Dutch, as well as the Amsterdamsestraatweg in Utrecht. If this man was losing as many braincells as I always thought people do when boxing, he must have started out as a freakin' genius!
He drove us to Slavonski Brod, where he left us at a quite deserted gas station. For a moment, I really thought we would be there for a long time. There was, however, one truck, all the way at the end of the parking lot, which I recognized as being from Turkey (Istanbul actually, as the license plate showed). After a quick exchange of looks containing the words "autostop" and "Srbija" we were on our way again to the border. A big moment for Hanne, who was really glad to have a ride in her first truck ever.
When we arrived at the border, it was incredibly busy with cars waiting to cross. We were happy we weren't in them at that moment, as we walked past all of them, happily waving from time to time. Crossing busy borders is one of the few times where hitchhiking can literally save you hours of waiting as you just walk up to the passport control and go in front of the first car in line, and we were enjoying it. Walking through no-mans land in between the two border checkpoints is also always something special. A strangely empty highway, with a car passing every 2 minutes or so, the eye of the storm of cars, trucks and people trying to move from one country to another. And then the whole procedure repeats itself. People looking at you strangely, as they wonder whether you have left your car somewhere in your backpack, and when the smarter people among them realize you're hitchhiking you even get a smile every now and then. And, as we would discover later, a ride. At the other side, as I just finished writing the sign for Belgrade, Darko, a kind man from that city, pulled over to bring us all the way there. He told us he had seen us walking by, and after first feeling miserable about having to wait in line himself, he decided he just had to live with it and wanted to make our journey a bit easier too. He even bought us ice cream on the way! Very smart man altogether, I would say!

In the mean time, Hanne had decided she would like to arrive in Istanbul a bit earlier than we would if we kept hitchhiking. She would therefore take the train from Belgrade to Istanbul after we stayed in Belgrade for two nights. Even though I thought it was a shame, as I liked hitchhiking together with her, I was going to have to hitchhike the better part of the journey alone anyway, so it was no reason for me not to hitchhike further.

Actually, I'm going to meet a friend of mine from university in 5 min. so I guess I'll have to finish the rest of the story later today. Stay tuned for more stories (and pictures!) :)