Insurance in the region

[smaytum]

All, what do you normally do regarding bike insurance.

Do you buy at the boarder? What type of cost?

My insurance will expire when i'm away travelling in Sept.

Renew is £140 but they won't give a green card for many of the countries and advised that i buy at the boarder.

Carole Nash just gave be a quote of £340 and will cover me in all the countries.

So i guess it's a question of some.

Countries are.. Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey.

Do you buy insurance at the boarder or take a chance? Is insurance law in the countries above? How much at the boarder? etc.

 

[grez]

Having the same problem with Carole Nash. Will sell me green card insurance for Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Macedonia but deffinatly not Serbia and Montenegro. Thay advise buy 3rd party insurance at the boarder and take a big chain. My insurance also runs out, although it is the day I get back, which adds to the fun.

I am leaning towards just going and dealing with all the shit when I get there...at best it is cheap insurance and I get in....at worst (excluding getting blown up by a land mine) is cheap insurance, bike gets nicked and I fly home...does leave a fair bit of middle ground but then life is an adventure.

 

[Ricardo2]

Insurance in the Balkans

I went with a friend in April last year and made our way down to Greece through the Balkans. Carole Nash wouldn’t insure us for the southern Balkans so we paid at the little insurance huts at the border points.

If I remember right it was free on the Bosnian crossing on the Dalmatian coast (it’s a few km of the coast before you’re back into Croatia. I went into Bosnia before in 2000 and 2004 and paid 10 Euros I think), 10 Euros from Croatia into Montenegro, 50 from Albania into Macedonia (the crossing near Struga). Going from Podgorica into Albania north of Shkoder I asked the border bloke where I bought insurance.

He said ‘insurance. Why?’ so we rode carefully along the road to Shkoder though riding fast isn’t really an option on that road. Full of potholes, articulated lorries coming across onto your side, and then the road becomes a motorway with no markings and the occasional old woman leading a cow on a string across it, and then turns back into a cart track with no warning.

From Shkoder to Tirana and then to Elbasan the road’s good, weaving through the hills before coming out at the border with Macedonia. We went to Lake Ohrid and through Bitola down to Greece at Florina. The Greek border official said ‘what, you came through Shkoder?! It’s the most mafia-infested, nationalist, jihadist and scary place on earth’. Generally we found Albanians to be really friendly. I naively asked one bloke in a UK registered Range Rover where in the UK he was from. He looked shifty and said ‘no, is my cousin’s car’. There’s an awful lot of cousins cars in Albania and they don’t even bother changing the plates.

From Macedonia into Kosovo was 10-15 Euros, then we headed up the Pristina to Nis road to cross into Serbia but were turned back as they said it wasn’t a proper border point. Some people they let through, others they didn’t. We had to go back to Pristina, through Skopje and into Serbia that way and set us back a good few hours. It didn’t cost us anything to get through into Serbia though. Which presumably meant we weren't covered there but hey..

We cocked up on going back through Slovenia on the motorway. A Slovenia biker said we could pay for the vignette at the end when we rode into Austria but we couldn’t. They charged us 150 Euros for not buying one and it could have been double but they felt sorry for us.

Fantastic trip though. Wonderful roads, people and food.