Any old promotor drivers around

Hi Sandway, I thought that you might of enjoyed reading that story from Dry Ginger as I was hoping that it might of stirred a few of your old Yugoslav memories, like it did for me.
In fact, on my second trip to Yugo I was running with Barry Longdon’s younger brother Dave who was about a year older than me. As it was only my second trip to Yugo and Dave’s third trip I looked up to him as the “experienced man” and stuck to him like glue.
We also travelled down along The Dalmatian Coast as I was going to deliver to a place somewhere near Split and Dave was carrying on to offload in Mostar. Neither of us had a belly tank on our trailers so we both topped up our running tanks before we had left Hungary. I had filled up on the Black Market in places like Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania before so I had a fair idea of what the score was. It turned out that Dave had never bought black market diesel in Yugo before so it was a first time experience for both of us.
About 5p.m. one rainy afternoon somewhere along the coast road we came across a filling station just outside a little town and decided to try our luck. There was a bit of spare ground just across the road so Dave and I decided to park on it and walk across to talk to the owner. We told him that we had no Yugoslav Diners and asked him if we could pay in West German Deutsch Marks. After a bit of humming and scratching his head he asked if we had got any American coffee. Dave said yes, he had a jar of Maxwell House. The owner reluctantly said O.K. and started to write down some numbers of how many litres we could have for D.M.100. Dave and I agreed that it wasn’t a bad rate and we really did need diesel so we shook hands on a deal.
Now this was all done in our best pigeon German and we thought that things were going well until the owner said that we must come back when it was dark after the garage had closed.
But it didn’t get dark for another two hours and as we had no idea of where the next garage might be we decided that we would make an early dinner and drive over at 7 p.m. It seems like we were sitting there for hours until just before 7p.m. most of the lights went off in the garage and the owner waved us across.
We both filled up and decided to do a bit of night driving to make up for the time that we had lost. Driving down that coast road in the rain at night, especially as we didn’t know the road ahead was not a great idea but sometimes you felt that it just had to be done.
We parked up about 10 p.m. that night and in the morning we were woken up by another Dow driver Ken Singleton who was on his way back from Dubrovnik. We had breakfast with Ken and told him where we had got our diesel from the night before.
Ken started laughing, he thought that it was quite funny and told us that there wasn’t much of a black market for diesel in Yugo. If we would of gone into a bank and exchanged our Deutsch Marks for Yugoslav Diners we would of got a good exchange rate and there was no need to buy diesel coupons like you were supposed to in rest of the Commie Block.
It seems that for what Dave and I had paid for the fuel along with the jar of coffee we had been given a raw deal so we both had to put it down to our inexperience. :unamused:
I enjoyed seeing your old photos of Dubai Creek Brian and I have a feeling that you might be a bit disappointed if you ever decide to go back there. I must admit that I never managed to get down to The Emirates forty years ago but I still enjoy seeing those old Dhow boats close up. What still surprises me is that you still see loads of goods waiting to go places like Muscat, Goa, Mumbai and Colombo. There were stacks of computers, big screen television sets and other electrical goods waiting on the pavement to be loaded on to the Dhows so it appears that containerisation hasn’t completely taken over, yet.
I still get a buzz walking around the Souks in these kind of places, seeing all the different kind of spices, rices and walking around the gold shops even though we never seem to buy anything from them nowadays.
Brian, I wish you and all the other ex Promotors drivers a very happy and prosperous New Year and I hope that you all keep this great thread going through out 2019.

Regards Steve.