Monday 25th April: Pluzine – Foča: 51km (continued)
It was the strangest border I had ever been to. An odd unsigned descent to a confluence of rivers: the bursting Tara to my right and the turquoise Piva to my left. The only sign of life wooden shacks and garish vans loaded with canoes for the full Tara Canyon rafting experience.
And then, the only road turning 90 degrees over the river, over a single lane wooden bridge, rocking precariously with every lorry. The gaps between the wooden slats were so wide I feared my tires might slide between them and my bike and I would plunge down for an unexpected Tara Canyon experience.
There was no room to stop or contemplate: the border wasn’t exactly busy but there were cars rumbling along every minute.
So over I went and then turned left to an unobtrusive border post resembling more the ticket booth to a national park. Out from Montenegro and into Bosnia-Herzegovina without so much as a blink from either border agent.
Except by the signs of it, I hadn’t crossed into Bosnia at all. Not a single Bosnian flag. Not a single “Welcome to Bosnia” sign.
Instead, a towering red, blue and white sign and a suspiciously new sign:
In my previous post, I likened Montenegro to a modern day Borduria, the fascist state in the Tintin books. So now I was crossing from one fictional country to another.
And just to add to the experience, my half of the road had fallen to bits: a dusty pot-holed mess. I was glad that there was little traffic in either direction, so I could pick my way round it.
But my, what a beautiful country! Crenelated crags covered in trees like green Velcro sweeping down to vibrant blue rivers. A vast verdant emptiness.
I took my time. With the roads, I had to. At one point, I came across cows, idly meandering across the road without a care. The sun was out and here I was venturing into the unknown, brimming with curiosity. Even the inclines were benign: gently up, gently down for twenty gorgeous kilometres.
At Brod, I joined what passed for a main road, heading right to Foča, a cheerful town a few kilometres north, where I had booked an apartment for the night: full of families out for the evening walk, lovers making eyes at each other. And fascists.
Cheerful fascists, but fascists nonetheless. There were fascist sculptures, fascist graffiti and worst of all, a weird green glass and grey stone modernist fascist civil war memorial to the ‘victims’ of the people they were supposedly sharing a country with, dressed up like a Silurian from Dr Who and with Cyrillic lettering like Norse script. The message was clear: this is not over. It is merely on hold.
Tuesday 26th April: Foča – Sarajevo: 81km
Another beautiful spring day, out relatively early with a long and hilly ride ahead. As I stopped outside Foča, a young man approached me and seeing that I was English, started to engage with me. About boxing. Which I know little about and care even less. “Tyson Fury: he is Irish Traveller, like Serbian Orthodox.” He then kissed the rosary around his neck., “No Muslims”. So farewell then, Foca and your cheery fascists.
Before going, I had fretted about poor roads, dangerous drivers, and long tunnels. I need not have worried about any of these. The road was not perfect, and I had to keep an eye out for rocks and the odd pothole, but it was decent enough, and the drivers were – mostly – pretty careful, giving me a wide berth and the odd toot of encouragement. And the one long tunnel that I did come across was fully lit and empty. I did not have it all my way: short of Dobro Polje, I was harassed by an Alsatian rushing at me out of nowhere and not backing down in the face of the threats of physical violence I was making in his direction. I dismounted, keeping him the other side of my bike and slowly walking out of ‘his’ territory, neither of us giving an inch. A true Balkan stand-off.
But what I hadn’t expected was how beautiful it all was: the fast rushing Bistrica river as I gently pushed uphill, tight gorges with rocks looming on both sides, vistas of trees and distant crags and as I got closer to Sarajevo, snowy mountains glinting in the sunlight.
Then a tough final ascent to the waterline between the Bistrica and the Zeljeznica with even the cars slowing down. At the summit, yet another Serb – sorry, ‘Srp’ – war memorial, slightly more sober than the Silurian before chatting with a stopped lorry driver who had one arm in plaster.
Down the valley I went, fine scenery, almost Alpine, but not as dramatic as on the way up.
Then the madness of Sarajevo, an eternity of suburbs and car fumes, enlivened by a dramatic descent into the Miljacka valley, following the other cyclists and riding on the pavements, and then up a busy street to my friend’s house.
It was a happy reunion after too many years apart, made more joyful by meeting her husband, daughter and lovable but excitable dog, Rita. I could not have been in better hands. And Rita was clearly happy to have another leg to throw herself at.
How wonderful and how incredible to be in Sarajevo! There are few cities on earth where you feel the weight of history push so heavily down on you. Berlin, Moscow, Belfast, Jerusalem certainly. Perhaps Paris, Rome and Warsaw too. But one must see these cities, one must breathe these cities. To come to Sarajevo was a big detour on my trip, but it had never been in doubt.
After dinner, my friend took me for a wander along the main drag, still named after Marshal Tito, pointing out this and that: not just the highlights of the town, but also places from her youth: her school, the law academy. We walk all the way to the old town: Baščaršija, a throng of narrow lanes, mosques and tourist shops selling sweet pastries of all kinds and in all colours: bright green, bright pink…. Most of them, my friend told me, are made in Turkey…
Wednesday 27th April: Sarajevo
With my friend off at work, her husband took me up the hills to the ruins of the fortress overlooking the city and my first Bosnian coffee, Sarajevo splayed out beneath me on a gloriously sunny day, a city like any other.
Yet the past clung everywhere in the air like a suffocating smog: the old gun positions, the bridges, the monuments, and the human regrets.
He dropped me off at the City Hall, insisting that I take a look inside. And rightly. It was empty but quite glorious: a mix of art exhibits, historical artefacts, administrative offices, and a recreation of the war tribunal… A sign on the outside notes that the hall was firebombed by Serbians during the civil war and rebuilt with Austrian funding, a symbolic reconciliation from one side at least. History in the raw.
And then after a simple but delicious lunch of cevapcici sausage and a glass of yogurt in a Muslim café, out through the city, stopping at the Latin Bridge, where a small sign on one of the buildings notes the spot where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. A chill came down me, and again when I walked along Sniper Alley and the distinctive yellow Holiday Inn.
But it is not just the past that chilled but a foreboding of the future: a conflict simply frozen rather than resolved, and with the evil Putin trying desperately to thaw it. I had imagined Sarajevo as somehow tucked firmly inside the Bosniak and Croat zones but no, it is divided right along the river. And yet, my friends told me, there is hardly any socialising between people on each side. A society in limbo.
Yet life goes on and there are odd glimpses of the normality and moving on that my friends crave. For the first time on my trip, I saw bikers out in the streets in their lycra and shades. In an abandoned factory area, I came across a Specialized bike shop where I can get my front light. And in the evening, we went to a chic restaurant on a back street, specialising in nettle and leaf recipes: nettle pesto, dandelion leaf salad, and even a chocolate and nettle cake. This is the charming town that Sarajevo could become if only the politicians would let it move on.
Thursday 28th April: Sarajevo – Konjic: 63 km
“You should have stayed longer”, my friend said, and rightly so. And indeed I will come back if Putin and Vučić don’t make that impossible.
Out through the madness of Sarajevo, spending the first few hundred yards following a bearded unicyclist who was making much faster progress than I was… Then Sniper Alley and a long urban mass of grassed over bike paths and rutted roads lasting a full hour of grey misery.
As the city thinned out to commuter villages, my GPS directed me over some very sturdy train tracks, lunking out of the ground. My bike was too heavy to lift in one, so I had the choice of taking off all my bags and lifting it over, or seeing if there is an alternative route. The road continued to my left and on the map, I spotted a minor road that looks like it leads to an underpass or at least to an easier crossing.
So off I went, up a straight hill and whooshing down past a large bunch of non-European people milling around. As I pedalled on, fabricated huts to my left and right and African and Asian faces playing ping pong, strolling or sitting around, and angry dogs, and… the end of the road with a watchtower. Bollocks…
So back towards the bemused milling crowd, and some unpleasantly surprised Bosnian police officers and UN guards.
And it was at that point that I realised that I was about to be arrested…
The GoPro camera mounted on my handlebars did not help my case, and nor did my passport, which was promptly seized. The whole thing had “Suspicious British NGO worker tries to break in to take footage of appalling conditions in asylum camp” written all over it. Luckily, I had not been filming during my descent, so could show them innocent footage.
After what seemed an eternity, their faces relaxed and they sent me off along the RIGHT track, with a friendly pat on the back and a clear message to not come back. Ever. Just go now.
Then a mercifully more mundane ride out along the main road to Mostar, the M115 and M17 with the odd delightful turn-off through a small village. As I was stopping for a drink, a young Spanish rider pulled up, laden with twice the amount of baggage including some very bulky canvases for sketching. He was cycling East, to Turkey… and beyond… So off we went, with him very quickly leaving me for dust.
Did I mention that he had twice the gear? Yes, but he was half my age, the little bastard.
Then off up a very long and middlingly steep hill with two lanes for uphill traffic, and threoufh a long but completely lit tunnel to a quite magnificent sight: a line of grey crags mostly covered in trees. As I sat at abandoned picnic tables, a long line of road bikers were making their way painfully up from the valley floor in the opposite direction, coaxed by a support van, whose staff proudly gave me a Herzegovina Bike Tours card. Again, some hope for this beautiful country.
Then a quite amazing descent over the best part of twenty joyous kilometres and impeccably paved and engineered, whizzing down and trying to take in sight after sight, and hoping that my GoPro would get at least some of it. Watch the video for just some of it. One for the ages…
Konjic: a pretty town perched on the turquoise Neretva river. My B&B – the basic but charming Pansion Neretva – was quite a walk from the town, but it was a nice walk at that along that stunning rustling river. I felt as though I were in the real Bosnia: wood smoke, minarets, red roofs, apple trees, and the odd foul-smelling factory poisoning the water…
I ate dinner in a soulless and almost empty restaurant in the old communist style with menus in English, Croat and Turkish with a dull but well-meaning waiter. But my goodness, the food was good: “Bey pottage”: a rich soup of chicken, okra and vegetable stock, followed by a perfectly cooked small steak in butter with chips and grilled veg, all polished off with some fine Montenegrin Blatina wine. For purely medicinal purposes.
Friday 29th April 2022: Konjic – Mostar: 70km
Having joined the Neretva river, I was now to follow it almost to the sea. I retraced my route to Konjic and then after a rather boring first hour and a half, as I came out of the tunnel to Jablanica, the scenery became much better as the Neretva contorting itself round hills. There was a particularly lovely stretch coming out of Jablanica, a quiet but mostly well paved country road with expansive views of green truffled hills tied up in turquoise, and all in glorious sunshine. Perfect.
Sadly I had to rejoin the heavily trafficked main road, the M115, before too long, but even then, the scenery made up for it, particularly the first section with great stiff fingers of rock crowding down to that swirling river, and then regular changes of scenery as the river and valley widened out again. And I was able to take the benefit of the many metres painfully climbed since Kotor: for over 25 glorious kilometres, I was on a gentle downward sweep, at a speed well above my usual snail-like crawl.
I didn’t even mind the tunnels: there were 16 of them and they were either short or well-lit, and wide enough for cars to give me a wide berth.
The only irritation was the traffic, passing in waves all day. The road was wide enough, but the cars became a bore. The only danger came when a car coming the other way decided to overtake a line of vehicles and came at me – in MY lane – flashing its lights at me to get out the way, and forcing me to swerve into a hedge. Ah, the delights of afternoons during Ramadan… Tired and hungry drivers with too little sugar and too much adrenalin.
It was all too good to last and after a final long tunnel, a long flat stretch away from the river to Mostar with rush hour traffic buzzing me the whole time.
Saturday 30th April: Mostar
I was expecting a lot from Mostar. I was disappointed. The star turn is the old bridge across the Neretva. It had stood there for over 400 years before being destroyed by Bosnian Croat forces in November 1993. Rebuilding was completed in 2004.
It was very impressive and beautiful but somehow, I feel that there is something missing with reconstructed monuments. The old town seemed very small and jammed with tourist shops and restaurants. It was indeed jammed with tourists out on a sunny day. No atmosphere. And the rest of the town was alternately grim and boring: grim on the Bosniak east side, still largely unreconstructed and rather mundane on the more prosperous Croat side. The divisions remained, even between the apparent allies.
There were redeeming aspects: a pleasant and rather untouristed spot just south of the main drag with a splendid view to the bridge where I sat for a while in the morning and at dusk. During the latter, I was gently amused by a young man with an expensive camera and tripod, repeatedly setting up Instagram shots of the bridge, putting the timer on and then leaping in front of the camera like a gormless gorilla. I wanted to tell him that the problem was him, not the camera settings… The other quiet joy was discovering some wonderful murals on the Croat side, livening up the place.
I did though find some nice spots to eat on the edges of the old town, having a very good Bosnian stew for lunch and a steak stuffed with cheese and prosciutto that might not have looked good but tasted wonderfully.
Sunday 1st May: Mostar – Gradac: 84 km
A beautiful day to leave a sad country. Off early and after 6km of the main road with more Croatian flags than Bosnian ones, was led onto progressively quieter country lanes, picking up the Ciro Trail, a recently launched bike route largely following the old railway line from Dubrovnik to Mostar.
At one point, I spent a long time going round the outside of the “Aluminija” company. I mention this because of the combination of neat “no photos” signs, bilingual signs for a deserted vineyard and garden, and giant structure like the Seattle needle, with “We are Aluminija” written in English in a trendy font. Not a soul around… It was all rather James Bond secret villain. In farmland. I had the feeling that if I stopped, I would be quickly surrounded by burly security guards, so on I went…
Then the old railway line and that rather typical thing where you spend kilometre after kilometre pedalling along straight and narrow tree-lined lanes, getting bored out of your skull. It finally opened up to a wonderful bridge over the Neretva, with the river tumbling over falls and again not a soul around. It was just so pretty and so unknown.
Then through a rather pretty gorge, though with parts along a bearable gravel track. Few other sights: a day for making the distance.
Then off the route and onto the main road into Croatia, with the customs officer barely looking at my passport, let alone my bike or vaccination papers.
So that was Bosnia. I had taken a big detour away from the standard tourist route along the Adriatic. I had entered the country with my stomach only just about recovered from a bout of food poisoning and my feet still cold and damp from the rain in Montenegro. I had stepped into a forgotten country from a forgotten conflict with little clue as to what to expect.
But I had also stepped into an often fantastically beautiful landscape of tree-covered crags and bustling rivers. A land of great kindness, most particularly with my friends in Sarajevo. A land of great food.
A land where history lay heavy and had not stopped. It was like skating across a frozen river with rushing water not far underneath. And in that spring of 2022 with Russian tanks rolling across European territory, the ice felt thin indeed.
A land of pious Orthodox men kissing their crucifixes, of grotesque green war memorials, of fascist flags and graffiti, of divided towns with divided populations. A land of wary policemen and frustrated asylum seekers in hidden camps. And yes, a land of strange, guarded industrial plants with video cameras side by side with vineyards.
But also a land where many wanted to move on, to escape the legacy and addiction to violence and confrontation. To skate to the other side of the bank and freedom.
Bosnia will always have its history, but I left wishing for it to have its future as well, to find its true identity, to escape the ghosts, to be normal again.
So, on to Croatia… Part Three will follow…