Tour de (Western) Balkans 2023

One of the weird things about this trip is that every border crossing heading North seems to bring a new degree of lushness to it. Maybe it’s because most of the border crossings we’ve done have been over mountain passes so the North-facing side is always colder/wetter. This is no exception.

There is also a weird thing going on with seeing spring bloom again and again heading north but that’s a whole other story for another time.

Final oddity: we’re about to have our second Easter as Orthodox and Catholic Easters are a week apart.

In the meantime, no man’s land is already STUNNING with very steep alpine views, lots of pine trees (a variety not yet seen that look like Scots pines from a distance – all horizontal branches) and it smells AMAZING. We get a major headwind buffetting as we round the corner to the Bosnian border. The potholes abound. They then disappear.

Through the border post and it’s steeply downhill through this beautiful landscape to a dammed river by which we have a good picnic and watch some unlikely lads arrive in their slowslung cars and get their fishing rods out and their waders on. I get sock-envy as one of the lads has a lovely pair of home knitted oversocks.

After that, it might just be tiredness but the landscape gets more bleak. We get our first taste of the contrasting nationalisms as the Republika Srpska flags appear in abundance.

We arrive in Trebinje after long suburbs into a very pretty old town centre – a very French or middle Europe feeling square lined with plane trees and cafés. The old city walls are suitably thick, the old pretty mosques have been rebuilt and look well cared for. It is full of tourists, we think possibly mainly Serbian, or Russian. After a comfy night in a place where the owner’s wife decorated the Easter eggs we leave town via a newly rebuilt monastery and a crazy oligarch mini mansion.

Our goal on the next section was to cycle along the well established Ciro cycle trail that follows the old railway line from just outside Trebinje to Mostar. Who says railway line says reasonably flat. It also starts dead straight, with great views, and multiple warnings not to stray off the path. There are still a lot of landmines in Bosnia which puts a new twist on the wild camping.

The trail is truly excellent. An amazing bit of potential tourist infrastructure and both Jon and I are staggered that this isn’t crawling with cyclists. It starts as very good tarmac with occasional potholes. There are some off piste sections, and if like us you manage to get lost on day two I can’t guarantee that you don’t end up pushing your bike for a few kilometers over a hill on very broken terrain. But most of the off piste on the main bit is fine (one section after a dam barrier when the old railway track contours up the side of a hill is a bit cheeky and I got off as I didn’t fancy plummeting to my dual death by fall’onto’landmine).

The views on day 1 are extraordinary. You are basically following a chain of mountains from the other side of the polje. The landscape in between is at first wild bush, then gradually morphs into orchards and vines. You get tunnel and viaduct action. The yellow crash barriers of Montenegro recur and I work out they must have been Yugoslav standard. There are plenty of stopping off points of interest in the form of old derelict train stations, with very good information panels. There are villages after villages that are ruined and ransacked. Bullet and mortar holes everywhere. Large red paint marking the words OK on some of the buildings that I reckon just have been a symbol of”checked for landmines”.

The overall feeling is a combination of increasing awe at the natural beauty and increasing somberness at the human folly. It’s a powerful combination.

We stop off for a coffee at a friendly dining establishment and the (Croat) owner deflects my ignorant/thoughtless question about (Serb) Trebinje by offering us rakija and cherry brandy and sitting to have a chat. He fought for 3 years in the war and tells us that in this, his dad’s village, only one resident remains, the local shepherd. I’ve now learned enough tact not to ask about the war.

Onwards up the valley and industrial orchards extend up and up. We get water in a graveyard (my mum’s great piece of life advice: you can always find water in a cemetery) and head off looking for camping spots. Jon vetoes my one overlooking the dam (too public). I veto his in a hidden sunken knowle (1. too spooky and 2. next to the only big tree in a million miles PERFECT for lightning strikes). We pass an even spookier derelict factory and eventually find a sheltered spot on the edge of a village. It’s lovely. We are lulled to sleep by the sounds of increasingly wild accordeon playing in the distance. I’m reminded of a great film from the 1990s by Tony Gatlif called Gadjo Dilo. Getting up to pee at night, a giant cross is illuminated above us on the hill side. We see this again and again – re-establishing the religious altitude supremacy.

Day 2 on the trail starts off well with a coffee in a very natty café in what was a bombed out school, all grey and gold paint. The not so old boys are all having their regulation coffee fag and rakia combo and wave us in.

Unfortunately we then have a bit of navigational mischief and end up totally off piste (both literally and metaphorically) thereby missing the section of the Ciro trail that has multiple tunnels and viaducts made by Mr Eiffel. We end up going over the hill rather than round it. Still, we get stunning views onto wilderness and a far off lake but we do miss the bit that Jon especially was really looking forward to. So if anyone reading this is heading that way, when there’s a sign post pointing in utterly the wrong direction it isn’t because someone has swivelled it around, it is genuinely because you have to go in completely the other direction. Hey ho. We get to hear a far off shepherd yoddling to his goats instead and to push out bikes for miles in the middle of nowhere! It was an adventure.

There is definitely a consolation prize in the waiting however as when we finally reach Caplinja (having carried the bikes over a brambly ditch where the Lettuce Man had taken over the whole track with his van), we have a truly amazing burek in a back street cafe. We watch the school children all go past with their umbrellas and then get back on the bikes for a spot of detour tourism to the recently renovated village of Pocitelj, passing under the Chinese built new viaduct. The mosque, the fortress and the hammam impress. The theme of the day is school children as the village is alive with Turkish teenagers on a school trip. It’s all very lovely and we sit on some steps and eat the pekara fare.

Then it’s onwards to Mostar. We arrive late afternoon to a very lovely spot called Palmera, run by Mariano and Arno a father and son combo who are just lovely. Mariano went to the lycée in Auch for a year and they lived in Toulouse for many! The courtyard outside is full of plants and they could not be nicer hosts. They put up with us drying our tent outside in their beautiful courtyard.

We ditch the bikes for 24 hours and head to Sarajevo on the train for a day of tourism (stunning train ride through the mountains). I’m convinced Bansky is sitting next to us on the train. Both Sarajevo and Mostar are lovely places deeply scarred by the war with bombed out buildings, Ottoman remnants, Austro-Hungarian remnants and Yugoslav concrete all bunched together. Mostar is very pretty and once the throng of tourists has left in the evening it has a lovely feel.

Really starting to get a sense of the scale of destruction of the war, both in terms of the buildings but also more importantly the people. Some harrowing museum action.

Finally: we discover that Jon is really quite average for Bosnia. This is the country with the tallest men in the world.