Tour de (Western) Balkans 2023

We leave Jajce going back upstream and cross the river at a series of crazy mini wooden watermills (the watermill version of mini golf) backtracking through our tunnel. The Lure of the Emerald water is just too much – we strip down to the undies and have a cold but lovely swim. Two mating frogs glide past, oblivious to us.

We climb gradually up the valley behind two heavily laden cyclists and we all stop to chat at the top. Alma and Roland are a young Austrian couple finishing up a year-long tour of Europe. Jon and I get both life-envy (though they tell us that in future they would rather do 2 month tours so as not to get jaded) and bike-envy (their chunkier tyres allowed them to do a lot more off piste over the mountains than us).

We say goodbye in front of the most bling church ever back in the Rep Srpska.

Then Jon tests my new found strength with some 15-20% kickers out of town. Steep steep STEEP. I demand a snack stop. It quickly flattens off and I get some good main road bypass sections until we leave the main road proper and start cycling up through what feels like incredibly empty woodland. We’re heading for a campsite we’d read about that doubles as a gallery, bar, jazz festival venue and generally friendly place called Zelenkovac. The friendly owner lets us camp though the camping season hasn’t yet started and only house huts are in use. We are on our own in a lovely field surrounded by bubbling burns and lovely woods and a random yellow truck. We go back to the bar once the tent is up and end up having a hoot and a lot of rakija – Stevo the barman, Nemanja our two main entertainers. It all feels very mellow – even the Banka Luka hells angels are super friendly and like stroking the local cat.

The campsite is lovely in the morning sunshine and we stroll up into the woods before heading back to the bar for the breakfast the boss had said he would make us. It never materialises in solid form: Stevo plies us with coffee while we wait. And then with rakija. We cut our losses before more rakija gets poured and head off. We’ve now had a classic Balkan breakfast – coffee rakija and cigarette smoke – except our smoking was all passive mixed with wood smoke from the stove. Have I said already that everyone smokes here? Everyone smokes here. Especially indoors. You just have to chill out about it and accept it as part of the cultural experience.

The neighbouring village sorts out our food shortages and off we head into the mountains. We know it’s going to be a toughie but we don’t yet quite realise WHAT a toughie. Thank goodness for plastic swiss roll.

The first climb’n’descent is very pretty but it’s a sharp uphill again and we soon find that our Osmand mapping app isn’t quite accurate in this area. The day turns a bit epic involving a pretty spooky semi deserted village with lots of old military trucks, a road that just stops existing (one moment it’s a proper tarmac road and the next moment it’s forest), some logging tracks that just go on and on and on traversing across the hillside, crisscrossing each other, a spooky red and white barrier in the middle of nowhere, our water nearly running out, the knowledge that there are actual bears around, and 20km + of off piste. We get totally lost in this densely wooded mountainside. Eventually we pop back out fully into the real world from this whole parallel universe feeling and descend quite relieved into the town of Drvar.

On one level Drvar is a dump. It’s all shelled out abandoned buildings between the slightly dismal shops and cafés, with teenagers lolling around. Giant pimped up quadbikes with folk in army surplus. It feels like a back water. We check into a hotel that has definitely seen better days (and worse ones too by the looks of the burned wall) and wander down the road to find food. Which we do in the shape of very delicious fast food.

And although, on one level Drvar is a dump, we both feel really really glad we came as this evening gives us a whole new perspective of how complex things are in this Krajina border area of Bosnia in particular. I’ll probably get a few things wrong, but in a nutshell…. The town used to be predominantly Serb in a largely Croat and Bosniak (Muslim) area. Serbs were badly persecuted during the Second World War by fascist Ustase Croat forces and many, many were killed. Serb factions then themselves killed a lot of people in 1991 in the Krajina border area both in what is now Bosnia but also in Croatia. When the Croat forces advanced in 1995 the majority of the Serb population fled, seeing the writing on the wall. Houses were re-appropriated by the state and handed out to displaced Croats, and a Serb bloke we spoke to described the difficulties of being a refugee himself and then making a decision to bring his parents back to their home town and trying to get their property back now that it is is predominantly Croat area. He was candid about the mess of the war. He made no acknowledgement of the Serb-committed massacres and squarely blamed the war on the USA, the UK and Germany. He admitted that the war had got nobody anywhere.

The tension is palpable. There is no sense of a country undergoing a truth and reconciliation process as a country, but more of warring factions who have been temporarily prevented from fighting but retain a deep sense of injustice, hurt and damage. Both Jon and I were left with a very depressing sense that war could easily break out again around here, or at least that militias would have a ripe breeding ground. There has been so much killing, and there remains so much tribal “my injustice needs avenging” that it feels caught in a similar terrible vortex as Israel & Palestine. How does a country ever move on from that? In an area like Drvar where tourism hasn’t acted as an economic leveller and distracting force it seems hard to see the way forwards.

We leave town the next day along what would have been an elegant tree lined avenue before all the destruction took hold and cycle through some truly stunning landscape of limestone gorges that would attract hordes if they were anywhere else. This area’s main economy was wood and wood features everywhere today with sawmills, well managed woodland, trucks delivering next winter’s fire wood.

Tourism is getting off the ground and it isn’t all doom and gloom round here as we see plenty of evidence of people trying to move forwards with their lives. We get our first sight of the very beautiful river Unac and meander along until we stumble on the Atlantis KV, an art and community place in a disused baby clothes’ factory that is utterly random and utterly beguiling in Kulen Vakuf.

We end up in a beautiful valley just upstream from Strbacki Buk waterfalls, with the bright green river that flows through the steep hillside (and that we swim in), all peaceful pastureland, a row of simple white houses, beehives and vegetable gardens. I woke up to the best dawn chorus I’ve heard in years.

This campsite/apartment place is run by a lovely man whose main occupation seems to be growing strawberries, making jam and welcoming strangers. There is no evidence of a missus nor kids.

The hillside opposite is Croatia and this is still borderland. It is really difficult to hold in your mind simultaneously this utter natural peace and the multiple horrors of what happened in this area in the 20th century. I was reading until late last night about the multiple massacres in this area, in particular of nearby Kulen Vakuf. We went through Kulen Vakuf yesterday and had an ace time utterly unaware of what had happened there, light of heart, eating burek and baklava, drinking bosanska kafe. Hard not to cross this country and leave it anything other than a pacifist.

We leave to head for Bihac the next morning: another lovely Bosnian town full of cafés and friendly people. Our last mosques probably, our last calls to prayer overheard before we head into Catholic Croatia. We idle there and eat amazing birthday pancakes and meet nice Julien from Brest on his bike. He’s a hard core cycle tourist who tours 2 months every year. A younger Donnie Martin!

Then it’s off to another very slick border crossing into Croatia. Bosnia has been the most powerful bit of our trip so far. It has been unexpectedly prosperous, though maybe more in the BiH areas rather than the Rep Srpska bits. The tarmac is ace. The bureks are the stuff of legends. The landscapes have been utterly stunning. The evidence of human destruction has been huge. Very very very glad I came.