Tuesday 10th October

Driving through the towns and villages of Bosnia, as I did today between National Parks, it is impossible not to be reminded of the war, and will be for many yes to come. There are many shelled buildings, now just ruins. There are also abandoned houses, whose occupants fled and became refugees in Western Europe, in almost all cases, never to return. And there are war memorials and graveyards, striking in how new they are compared to those we are used to, from the World Wars, in the rest of Europe. The town of Kalinovik is typical, quite depressing to visit. I recall stopping over here 5 years ago on the bike. Today, it was just for fuel, and then I on a rough road south to the entry to the Sujetska National Park.

To my surprise, I found a small campsite just at the entrance, and knowing that the road onwards was challenging, took a space for the night. I say space, but I was the only one there. It’s a small family run, where the family have worked really hard and given the place plenty of character. It was 12Marks a night, about 5 euros.

In the afternoon I decided to get the bike out after a few months in hibernation, due to my injury. Unfortunately, this didn’t go well. All I succeeded in doing was to aggravate my left hip (the better of the two), practically falling off after riding about 20 metres. When the hip is aggravated like this it’s really difficult to even walk. It was a fairly sleepless night until I upped the ibuprofen/paracetamol mix, and it will be a few days until it recovers to what it was, from 1/10 back to 5/10..

The next section of road I drove this morning, a 45 kilometre section that takes about 90 minutes, and is just about on the limit of what the van will do. It’s all unsealed, regular potholes, loose stone, but with a gradient that’s just about doable. This section of the National Park is the Zelengora massif, which makes it, the R434, one of the great roads. Lower down on each side of the pass were a few logging trucks, but otherwise no one else. At the pass its 1766 metres above sea level, with spectacular views of the jagged peaks. With my (new) injury, and walking was a hobble, but I still managed a couple of short outings.

I’m now parked up at a small campsite in the east of Sutjeska National Park, having descended onto a regular road and come back north again through the town of Tjentiste. There are a few campsites here, clearly busy in the season, but in their last few days open now before the winter. There’s a bar and restaurant here also, which though open when I arrived, closed while I was doing some work in the van in the late afternoon. Once again, it’s extremely cheap to stay compared to Western Europe, and a good situation. Most likely, I will hang around here for a few days.