Bosnia and Hercegovina

This was Rachel’s idea, but being so close to the border it did make sense to tick off another country.

Although the landscape rarely changes quickly as you cross borders, the architecture certainly did for us this time. We had only been in Bosnia for a few miles when we saw our first church, consisting of a dome and minaret, we didn’t expect to see the influence of the Ottoman empire so soon! It encouraged us to stay in the country longer than we had planned and we found a campsite about 10 miles over the border. This is definitely different from the western culture we are used to, the campsite belongs to the hotel, and entering both was a little bit like being transported back 30 years. Although there are over 100 pitches in the camping area, tonight there is one Dutch caravan and us. The young guy responsible for the camping is very polite and speaks good English, everybody else seems to speak, what we would perceive as Russian, and the road signs have graphics of which I have only ever seen on a computer under the ‘insert symbol’ tab.

Parts of the journey southeast through Bosnia reminded us of Scotland

Having said all that we do feel safe, despite me reading in the reception of the hotel that vipers are commonplace, and that there are still areas of the country where there may be unexploded land mines, but I haven’t told Rachel these minor details yet.

Sunday morning we headed southwest into deepest Bosnia where the motorist is stifled by prohibitive speed limits, open country roads where the maximum is 60….KILOMETRES per hour, that’s a mere 37mph, as pointed out by the Bosnian police officer who pulled us up for doing 71.4…..kph NOT mph! My first thoughts were a hefty fine, possibly imprisonment, but one of my pathetic apologetic smiles and a handshake seemed to do the trick. It was then I really started to ponder the significance of being in a non EU country, something we will ALL have to do soon. I know you would expect better of me, but I’ve become a little blasé during my retirement years, so hadn’t thought to consider whether or not we were actually insured to drive in Bosnia, which we weren’t! Oh dear, well let’s not panic, just don’t knock a cyclist over and hopefully we should escape without prison. The plan was to head north via the beautiful waterfall town of Jajce, pronounced something like Yieetzee, and avoid contact with anything! We knew that there were no campsites in southern Croatia where we were due to cross and as the nearest ones at Zagreb were poorly rated we plumped for the nearest/best, which happened to be in Hungary.

Escaping from our friendly police officers

Our route north out of Bosnia

For anybody ever wishing to cross from Bosnia to Croatia, please NEVER cross at Gradiska. It took 2 hours to do ONE mile! When they finally finish the end of the motorway it’ll be great, but until then avoid it like the plague!

Making Botchergate look good!

When we eventually got through, the lovely sunny evening (still about 25c) made the drive to Hungary a pleasant experience. We decided to do some stamp collecting so picked up one from the Bosnia, Croatia and Hungary crossings although we got a bit perturbed as we crossed the bridge into Hungary to find that they had put concrete barriers and barbed wire across the road so only one vehicle could pass at a time.

Having driven nearly 260 miles we were both starting to get pretty knackered and although we were now on supposedly decent roads in Hungary we found them quite frankly ……. swearworthy. At this point what I really didn’t need to hear from my beloved passenger were the words “the sooner we are out of this country, the better”!

No matter how hard a day it had been, we had already made the decision that it would be an alcohol free day. We arrived at the private house with a large garden all set up for campervans. There was one visible Dutch van in the garden, so pulling up the very short driveway to the gate meant blocking half the quiet village road with our 8 metre van, I rang the bell to which we were welcomed by Leo, our very friendly host. Once plotted up we were to join him and his wife (and other friends) on the terrace for welcome drinks, surprisingly they turned out to be alcoholic, so bang went our alcohol free day!

Oh one last thing, our hosts made the point of saying that their Dutch guests use the pool ‘au naturale’, providing we didn’t mind?