Balkan Bikers »

• It’s Mad Max territory

  July 30, 2008 @ 4:41 pm | by Peter Murtagh

  Ok. Memo to bikers: On balance lads, I’d say avoid this place. A few random thoughts and observations…

  We spend the night in the Palace Hotel in Mitrovica. Which is grand: good, clean room for half nothing (€30 if I remember right after a half-for-nothing steak to die for and a moderately decent bottle of red…) But, like, next morning as the dawn rises, we see that we spent the night on the side of Scrap Yard Highway: gateway to Pristina. Every other lot on the side of the road out of this place is a yard selling lumps of junk – bits of car doors, roofs, wheels, tyres, bumpers, exhausts. Whatever. And the bits that can’t be recycled come back on to the road as part of a clapped out rust and dust hulk hurtling towards you on the wrong side of the road on the brow of a hill…

  Someone tells us a day later that scrap metal is Kosovo’s most important export (by which I assume is meant the largest provider of foreign cash). Amazing but not totally surprising…

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• Border crossings

  July 28, 2008 @ 11:34 am | by Peter Murtagh

  Srebrenica to Mitrovica in Kosovo – 328 kms: The Bosnian border guard at the crossing into Serbia is really friendly and wants to know all about the bikes. He and Tony and I chat as he waves other vehicles through with little more than a cursory check.

  The bridge over the Drina river, the far side of which is Serbia, is straight out of Cold War central casting. Two graceful arches of steel girders span the river and hold the bridge up. It hasn’t been painted for years. The road over it is made of small uneven, small square granite cobbles.

  In the spy film, this is where the hand-over prisoner exchange takes place on a dull, damp and foggy night…
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• Worlds apart

  July 27, 2008 @ 11:40 pm | by Peter Murtagh

  Sarajevo to Srebrenica, via Pale – 220 klms: Pale was the Serb capital during the siege of Sarajevo – the stronghold of Radovan Karadzic and his army general Ratko Mladic. The road out of the city rises towards it steeply up the mountains. Pale is around 20 kilometres away.

  It’s odd, really. One is travelling between two sets of people who have radically differing views of themselves and of each other. But the landscape is the same, the trees in either place look the same, so does the soil, so does the general topography. But Pale and Sarajevo are worlds apart.
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• An invite to ‘The Pudding Hall’

  July 25, 2008 @ 12:59 pm | by Peter Murtagh

  Inside Sarajevo: A taxi ride to the UN Police Mission HQ produces an interesting aside. Amer (the driver) is a chatty bloke with decent English.

  We go through the usual “where you from?” conversation.

  “Ireland!” he exclaims. “My uncle live in Dublin.” (more…)

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• Skidding along in the wake of the Karadzic arrest

  @ 10:52 am | by Peter Murtagh

  Hrvace to Sarajevo – 267 Kms:  This is a day or three behind because, like, there is a certain amount of conventional hacking pressure this end… So bear with me, eh?

  Woke Tuesday morning to a txt message from insomniac Cousin Derek to effect that Radovan Karadzic had been arrested in Belgrade. Jaz*s!

  At this stage, Tony and I are in the middle of Croatia and a fair distance from
  Sarajevo where there’ll be a good reaction story to file to the paper. “Dancing in streets” says teeth grindingly helpful txt from the brother (more…)

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• Musical interlude in Kijevo

  July 24, 2008 @ 11:33 am | by Peter Murtagh

  Sveti Rok to Hrvace – 130 Kms: The town of Knin sits on a plain in the middle of the mountains southwest of the Dinara range that separate Croatia and Bosnia. It’s a substantial place with a population of about 11,000.

  Before the war that followed Croatia’s declaration of independence in 1991, some 80 per cent of the people who lived there were ethnically Serb. Today Serbs account for about 10 per cent.

  Three Croatian soldiers in uniform are sitting in the shade of a canopy outside a café smoking (as everyone seems to in the Balkans) and drinking beer. One, a handsome officer in formal uniform as opposed the military fatigues, speaks good English but is a man of few words. (more…)

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• Why would you want to go there?

  July 23, 2008 @ 11:24 am | by Peter Murtagh

  Kremsbrücke to Sveti Rok – 464 kms: “Why you want go there?” the waiter in the quay-side café asked with a mixture of indifference and contempt for our plans. “Everything you want is here. There’s nothing up there. Nothing.”

  The Adriatic along Croatia’s Dalmatian coast is certainly pretty. In places immediately south of Rijeka however, it is pock-marked with high rise monstrosities from Yugoslavia’s communist era – poorly constructed tower blocks with rust stained facades and bits of concrete falling off. They look like slums.

  We arrived on the Croatian coast speedily after crossing from Austria into Slovenia. The mountains that separate the two countries are breached by a 7.8klm long tunnel. We whooshed through it on the bikes and, crossing the river Sava, were in the little country that escaped unscathed from the horrors of former Yugoslavia.
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• On the road again – this time to the Balkans

  July 22, 2008 @ 5:02 pm | by Peter Murtagh

  Munich to Kremsbrücke – 268 klms: This is the start of a journey that emerged out of a bike ride last summer from Vezeley in France to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. Then my biking mate, Tony Sullivan, and I rode two BMW 1200 Adventures weaving in and out of the medieval pilgrim route and I wrote a diary for The Irish Times*.

  “What are we going to do next year,” asked Tony at the end of that caper.

  And so the thought began…

  I have been fascinated by the Balkans, or rather what happened there in the 1990s, since, working for another newspaper (The Guardian in London) I helped direct their coverage of the wars that attended the break-up of what used to be Yugoslavia. What was the place like now? Was there any reconciliation between the ethnic factions that ripped themselves apart so brutally back then? And what was the international community, Ireland included, doing to try to make it all better again?

  And so here we are – Tony and I – on the blue bus to Dublin airport at 3.30am feeling, well, bloody awful actually: gritty eyes and half dead for the lack of sleep. We are off to Munich to see a bloke named Stergios, who comes from Greece but whom we came across via a California website.
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