Srem. Mitrovica, to give the version in common usage, turns out to be a lovely place. It’s much more than mere gateway to the Gulag Plaza, three star retro commie hotel plonked in the middle of a prison complex.

Srem. Mitrovica was once something in its own right. It is on the banks of the Sava and has several pretty open places with grass, trees and cafes. There are some fine imposing 19th century buildings but the window frames are all peeling and the stucco is cracked and fallen off in patches.

All Srem. Mitrovica just needs is a little tlc to come into its own again.

Onwards and westwards down the motorway and a quick left to Banja Luka, capital of Republika Srpska, an entirely incident-free border crossing from Serbia back into Bosnia. They must be getting used to us…

On the Michelin map, the road out of Banja Luka is marked green indicating natural beauty. And they weren’t kidding. The road passes through a steep sided gorge, sweeping this way and that – fantastic biking country.

One side of the valley is tree covered and rises steeply to some 1,300 meters. The other is an escarpment, bare vertical rock, in places overhanging the road. The river in the gorge has that delicate pastel blue shade you often get in mountain waters.

At the top of the valley before the descent deeper into Bosnia and, out of the Serbian self-government part and into the Muslim Croat federation, we find Motel Lav and bed down for the night, fortified by yet another feed of Serbian meat and Montenegran wine.

The next day, Tony gets all excited about an old Yugoslav army generator sitting in the garage and instructs me to take five hundred million photographs of it. Today’s riding is going to be a long, hard grind. We aim to make Austria is one dash – a good 10 hours riding at least. The main event turns out to be a spell of off-road biking – only it’s on the road, the main road a little southeast of Bihac.

There’s road works and traffic is redirected to what eventually turns into a very narrow, winding gravel dirt track through farm land. The track is bone dry and cars and trucks, none of which slow down very much, churn up the dust until soon we’re riding through a chocking fog. We’ve got street riding tires on, not the nobly ones for off-road biking, and at the slightest excuse the bikes slither all over the place.

Articulated lorries, petrol tankers, cars with trailers, cars without – they’re all hurtling along, passing each other out at will even though you can barely see 20 feet ahead. I’m back in Mad Max land and it lasts for an incredible 20 kms…

And then its out of Bosnia, spluttering and wheezing, quickly across Croatia and on into Slovenia, the Alps beckoning.

It’s been a blast. The whole thing. And I know I’m on a hiding to nothing if I try to say that it was work, that I was up every day at 6, writing till 9 and then out on the road again. So I’ll just give in now and take the hit…

The bikes were brilliant – Stergios the Munich Moto Greek did us proud. I just love these BMW enduro machines. We saw some incredible scenery: central Bosnia is for sure one of the most breathtaking places I’ve ever seen and you must go there. And while some of the stories you will hear from the wars are heartbreaking, the people are warm and welcoming, their hospitality genuine.

None more so than Avdo, Emina and Adina, the grown up children of Abdulah Purkovic whose family run hotel and restaurant, the Misirlije, is in Srebrenica and whom I mentioned in my final report for the Command and Anlysis pages.

We turned pretty much the whole of their eating area into a press room for three days last week. There was Tony and me; Kalle Holmberg from the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter; Stefan Bos, a Dutch journalist, and his wife Ukrainian-born wife Agnes, also a journalist; and a photographer from AFP who glories ion the name Elvis Barukcic. (Kalle seized the moment to utter the must-be-made comment as Elvis was departing…)

The front of the restaurant became a newsroom and radio studio. There were laptops and cable and cameras everywhere. Stefan and Agnes run a newsagency in Budapest, BosNewsLife, and were multi-tasking to a variety of outlets – writing quick news reports, lengthy more reflective material, editing pictures and broadcasting radio reports over the internet to three different countries in five different languages… pretty much all at the same time.

And amid all this babble and confusion, Avdo, Emina and Adina cheerfully provided for our every whim and sat up talking late into the night.

Srebrenica isn’t Auschwitz and what happened in both places shouldn’t be confused. But genocide did happen in Srebrenica because of what people are capable of doing to each other when the veneer of civilization is stripped away and because the rest of the world didn’t stop it happening when it could have.

So I think people should visit Srebrenica and stand for a while among the graves. Show solidarity with the dead and those who loved them and live on, and show the people who did this that it was wrong. Some of them are living nearby…

And when you’re in Srebrenmica, there’s only one place to stay… misirlije_@hotmail.com (bikers welcome!)

“Where to next year,” says Tony, before answering himself. “Chad,” he announces.
“North Cape via the Arctic Circle,” I say. “I’m pining for the fjords.”

But this shouldn’t have to end now. We shouldn’t have top stop just ’cus Motogreek Stergios wants his bikes back. I mean, how completely unreasonable is that?

A final look at one of those stunning panoramas high in the Alps, the rest of the world spread out below, all the little Austrians and their cellars, before we descend to Munich.

This blog, this great wheeze, should just go on and on for ever.

“Tony.”
“Wha?”
“Have you ever seen Thelma and Louise?”

Tony says he’ll keep our place in the queue if I move forward slowly down the outside lane and see what happens.

This I do. The queue is perhaps 20 cars and trucks long and nobody’s going anywhere in a hurry. It’s boiling hot. People have opened doors and windows or have got out of their vehicles and are trying to stay cool. And here’s me queue jumping…

A couple of border guards see me and start jumping up and down, arms flailing.

Contrary to my immediate assumption (“Back in the queue Pal or we start to shoot…”) they’re in fact calling me to come on, signalling to pull the bike right up to the hut.

Soon Tony’s with me again and the guards are all over the bikes. A group of perhaps six heavily armed – side arms and assault rifles – Kosovo police hop out of a van and also come over.

One of them is excited with my bike, a GS 1200. He whips out his mobile phone and scrolls through his photos until he gets the one he wants to show me. And there he is: in uniform, sitting on his GS 1150 (the same as mine back home) only he’s also sporting an assault rifle. Couldn’t tell if it was an AK47 or an M16…

And there follows the bike conversation for the umpteenth time before, passports inspected and hands shaken, we’re sent on our way with the best wishes of the entire Kosovan border staff… into another queue waiting to pass through the Serbian side. From experience, we know this will take a very long time because, as the Serbs don’t actually recognise the border in the first place, they clearly have the attitude that if you guys (the Kosovars) insist on putting this border here, we’re just going to take our time…

Our queue jumping stratagem works again: we are called forward right up to the frontier hut for… the bike conversation – more handshaking and bike talk (“BMW dobar, dobar” – yes, very good we agree, excellent in fact), but no passport stamping. The Serbs don’t stamp passports at any Kosovo frontier post because to do so would convey recognition of the divide.

And with that we’re through. Lovely sweeping roads await, well surfaced and with long curvaceous bends. The land is fertile and, typically for Serb areas, is well managed and very productive. There’s acres of corn and lots of fruit – pears, apples, plumbs (from which the Serbs distil their ‘blow your head off’ liquor, slivovic) and fruit canes.

Tony and I have a fruit stop and two bikers zip past, a friendly hoot as they go. Later they are stopped and we pull over. One has some class of a big Honda, the other a 20-year-old BMW with 78,000 on the clock but looking good as new. They are Serbs: one, Slavko, is a Danube barge captain and lives in Germany; the other, whose name I didn’t get, runs a photo processing shop in Belgrade.

For the next 100 kms or so, we are overtaking each other in turn and stopping for coffee and apple juice – sharing a journey and communicating as best we can. The road north from Kosovo, the E80 and then a lesser road to Krusevac following the course of the river Rasina is lovely – peaceful, pastoral, rural – great biking country.

To make serious headway to get to Belgrade, Tony and I break away and join the E75 motorway for a 165 km dash to the city. We stop for coffee (both of us are feeling drowsy) at a small service area.

“Deutsch!” says the café owner looking at the Munich plates on our bikes.

“Nein. Irski, Irlandia,” we say.

“Ah Irski.” Says café owner, lingering, looking. “Where?” he asks.

“Kosovo,” I say.

“Ah south Serbia,” he says, “Kosovo Serbia”.

Sweet devine. Can we please have another movie; I’m sick of this one?

“Irlanda,” he’s not letting go, “No Muslims Irlanda.”

Listen Pal, I’m thinking but don’t say. “Actually, lots of Muslims in Irlanda,” I say, “10,000 maybe (I haven’t a clue how many there are). In Dublin, we have two mosques, maybe more.”

The fact that I’m clearly not the least bit bothered there are Muslims living in Ireland is the coup de grace. Café owner does what he’s good at, we drink it (Serbian coffee is great) and we whizz off.

Belgrade is hot and sticky and much bigger than I had expected – a real big European city with lots of substantial 19th century architecture, wide streets and city buzz. The riot police, all helmets, shields and body armour, are on duty in Republic Square for a pro-Karadzic demo. It passes peacefully, a few hundred people walking in silence and carrying pictures of him (he having been extradited to the Hague in the early hours of the morning).

Belgrade is built on the confluence of two great rivers, the Danube and the Sava. Down by the river in front of an ancient fort, we have apple juice on a barge café but resolve to get out of the city for the night and see whether we can find a nice roadside restaurant and rural pension.

Just past Ruma, we turn off the motorway and head for some hills that are marked on the map as part of a national park. Bound to be something nice up there. Passing through a small village named Radinci, a group of half a dozen youths shout at us as we pass.

It sounded like Serbo-Croat for: “I wouldn’t go that way if I were you ’cus there’s absolutely nothing at all that way and you’ll end up gnawing the bark off the trees and sleeping in a ditch.” But I might have been mistaken. Except a little further on, the road peters out into nothing much…

We turned back and stopped at the lads. “Moto Guzzi, Moto Guzzi,” says one. “Kawasaki,” says another. I had indeed mistranslated. They were bike aficionados but the general thrust of their place for the night advice was there’s nothing in the hills because the national park has been closed for years.

It’s dark now and we’ve run out of options. Back down the road to a place named Sremska Mitrovica which looks industrial and uninviting but needs must.

We’re moving slowly down a dark road leading into the town when, on the left, there’s the outline of a dull looking building and an unlit sign over the door. The word “hotel” is there – bingo!

Inside, Hotel Srem is straight out of the communist era. The hall and reception area is dank and gloomy, below power light bulbs failing to illuminate the place properly. There are rows of coat racks with nothing on them, crappy pictures on the walls and tourist posters for a place that no longer exist – Jugoslavia.

Everywhere there’s dark wood veneer panelling, chipped formica cupboards with handles missing. In the dining room, there are rows of neatly set tables but no people at them. The bar has a stainless steel top and a fake leather, sponge padded front.

In the bedroom, crude rusty metal grills bar the windows. The dull green carpet is clean but fraying in places. The floor-to-ceiling outer curtain is bright shiny silver; the inner one is made of voluminous folds of white chiffon. It’s a bit like an over the top first communion dress.

In the bathroom, the white tiles are cracked and chipped and there a huge lump of enamel missing from the bath, a rust stain bleeding from it.

Down in the bar, they’re friendly and have great beer, cold and tasty. A smartly dressed young waiter speaks very good English and chats to us. We ask who owns the hotel.

“The government,” he says.

“And what’s all around us,” we ask, able to see that there are other buildings hereabouts but unable to make them out.
“Prison,” he says, “the largest prison in the whole of Yugoslavia. There,” he said pointing to the rear of the hotel, “and there,” pointing to the other side of the road.

Holy cow! We’ve checked into the Gulag Plaza!

“How many prisoners,” asks Tony, “Five hundred? 1,000?”

“Two thousand,” says the waiter.

“What sort of prisoners,” I ask.

“Every sort, even the worst,” he says but which I take to mean murderers.

I ask him about how things are in Serbia. Much better now, he says. “Now is better. Milosevic is gone and now our government looks west to EU.”

“Why not east?” I ask.

“We must look west,” says, “I look west for my children [he has two little boys]. Now we have government that is good, looking to EU.”

The meal we have is wonderful – mijesano meso, a giant mixed grill platter of all sorts of meat, very traditional, very Serbian. We have two bottles of wine, both Montenegrin, passing on a Serbian one which tasted like paint stripper. And we slept well…

Next day, the sun is up and in the field across the road, a work party of prisoners is lifting potatoes. The scale of the prison is now clear: it’s vast, stretching in every direction and with the Gulag Plaza (three star!) plonked in the middle.

Lily is at the reception desk, a lovely roly-poly type of woman of a certain age wearing a bright blue blouse. I ask may I take her picture. “Smile,” I say. And with terrible sadness she says: “I no smile, I no have teeth.”

But she does smile, a lovely, warm smile and, yes, she’s missing her side teeth but who’s looking?

And then the bill. The rooms were €18 each, including breakfast. The total bill was €106, which included all the food and drink. No wonder the place is banjaxed.

And then Lily returns to her gloomy, dingy glass fronted office behind the reception desk in the cavernous hall of empty coat racks and wallpaper dating from the 1960s, a TV blearing out some quiz show rubbish.

She deserves so much better. If ever you are Sremska Mitrovica, go stay with Lily and indulge in a little Commie nostalga. It won’t be there for much longer…

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…

Anyway. This is the sort of stuff that greets you as you hurtle down the highway towards Pristina. It’s Mad Max territory… and there’s that slight suspicion that if you stop for a pee, you’re going to find yourself in that weird bar in Star Wars…

Leaving the Palace, there’s a small sign on the roadside that seems to have got it about right: SHITET, it says. Later, we learn this means “for sale”.

We see no other serious bikers here over two days and really, it has to be said, we can’t wait to get out. The driving is truly horrendous. There seem to be more car lunatics per square kilometre here than anywhere else in the world (with the possible exception of Donegal at 3am on a Sunday).

Driving on the right or left seems to them to be a quaint irrelevancy and speed is all. And so you meet these guys (and it’s ALWAYS guys) coming over the brow of a hill on the wrong side of the road at never less than 120kph. Everyone drives bumper to bumper but these maniacs still manage (thankfully) to barge their way back onto the right side of the road with inches and only a nanosecond to spare… but clearly not always given the number of wrecks around.

(Aside: it is very striking that Defence Force drivers who shepherd us from Pristina hotel to military camps and back are very calm and measured. They have been told, apparently, that the most serious threat to their safety in Kosovo comes from local madmen on the roads and, well, just take it easy and don’t get involved. Sound advice.)

For a biker all this danger means driving with one eye looking forward and the other in your rear mirror and just get out of the way of whatever it is. Not so easy always…

And what makes it all even more bizarre is that amid the crappy roads, roads works, scrap yards and general decrepitude, the main highway from Mitrovica to Pristina, and on out of the capital to parts further south, is lined with huge new developments – vast petrol stations galore, offices, out of town shopping centres and apartment blocks.

So where’s all the money coming from to bank roll this lot then eh?

When you put it together with certain displays of personal wealth – the big four wheel drives, invariably driven by blokes in sunglasses and exhibiting a certain swagger when they alight – the post-war economy and boom, you get the distinct feeling that organised crime and dodgy loot is a major factor hereabouts…. There are loads of cars with German,

UK and Dutch plates – members of the diaspora home for the summer apparently. Downtown Pristina (access via

Bill Clinton Boulevard
, the existence of which is announced by a three storey high picture of the great man draped from the gable of an apartment block) seems normal enough – lots of cafes, clothes shops, offices, small businesses, restaurants and hotels.

And then there’s the international presence… it’s huge and very visible. There are large car parks in the centre of the city attached to various office blocks and they are full of UN, EU and OSCE cars. And suddenly you notice that a very large amount of the traffic – maybe as much as 10 per cent – when you take into account all the Kfor military vehicles…

It’s clear the internationals are going to be here for a long time to come in some shape or form.

But for now, we’re outta here….

Next stop

Belgrade.

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…

“Yes, Drina river,” the border guard confirms to me, “notorious Drina, he adds… Be careful over there,” he says looking across the bridge. “Stop for police but don’t for any civilians. Good luck.”

On the far side at Ljubovija, the Serbian border guard is unsmiling but efficient. He takes time to examine our passports, green paper insurance and Munich bike rental details. When at last he is satisfied, “Welcome to Serbia,” he says.

And, to be fair, everyone in Serbia is welcoming. As we zip along the road (much better than almost anything we have driven over in Bosnia), cars hoot their horns in greeting and people wave as we pass.

You can see why the Drina here is the natural boundary between the two countries: the river on the Serb side and the steeply rising mountains on the Bosnian side form a natural barrier. The notoriety of which the Bosnian border spoke comes from the fact that further upstream and deep inside Bosnia, Serb forces tried to ethnically cleanse the Drina valley of Muslims during the war.

They did not fail entirely…

In Serbia, the floor of the Drina valley is quite wide, perhaps a kilometre at some points, and the river fat and flowing lazy. We see anglers trying their luck.

The flood plain is rich and fertile. All the land is used, the farms well tended and neat. There is corn, maize, potatoes, grass for hay, tomatoes, onions, apple and plumb trees and fruit canes. There are hives and, where the Drina has changed course over the centuries and left deposits in its wake, sand and smooth river rounded stones are extracted from gravel pits.

Most of the time it is raining, often heavily, but the biking is good. The roads are mostly well surfaced. On the straight bits, you can get up a good speed – 120 to 140 kph if you want.

Apart from the obvious, the rain does something else. If there’s one thing bikers fear more than a lunatic on the wrong side of the road its gravel. The pleasure of riding this way and that along the gracefully curving climbs into the mountains is reduced by the number of lethal sand and gravel spits the rain has spread into the road.

Coming out of a bend into the straight, it’s clear ahead to pass a line of cars. Moving out, I see a rock the size of a tennis ball too late. I’m only doing about 80 kph but when the front tyre hits it straight on, the whole front of the bike wobbles madly and I’m sure I’m going to come off. Thankfully I don’t…

While the Drina valley and the land to Uzice and on towards Nova Varos look settled and prosperous, we pass through some areas that are dirt poor. The upland area around Sjenica looks grindingly poor, a coal mine and all that goes with it seemingly to underline the point. And a surprise around Novi Pazr long before we enter Kosovo: there are mosques aplenty – a significant Muslim minority within this part of south western Serbia.

At the frontier with Kosovo, there’s all sorts of real stuff going on.

Once again, the Serbian border guard initially seems grumpy and unfriendly. Traffic is held back from the border post by about 100 meters and vehicles are called forward one by one.

He takes us together. “Passports,” he says circling the bikes, eyeing them up and down. “Papers,” he adds with a nod of his head at the bikes. He takes them, disappears into a cabin, gives them to a colleague and comes back out.

And then we have the bike conversation: where did we get them, where have we ridden through… all the usual stuff. He’s engrossed and doesn’t pay a blind bit of attention to the honking motorists getting impatient back down the queue.

And then he gives us back our passports and other papers and waves us through with a smile. More Cold War stuff – barbed wire wooden barriers across one half of the road forcing us to zig-zag through but no sign of the Kosovo border.

Around a bend into no man’s land and there’s a bunch of UN guys in deep, dark blue battle fatigues and combat boots. Most are wearing the light blue UN peaked cap or beret. All carry side arms, a couple have small, but no doubt effective, machine guns.

I pull over. Tony still hasn’t come through the Serbian border check. Engine off, I dismount and go over to a fellow getting out of a white, UN four wheel drive.

“Hi,” hand outstretched, I say. The big bear of a man in a dark blue tee-shirt takes it and responds, clearly a little unsure what I’m doing, stopping here and what might come next.

“UN?” I ask though it is blindingly obvious who and what they are. But you have to start somewhere.

“Yes.”

“Where are you from,” I ask, his Polish insignia clearly visible.

“Poland.”

“Ah. Polska.”

“Yes. Polska! Polska!”

“We have many Polska in Ireland. Many. Shops and pubs. Many Polska.”

“Yes,” he says now smiling broadly. “You want coffee?”

And out of a camouflaged make-shift seating area pour his colleagues, about eight of them. Tony arrives. “Coffee?” they say. And so we all stand there chatting and once again the bikes and the journey are the real centre of attention. By now, we have collected a lot of street cred mud spatter and grime and the guys are clearly impressed.

There are smiles and handshakes all around as, obligatory photo taken, they wish us well and we head off.

Around the next corner, the much more serious stuff: a border base of French and Danish troops, all barbed wire, sandbags, gun emplacements and light military vehicles. Last St Patrick’s Day, about 1,000 Serbs from both sides of the border (and both sides of the border are Serb dominated) converged on it, confronted the UN personnel and made their feelings known by setting fire to a few huts.

There is some evidence of what happened – debris and the like – when you reach the Kosovo border post. There, a smiling UN policeman from Bangladesh asks for our papers. He hands them to a Kosovan woman police officer – the first Kosovo presence in this mass of UN police and military.

Again there’s the biking conversation, although the woman officer wants to know where we’re going, for how long and where we will exit Kosovo. We get a 90 day permission to enter and leave, issued under UNMIK regulation 2005/16. Unmik is the United Nations interim administration in Kosovo.

Permission to enter and the Bangladeshi UN man whispers some advice. He names a small hotel just down the road. Don’t stay there, he says. Not safe… We pass the place, it looks fine but we take our friend’s advice.

This is Serb territory and all along the way, but especially in Zubin Potok, the locals make their point: Serbian flags fly from the top of most lamp-posts.

Zubin Potok: twinned with Portadown!

A little further on towards Mitrovica, there’s yet another Unmik police check only this time, they’re wearing customs badges. A small, stocky man with perfect English waves us over to the side of the road. The papers come out and there are the few perfunctory questions. But yet again, it’s the bikes that are the real centre of attention.

“I ride a Kawasaki!” he announces proudly. “But these, BMW, incredible machines,” he declares. We can only but agree…

“So where are you from,” I ask.

“Turkey. I am Turk,” he says.

“Oh where in Turkey?” I ask because I know parts of it well.

“No, I am from here,” he says. “I am Kosovo Turk from Ottoman time. I speak Turkish. I am part of Kosovo Turkish minority.”

Sweet devine… This place gets more complicated by the day!

Mitrovica and a bed for the night. Mitrovica is often mentioned as being the capital of the Serb dominated part of northern Kosovo. The ethnic Albanians, who make up the great majority of Kosovo’s overall population, dominate from south of Mitrovica, south to the border with Albania and including the capital, Pristina.

Inside Mitrovica’s five star Palace Hotel (where single rooms are €30 a night and incredible fillet steak costs all of €7.50) the place is hopping as 250 Albanians celebrate a wedding is traditional style until at least 2am…
 
There may not be much alcohol flowing but they’re blasting away with the music and dancing and it all sounds wonderful.

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.

The only thing on the road out of the city to alert you to the fact that you are entering a separate political and cultural entity is when, after passing through a road tunnel, a large billboard announces: Welcome to Republika Srpska. After that, road signs are in cyrillic script (which makes than damn hard to decipher) but apart from that… nothing.

Republika Srpska is the self-governing Serbian part of Bosnia, recognised under the Dayton Accords that ended the war. But it remains also part of the country Bosnia and Herzigovina. The capital of Republika Srpska is Banja Luka, some distance to the north of Sarajevo. But Pale was the Serb capital during the war.

The place does not have an awful lot to recommend it. It’s said that 16,000 people live there and if that’s so, most of them are in a cluster of four to six storey high apartment blocks that form a substantial rectangle that makes up the centre of the town. The area might be the size of six or eight GAA pitches laid out in a block.

I’m looking for posters of Radovan the Evil and all that. Nothing. We buy some fruit instead and have a look at the Orthodox church, the only building that looks remotely interesting.

It’s tiny and inside has the usual collection of Orthodox church icons. One shows a severed head being offered on a plate. There’s a Serbian flag but no alter or seats. In the centre of the church (which measured not much more than 20 ft by 20 ft) there is what looks like a dias. It has a plate with a dolie.

A man in his 30s dressed in jeans and a jacket walks in, places some coins on the dolie and stands in front of the dias praying. We leave.

When he comes out, I approach him. He’s warm and friendly. The church is only about 200 years old. We chat as best we can – my Serbo-Croat is nil, his English limited but good – and he wants to know if Ireland is Christian. Yes, I say, Catholic and Protestant but all Christian.

But you Irish fight, he inquires. Well, yes but not now, not any more, I try to communicate. I tell him that in the whole island, Catholics have a big majority and Protestants are a minority. But in Northern Ireland (at the risk of getting into the difficult bits) I tell him that Protestants are the majority and Catholics the minority.

“Northern Ireland is like sort of our Republika Srpska,” I say and he doubles up laughing.

His only comment on the Bosnia situation is to say that Catholics and Orthodox and Muslims living together create problems. No, I don’t say because it would be impolite, it’s particular people that create problems; most people rub along fine if you just leave them alone…

He’s a nice welcoming man and he wishes us well on our journey, as do the few other people we spoke to in Pale.

We backtrack to the main Sarajevo-Srebrenica road ’cus that’s where we are heading. A pee stop coincides with a call from RTE…

For the next 150klms or so, we pass through heavily wooded hills and valleys. The road is good and the traffic not so heavy that it makes travelling a bore. There are saw mills aplenty, the low lying land is fertile and well worked.

And finally, after a wrong turn or two, we come to Srebrenica, the place where the worst mass murder since the second World War was committed. Writing about that is for another day…

…the Other Biker adds: Members of the biking fraternity thinking of riding into the sunset in Cyrillic countries might consider the following:You will struggle with the signposts. Try this for size, on our way from Sarajevo to Srebrenica the excellent Michelin map 757 of Croatia and Bosnia, shows, among many others, the village of Vlasenica but the road sign displays – and sorry, but we don’t do Cyrillic so let’s be phonetic, as it were – something like a capital B, then the pie sign, followed by an ‘a’, a ‘c’, an ‘e’, a ‘h’ and then that Russian looking ‘n’ turned backwards. And Srebrenica was an indecipherable Cpe, followed by the number 6 wearing a cap, an ‘e’, a ‘h’, a backwards ‘n’, a square ‘u’ with a tail, and an ‘a’.

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

“Ireland!” he exclaims. “My uncle live in Dublin.”

Amer looks to be in his late 30s/early 40s. He was a soldier in the Bosnian Army, defending Sarajevo, during the siege and war. He stayed in the city throughout, living with his parents in a modest home in the old part of the city.

Uncle Faruk ran a small shop and one day a bomb exploded too close to him. His right leg was damaged.

Somehow (and I forgot to ask how) Uncle Faruk got out and went to Dublin for treatment for his wound. There he was joined by his wife and now lives happily with his 16-year-old son.

Amer is trundling down what used to be called Sniper Alley, delivering us to the UNPM when he fiddles with his mobile. A babble ensues before he passes the phone to me. “Eees Faruk.”

“Howya Faruk; how’s it going?”
“Fine, thank you. How are you?”
“I’m fine. I’m a journalist with The Irish Times. I’m in Sarajevo. Where are you?”
“Clonsilla.”
“What’s the weather like?”
“Eees good. And Sarajevo?”

And so it goes on. Bizarre. It turns out that Faruk works in a restaurant/bar in a recreation place not far from Ashbourne in Co Meath which he says is called – and I fear something here was lost in translation  – The Pudding Hall.

Does he do rasnici and cevapi, asks Tony referring to his favourite Balkan food.

“Yes”, pipes Faruk down the line. “You must come and eat with me.”

Indeed we will Faruk. But perhaps not tonight…
 

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

Breakfast out of the way and we’re off.

At a petrol station in Croatia not far from the border with
Bosnia, a big sausage-fingered farmer eyes the bikes, which have German plates. He says something in German.

Irski, say I.

“Ah Irski,” says sausage fingers. “Roy Keane!”

And so begins another round of international diplomacy, punctuated with words and phrases like “Manchesta United Yes!? Geenis gud, yes? Ha, ha ha…”

When we arrive at the frontier, a serious looking armed Croatian border guard strides up and says: “You eat restaurant?”

“Eh?” I reply

His impossibly good looking female colleague (politically incorrect aside: there are simply – and it is a fact that I have spend the past several days verifying personally –  there are simply an extraordinary number of very good looking young women in these parts. I had heard this before coming to the Balkans but now I see it with my own eyes and can confirm it. Tony agrees with this, I might add.)

Anyway, your man’s colleague at the border post speaks English as good as she looks.

“Hello,” she says promisingly. “Did you eat in a restaurant in Hrvace?”

Unsure what the consequences of either a Yes or No answer might be, I mutter “er, um…”

“And use a credit card?”

Tony and I look at each other. Fraud? Robbery? What criminal mayhem do they think we have left behind in our wake?

“Because you left card. Jankovic have for you.”

Brilliant! In the rush to exit and join the ‘Karadzic arrested’ celebrations in
Sarajevo, Tony’s credit card was forgotten in the dial up pay machine in the Jankovic motel and restaurant where we spent the night. And the good people there, knowing where we were going, rang the border guards and told them to stop us.

We phone them and make arrangements for the card to be sent home to
Ireland. We shake hands with the border guards, who are all smiles and ogling the BMWs.

A picture, I venture? Fetching border guard has no problem – Lights! Action! Stern colleague is having none of it. “No, no, no,” he says wagging his finger, “No photo.”

The hundred yards or so that it takes to reach the Bosnian border post reveals a world of difference between comfortable, settled and fairly prosperous Croatia and anorexic
Bosnia. “It’s like going back half a century,” says Tony.

Whereas the Croatian side was all big and gleaming new, the Bosnian side was a single pill box in the middle of the road surrounded by broken pavements and crappy, run down cafes.

Then comes the rain and Tony is stuffing a bin liner down his pants in an effort to stay dry. The riding is grim: town and villages are dirt poor, all crumbling concrete, things held together with bits of welded metal. There’s crap yard after scrap yard where blokes try to patch up banjaxed cars (almost invariably ancient VW Golfs).

The rain is tipping down. We get to Mostar, get some Bosnian Markas and hit the road again.

The E73 from Mostar to
Sarajevo goes through some stunningly beautiful countryside. The road licks along the edges of the Neretva river which has been dammed and is home to many fish farms.

The road is really slippery: weeks of sunshine and tyre rubber and oil make it lethal in the rain. And its jammed with traffic. Once, on a clear stretch, I pull out to pass and open the throttle. The rear of the bike goes all over the place. I’m lucky to stay upright.

Chastened, we go with the flow. It takes a good two hours to grind down the 120kms to
Sarajevo.

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.

I introduce myself and seek directions. The information is given. I then say what my job is in the hope of an indepth conversation about recent history and the current situation.

“Yes, I am in Croatia army. My base? Secret,” the officer snapped.

End of conversation…

High above the town is the Fortress of Knin which dates from the 9th century and was the residence of various Croatian luminaries – dukes, governors, bishops – over many centuries and was the capital of medieval Croatia. Looking down on Knin from the fortress one appreciates both its strategic importance and that of the town itself.

Knin is a spa town and a major rail junction for lines that traverse Croatia and beyond. When Yugoslavia was ruled by Josip Broz Tito, he ensured that industries were located in Knin to keep the place prosperous.

In the war that broke out after Croatia declared independence in 1991, most Croats living in Knin got out. The Bosnian Serb Army that invaded and occupied Knin and villages between it and Serbian parts of Bosnian wanted to unify pockets of Serb dominated territory in Croatia and Bosnia and turn what they could into a single, coherent Serb entity, probably eventually joined to Serbia proper thus creating Greater Serbia.

But the Croation Army launched a counter offensive in 1995 and retook all the territory in and around Knin. In the days preceding their offensive and as it progressed, almost all the Serbs fled, encouraged by the Croats in what was probably the single largest incident of ethnic cleansing in the break-up of Yugoslavia.

Today, there’s not a lot to recommend Knin to the visitor (apart from the beautifully maintained fortress which is the major tourist attraction). It’s a dull sort of place and there are few signs of the convulsions of the 1990s. But Knin has a major problem which it shares with other parts of Croatia and Bosnia scarred by ethnic cleansing: property once lived in by one side is very often lived in now by someone else and the current residents do not have title. It’s part of the mess here that has yet to be sorted.

Off down the E71 to Kijevo, the village about which I wrote in the opinion and analysis pages this morning and where my travelling companion Tony Sullivan and I met Tihomir Kupanovac and his family.

One of the great delights of travelling is encountering the generosity and kindness of strangers. Tihomir, who spoke excellent English, invited Tony and I to his father-in-law’s home for an extended talk about what happened when the Serbs occupied the village.

Lemonade and cake is produced for us. Chairs are brought from the house so we may sit in the shade of a cherry tree and chat. There are moments of social awkwardness as an elderly woman in black, Ika,  and Tihomir’s wife, Dubravka, insist that we sit down while they stand.

After a lengthy conversation about the war and the horrors inflicted on this place (the house, like many others in the village, was wrecked by Serb soldiers) Tihomir’s father-in-law, Mioslavic, disappears inside and re-emerges with a plastic bag containing something.

He pulls it from the bag. It is white and leathery. He attaches two wooden pipes to it and starts to blow through one of them. Seconds later, strange, high pitched notes emerge. They sound a bit like those made by Northumbrian pipes or Galacian pipes but the music also has a whiff of Arabic about it.

It turns out that Mioslavic is something of a poet and local musician. The instrument is a diple, a bagpipe-type instrument that is traditional to both Croats and Serbs. Mioslavic’s is made of goat skin and sticking out of it are what look like two hogs teeth.

He is interested to show us how it works and dismantles the double mouthpiece showing us the two airways called labiums that are distinctive to the diple.

Mioslavic stands and, delighted with himself, plays us a few tunes. It is a lovely happy innocent moment of pleasure in a place with so many awful stories to tell.

We ended up spending much more time in Kijevo than we intended. Within  a few minutes of riding further towards Mostar (our target destination for the day), I’m falling asleep.

We stop at the Jankovic restaurant and hotel in Hrvace where, as the heavens open, we plough through yet another vast platter of grilled meat. They’re real carnivores in these parts…

Kremsbrücke to Sveti Rok – 464 kms:

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.

Slovenia is very like Austria – the landscape looks the same and the homes are alpine in character. Ljubljana, the capital, is bathed in summer sunshine and this day, Sunday, is a day for lazy walks by the river as it flows gently through the old town. Live jazz music wafts through the streets; people browse the flea market; couples linger in cafes.

The border between Austria and Slovenia is virtually non-existent because both are in the European Union. The Slovenes, however, do let you know that you’ve crossed into their territory as they hit you for a one-off motorway toll. It’s called a vignetta and costs €17 for motorcyclists but ours will last till January.

Crossing from Slovenia into Croatia is altogether different. This is a real frontier – a strange thing for anyone used to the EU. There are border guards, police and customs officials. They stamp passports, inspect the underside of cars with mirrors and, if you look shifty, they’re all over you like a rash.

We head for the coast, Trieste is on our right (Bonjour!). Breaking for refreshments by the sea, the waiter can’t understand why we want to turn back inland and head for Knin – the “nothing there” area.

Knin in reality is a very interesting place. It is an industrial city on an elevated plain in the Dinara mountains, about 50 km inland from the coast as the crow flies. In 1991, Knin was the self-declared capital of one of several Krajina in Croatia. Krajina is derived from the Serbo-Croat word kraj, meaning ‘edge’. The Krajina were pockets of Serb-dominated territory within Croatia – pockets on the edge of what should be Greater Serbia, as the Serbs saw it.

As Yugoslavia disintegrated, Krajina Serbs became nervous and leaders emerged who, with the active encouragement of Slobodan Milosevic, riding the crest of a Serbian nationalist wave in Belgrade, began agitating for separation from Croatia and, ultimately, union with Serbia.

This was the spark that engulfed first Croatia, then Bosnia and later Kosovo at a cost of up to 200,000 lives.

The road that hugs the Dalmatian coast is choc-a-bloc with cars and speed freaks on bullet bikes. It is single carriageway in both directions and so riding requires concentration and there are few opportunities for opening the throttle safely. At Senj, we turn inland and head for the hills.

At last, bends to die for! Curvaceous tarmac roads where you can lean gently into the turn, run the engine high as you sweep around and, eyeing the road straightening ahead, open the throttle full, tilt upright and away… It’s a bit like sex without the messy bits.

As we ride up valley into the mountains, much of the land is fertile and the small holdings are prosperous. There are lovely meadows and the verges are filled with wild flowers – cow parsley, fennel, feverfew, chamomile and what look like wild Canterbury Bells. Locally bought fruit provides a picnic.

At a village named Medak, this rural summer idyll changes. In the blink of an eye, instead of prosperous, well tended homes and gardens, we are whizzing past burnt out wrecks, windows and doors smashed, roofs broken in, collapsing.

Virtually every home in Medak, as well as a small apartment block, is like this – 40 buildings in all, perhaps. And the same is true further along the E71 road towards Knin as we pass the villages and townlands of Papu?a and Radu? – almost all the homes are destroyed, their inhabitants long gone, the land fallow, unworked.

But not at the next village, Sveti Rok, where roadside Bistro Braja beckons.

We’re hot, sweaty and tired but the damn place looks closed. A middle aged couple are walking the footpath; maybe they can help. No English.

Française? Says the man.

Un pau, say I and we’re off!

No the restaurant isn’t closed; yes, there are beds; we’ll get the owner for you.

In a few minutes a dusty Mercedes that’s clocked up its fair share of miles pulls up at the bistro and out hops Braja himself (pictured right) – a big, barrel-chested man with a moustache like a hedgerow. He unlocks the front door and leads the four of us inside before cracking open a bottle of the local white.

And for the next four hours we have one of those episodes that only happen to travellers. A vast platter of grilled meat and salad is provided speedily by Braja’s wife, whose face suggests she’s rather be in her living room watching the telly.

The man on the pavement turns out to be Sadok Ridene from Tunisia. He is married to the women with whom he was having an evening stoll, Amkica Sekulic, who comes from Sveti Rok. Neither of them speaks English. They both have Arabic and German and Sadok also has French. Braja speaks only Croat.

And so, via a babble of translation between these five languages and the clarity that comes from two liters of wine, this is what happened here.

Medak, Papua and Radu were Serb villages in this part of Croatia. Amicka says there were perhaps four to five thousand people living there before the war. There are no Serbs there now.

When Serb forces seized Serb-dominated Knin about 80klms further along the E71, they wanted to advance further into Croatia (a) to embrace other Serbian communities and (b) ultimately to capture the port city of Zadar and thus gain sea access for what would ultimately be Greater Serbia, stretching all the way back to Belgrade and, at its furthest, the frontier with Hungary.

It didn’t work out, however, as shown by a Croatian Army armoured personnel carrier war memorial outside Medak. It commemorates the fact that the Croats halted, and ultimately reversed, the Serb advance.

For the Serb people of Medak, Papu?a and Radu? the consequences were catastrophic.

“After the war,” says Amkica, “they left.”

Why, I ask.

“Because there was no work for them here.”

It’s an explanation that lacks credibility, of course. And it’s followed by an even more improbable suggestion. Could the people who still own those homes return, I ask.

“Yes, of course, they belong to them. They can come back.” Amkica, Sadok and Braja all agree.

Not that their Serb former neighbours are likely to, fearful no doubt of retribution and possible prosecution for what they may, or may not, have done during the war. It’s an irony of the war that those who initiated ethnic cleansing frequently achieved ethnically “pure” places… but often ones now inhabited exclusively by the other side.

And with that, we staggered off to bed to be awoken by the sound of Braja’s lusty peacock giving the dawn his all and the man himself herding sheep with bells through his back yard before feeding leftovers to his pen of wild boar across the road…
 

“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.

Stegrios runs Motogreek, a Munich-based bike hire operation and, for around €1,400 each, we’re getting an Adventure and a 1200 GS for two weeks, 4,000km milage included. Tony rides the Adventure ’cus that’s what he has back home; I get the GS for the same reason.

They’re beautiful bikes – new and smooth. When I start mine, the big engine has a low growl that sounds off-puttingly a bit like a tractor. But when you open the throttle, it purrs and just rips effortlessly down the autobahn. We say goodbye to Stergios and his sidekick Apostolos (who is dealing with Peter and his partner from Halsingborg in southern Sweden who’ve just completed a skite around Italy) and we’re off…

A little way south from Munich, the Alps rise abruptly, the tops jagged, untouched by glaciation. The motorway swings south around Salzburg and south again into a valley towards Hallin, whose salt mines gave the area its initial infusion of great wealth.

You can travel along the valley floor, following the path of the Salzac river, with its pastel, pale blue crystal clear water. But we opt for the motorway, which slices arrogantly through the mountains, in places hundreds of feet above the valley floor, in and out of tunnels, nothing standing in its way.

Below, tiny villages slip by; above, occasional fields of apple green have been etched out of pine forests. The place looks rich and settled and just a tiny bit dull – despite the breathtaking mountains.

The road is busy and fast. It’s a July weekend and it seems that half of northern Germany and a good deal of the Netherlands is on the move. (The Dutch evidently have a thing about caravans…)

Near Radstadt, we leave the motorway and opt for a smaller road through the Tauernpass, a gap between two peaks, Hochgolling (2,863m) to our west and another near Wald that is unnamed on our map but is 2,635m above sea level.

It’s blazing sunny and about 30 degrees C. All villages along the way are devoted to winter sports but the ski lifts and stationary now, the pubs and discos closed and the whole area is oddly dead.

Except for the bikers.

There are swarms of them. They travel mainly in convoys of half a dozen but sometimes more. Most are on bullet bikes: big fat back tyres, rasping exhausts, arses in the air, stomachs draped over fuel tanks – all leather gear and attitude. They throw the bikes this way and that as they lean over, knees bending out, to make the turns.

Where they are lying flat and burning up the road, the countryside whizzing past in a blur, we’re taking it easy, enjoying the scenery. What’s the point of taking a single track mountain pass at 120kph and missing the beauty of the place?

After the Tauernpass, the road drops again into a valley and follows the course of the river Lieser. Bike tourism is huge here. While the E55 motorway still snakes through the mountains hundreds of feet above us on giant stilts, ferrying all the holiday traffic south, the lower roads are biker heaven.

Everywhere, inns sport signs saying “Bikers Welcome” and “Biker Menu”.

Frau Glanzer is a big jolly, um-pa-pa sort of woman and her Gasthof Post is ideally placed on a bend in the village of Kremsbrücke to catch the passing trade.

“Zimmer?” she asks as we enter. Yes, a room please. One room with two beds, we inquire. “Ja so,” she booms, smiling. “Maybe for three,” she says laughing and gesturing to her grown-up daughter standing beside her.

Ho, ho, ho Frau Glanzer… aren’t you just the card!

Across the road is a plain looking church and, at six in the evening, someone starts to ring the bell. I go over but, sadly, the door is locked and so I can’t see inside.

Outside, however, there are four large upright tablets: two for the fallen of the 1914-1918 war, two for the 1939-1945 war. Kremsbrücke has about 800 people living in it (according to the randy Frau) and there’s no indication that the population was either more or less during the two wars.

The first war tablets have 57 names in it from 28 different families. The second war tablets have 46 names from 30 families. And between the two sets, there are nine family names in common.

A sobering reminder of what war has done to this part of Europe, as to many others also, and what it did more recently a little further south.