Here, there and everywhere

Stage 20: Mitrovica to Sarajevo (813km)
Day 1: 96.1km Near Arinjet
Day 2: 101.2km Beyond Dardhe (Albania)
Day 3: 85.5km Near Qyrsac
Day 4: 116.8km Near Danilovgrad (Montenegro)
Day 5: 83.8km 3rd town in from border (Bosnia [and Herzegovina])
Day 6: 100.2km Near Doll (Croatia)
Day 7: 97.9km Mostar (B&H)
Day 8: 0.0km
Day 9: 0.0km
Day 10: 131.9km Sarajevo

Before I start on how my entrance to Montenegro simply highlights what an ignoramus I truly am, I forgot to mention 2 episodes involving interactions with the locals in Albania.

The first was having two 12yr old male kids run after my bike on an uphill section repeating the phrase "fuck your mother" (sorry mum) a few times before they ran out of breath and had to stop (who teaches them these phrases?). Mr Broom stayed in his resting position, but he was ready should they have come within striking distance. Having heard about Ms Murphy's encounters with the local youth and my experiences in Jordan, it made me wary of the younger generations, but as it happened, it was a one off incident that was soon offset by the friendliness of everyone else.

To illustrate the point, on my final day cycling from Schkoder to the Montenegran border I had just 80 leke left in my pocket (about €0.70). I stopped to buy 2 apples adding up to a grand total of 70 leke. I handed over the change to the woman who then proceeded to shove a bananna into the bag, indicating that it was a present from herself. A man then entered the shop, had some words with the woman, she then insisted on returning my money (against my protests), whilst throwing an additional two nectarines into my bag. Apparently, the man was paying for my fruit.

So, with this final Albanian send off, I arrived into Montenegro. Not wishing to repeat my fiasco with the currency in Bulgaria, I hatched a plot to change money in a bank, thus ensuring I had the right currency to begin with. In my wallet I had both euro and Serbian dinars (used on the northern side of Mitrovica). I knew that Montenegro was a part of Serbia until about 4 years ago, and so would have used dinars. Surely they hadn't invented a new currency in the meantime? Still, I would go through with my little plan to avoid embarrassment.

It was a warm day, and the moment I walked through the doors to the bank, sweat beads started to form on my brow. Since Bulgaria, I have been getting along with the simple, multifunctional phrase "nay (insert language here)" to introduce myself. I usually accompany it with a little helpless smile and just hope that the person takes pity on me. Now, standing at the counter, I faced a problem. What language did they speak in Montenegro? Was it Serbian; was it Montenegran; or, since they call their country Srna Gora, was it Srna Goran? What was I going to say?

With the sweat now pouring down my face and looking pretty disheveled from the previous 3 nights' camping, I decided to say nothing. I withdrew €30 from my pocket and just waved it in front of the woman, repeating the word "change" in alternating English and French pronunciations.

The lady leaned forward and said something in her own language. I smiled helplessly, shrugged my shoulders and said "nay..." before tailing off into embarrassed silence. She had a little conference with the ladies behind her, while I stood there wiping the sweat from my face before leaning forward and asking in almost perfect English:

"why do you want to change euros? We use euros here"

I just had to laugh...and run out the door.

50km onwards, I set up camp in a secluded spot just off from the road. Up until then, whenever people have asked the question "how's your arse?", I've been able to reply that it's just dandy and praise the goodness of Brooke's saddles. That particular day, after the rough roads out of Albania, I had to exhale slowly as I peeled myself from my sitting position.

Tent was up and food was cooked when a young boy came to inquire if I was planning to camp there for the night. I replied in the affirmative, provided it was ok with him; he could speak a little English. He shook his head, pointed to the grass and said "long grass. many snakes. short grass. no snakes. you camp there". After a little deliberation, I decided to take his advice, along with his and his sister's help in moving all my stuff up to their other field. I slept, safe in the knowledge that there was a reduced chance of having my hand bitten in the morning when I reached into my bags.

It was a long day the following day, consisting of 70km of uphill climbing. My hands, feet and arse were still tender from the previous day and I made slow progress. Still, I reached the border with Bosnia (in another stunning location) and descended into a deep valley where I set up camp in an open stretch of land, next to the river and between two small villages.

I wasn't prepared for exactly how beautiful Bosnia (and Herzegovina) is [I've already been reprimanded once for leaving out the H part of this country!]. I followed a lush green valley for a while before striking out over some hills to the Croatian coast, getting scared by snakes by the side of the road (I thought it was roadkill until I surprised it from whatever it was doing).

Dubrovnik is a beautiful and very expensive city. I debated for a while about jumping in for a swim before deciding the issue on a lick of my forearm. It was already salty, so I stripped off and dived off the rocks at the foot of the castle walls. It was only when I got out that I saw the fresh water shower installed in the old walls. Croatians are such clever people; no wonder they won the war.

Lying in the sun I started thinking about all the people that must have died in that attractive city during its bombardment. Already, on my approach to the city, I'd passed by several houses with bullet and shrapnel holes. I thought about my trip through 18 countries and 4 major religions and the fact that I haven't met one malicious person yet. I thought about the book I was reading (Balkan Express by Slavenka Drakulic) and the Serbian news article that was reported in it:

"and we looked down the well in the back yard. We pulled up the bucket - it was full of testicles, about 300 in all"

or the Croatian doctor's autopsy report that "the victims were forced to eat their own eyballs before they were killed".

I thought about what the alternative must have been on offer to make someone eat their own eyeballs.

I wondered what makes people do this kind of thing to each other.

Don't get me wrong; I didn't come to any conclusions. I went and bought an icecream, sat in the shade and thought about how hot it was.

I returned to my bike to find a deflated tyre. A spoke had broken 5km before the city and I had decided to change the tyres. Turns out my prevoius puncture repair job hadn't quite made the grade and leaked. I replaced the tyre and set off, camping in an olive grove 5km before the border with B&H with a beautiful absence of nocturnal scurrying.

5km Croatia, 15km B&H, 25km Croatia before hitting B&H again; the borders in this part of the world are weird! I was heading towards the city of Mostar in SW B&H where I was going to stay with Francois, a South African guy I'd met in a hostel in Jerusalem. It had been a good day, and at 1.30pm I was about 20km from Mostar. "I'll be there in about an hour" I fatefully thought.

I finally limped into Mostar at about 7.30pm. Another spoke had gone on a perfectly flat section of perfectly smooth asphalt. I removed my bags, turned my bike over, removed my rear wheel, deflated my tyre, removed my tyre, removed my inner tube, removed my rear sprockets, removed the offending spoke, replaced the spoke, replaced my rear sprockets, straightened my wheel, replaced my inner tube, replaced my tyre, inflated my tyre, replaced my rear wheel, turned by bike over, replaced my bags, hopped on, cycled off. I got 200m before I realised I had a puncture. I'd replaced the inner spoke guard incorrectly!

I removed my bags, turned my bike over, removed my rear wheel, removed my tyre, removed my inner tube, fixed the puncture, replaced my inner tube, replaced my tyre, inflated my tyre, replaced my rear wheel, turned my bike over, replaced my bags, hopped on, cycled off. I got 200m.

This happened FIVE times. I couldn't believe it. Eventually, when it went for the 6th time, I jumped into the nearby river to cool my throbbing and overheated head (it was 34 degrees outside). With a cool head, I did everything super slowly. This got me 15km before it went again. I did it one last time and managed to reach Mostar. In all, I used 8 patches!!! I don't know what it was. Either I'm a muppet, or it was so hot the glue needed longer to set. The jury's still out, though I prefer the heat story; makes me look slightly better.

I spent a wonderful 2 days in Mostar, drinking coffee, eating food, jumping off waterfalls. It was fun, and I met a lot of good people through Francois. Thank-you guys to all I met there!

130km to Sarajevo: 90km of uphill. Luckily, it was not as bad as I was expecting, though there is a 5km stretch at a 9% gradient; I was thankful for my low gears. Like the rest of B&H that I've seen, this stretch was again something special with high limestone cliffs and snow covered peaks in the distance. It took about 12 hours to complete from door to door.

Once again, I met up with Francois and some Mostarites who had come up for the day. We strolled round the city and ate ice-cream.

Next stop: Belgrade.

It's not quite the most direct route home, but it's fun!

Statue in Shkoder, Albania

















Albanian plain, north of Shkoder

















Bosnia and Herzegovina

















Croatia
















Dubrovnik Street















Source of the Buna river near Mostar. Darko and me.
















Francois and Cory, my hosts in Mostar
















View from Mostar-Sarajevo road
















The place where World War I was started
















Francois, Ines and Mirjana with Sarajevo behind

Albanian Adventures

"Adventures" is a little bit of a strong word to use for my Albanian leg of the journey given that gun stories appear to be a thing of the past, but I needed an alliteration and due to my vocabulary pool being as dry as some of the sandier sections of the Sahara, I figured it'd have to do. I also read on a cycle website about a dearth of blogs on Albania, so thought I'd have to dedicate at least one post to my (albeit short) journey through this very beautiful part of the world.

I was a little worried about entering Albania. I'm not really sure why. The Albanian's I'd met in Kosovo had been prefectly nice and fine and not threatening in any way, and even in countries where I've been informed by the media beforhand that I'm likely to be strung upside down and have my throat slit while the locals hold out my still-beating heart in front of my plucked out eyes, I've met wonderful people. So really, an absence of information on Albania should have been a good thing. Maybe it was the report of Dervla Murphy getting robbed of her belongings by a group of little people (they were 5-yr olds according to the person telling me the story; I haven't read it for myself). Or maybe it was the Macedonians who I'd met in...Macedonia...that had, shall we say, "reserved judgement" on their Albanian neighbours.

So there was a little concern lodged there in the back of my mind as I cycled away from Mitrovica (40km north of Pristina) in the sunshine. Well, as I cycled away from the appartment of the daughter of a friend of the family in Mitrovica in the sunshine(she's a human rights observer for OSCE: a "pillar" of the UN as I learned during my time there). As I reached the city limits of Mitrovica the heavens opened and I got a severe soaking as the thunder clapped overhead and I wondered why I'd got so drunk two nights previously that I'd been too hungover to leave yesterday and so now found myself cycling through some relatively inhospitable weather.

I guess I should probably write a quick note on Mitrovica itself. If separation and bitterness was absent elsewhere in the short section of the Balkans I'd been exposed to up to that point; it was evident in Mitrovica...sort of. People weren't throwing rocks at each other and hurling abuse, but the city is divided by the river, with Serbs on the North (with minority Albanian groups) and Albanians on the south (with minority Serbian groups). I was free to walk and explore both sides, encountering nothing but friendliness, but things would probably have been different had I been from one of the two main ethnicities inhabiting that fair city. A fairly non-descript bridge joined the two that has seen some of the worst riots in the country in past years, but only hosted a couple of UN personal when I toddled over. Foreigners working there tended to have a preference for the northern Serb side due to the increased quality of night life present (though technically they're not really supposed to socialise up there [due to security issues]; so keep it on the hush hush!).

So there I was cycling out of Mitrovica, my body protesting to the strain, rain pelting down, and not really knowing what awaited me in the next country. I guess you could call it a good day. I camped in a forest that night.

Why should I mention that?

At night, when I was younger (I'm not talking two years ago here, give me some credit, it was a little bit longer; at least five or more), I used to tiptoe past my parents' bedroom door to get to the toilet. It wasn't because I was a considerate son and didn't want to wake them up, it was to avoid the two-horned-helmet-wearing viking, complete with battleaxe, that I envisaged lurking round the corner ready to decapitate me. I guess you could have said I had an active imagination.



Now, I stride to the bathroom without a care in the world but the remnants of my active imagination still lurk in the depths of forests where every little scuffle and scurrie outside is a red-eyed, four-legged evil lizard-shaped monster ready to tear into my tent and start devouring my toes. I still wake up in the morning, but it's not quite such a restful as sleeping in an olive grove.

I crossed into Albania near the town of Djakovo (Kosovo). There are two border crossings within about 20km of Djakovo; a southern one and a northern one. The southern one was marked on my map; the northern one was not. "Road is bullshit" said the Albanian man working on the fruit stall just outside of Djakovo. He didn't know much English, but I figured that the use of the word "bullshit" indicated that it was going to be a dirt road. I'd figured that beforehand, but had wanted to see Northern Albania, so was ready to take the hit. However, the new option of an even shorter, non-bullshit road proved too tempting and I found myself cycling towards the border crossing that was absent from my map.

"Albanian border officials are amongst some of the most corrupt in the world", I read somewhere on the internet. Elsewhere, I'd read them trying to charge 10 euro to enter the country when the official tax is one tenth of that sum. I got handshakes, smiles and a request for 1 euro before discussing amongst themselves the best route I should follow to the town of Puke (that's the way it's spelt, though with two little dots over the e). They then got the man most proficient in English to point me in the right direction.


The road down from the border was flawless. I descended into a lush, green valley with high mountains off to my right. Men were cutting grass in the fields with scythes and donkeys and carts were travelling along the road. I continued towards the town of Bajram Currie. Outside the town, the road branched with the bypass of the town being the better surface. I went with the smooth road. Big Mistake. I was not to enter a town with a bank or a shop for a further 90km and so had no official way to change money. "Towns" marked on the map were either a cafe with an electric substation (where I did actually manage to change money with the man in the cafe, before another patron bought me a coffee), or a cafe with a collection of small houses clinging to the steep hillside, spread over a large area.

I crossed the lake (a big one in NE Albania where one can catch a ferry to Tirane [the capital]) by the town of Fierze, which I had passed through before even realising it.

That's where the asphalt ended.


35km of dirt roads followed where my average speed dropped from 16km/hr, to around 9km/hr. I have a feeling that in one year's time, the road will be good, workers by the side of the road were building walls and drainage channels, but for the time being it's not! I camped on a small level bit of ground near the town of Dardhe (where I'd manged to buy some bread in a small cafe/hotel there).

The road the following day was good, with a smooth surface and almost no traffic. I hit the main road that runs from Kukes in the east (near the main border crossing with Kosovo) and Shkoder in the west. It was a mixed bag up until the town of Puke with about 50% being perfect, laid within the last year, and 50% being poor to criminal (for someone who used to work in an Asphalt plant at least!). From Puke to Shkoder the road was about 70% good to 30% poor to average. I camped near the top of the final downhill to the plains.

Good road to Shokoder, poor road out of Shkoder. It runs for 36km to the most beautiful border crossing location I've come across.

Kosovan clouds


2 men attacking a bunker with a sledgehammer. These bunkers dotted the surrounding landscape on my approach into, and through Albania