May 29, 2025 to June 7, 2025
Day 240-248: Peja to Sarajevo (Bosnia), via Serbia
Snaking across the Balkans continues… We’re going slowly toward the Schengen zone – but managing to zig zag all over the place, so we’re still covering some distance. Looking at the track, I think I can see a way we could have done this more efficiently 😊
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One ‘zag’ was to avoid running into Serbian immigration problems. We’d entered Serbia from North Macedonia and then made a short trip into Kosovo. Ideally, we would have crossed from Kosovo to Montenegro, but Serbia doesn’t officially recognise Kosovo, so if you travel (with a passport) that way you never get a Serbian exit stamp. Fine if you have an EU identity card (nothing to stamp), but a challenge for the rest of us. Plus, the north of Kosovo isn’t completely politically stable, so we ended up going 100km further east that we really wanted, to re-enter Serbia. But that was ok, because we saw some more of Serbia.
What neither of us saw on the map was a thumping great range just north of Kosovo. We’d ridden around the south of this range, in Kosovo, then had to go over it to get back to the west of Serbia (going all the way round the north was a possibility, but not a good one). A day of pushing straight uphill. There was a great view from the top.
Part way up the climb we recognised we wouldn’t get over in one day. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any Serbian Dinar, and there was no town to get any. There was no hotel and hardly any shops to spend it in anyway. We had enough food for a few days. Near the end of the day, we had to look for a place to sleep. We’d been told by some locals there are dangerous animals (i.e. bears) living wild in this corner of the Balkans. Great. We found a nice-looking field near a house and asked to camp, but the language barrier was too great. We continued to a small village and asked again but still couldn’t make ourselves understood. Third time lucky, we asked at a house on the edge of the village. They were initially hesitant, but got out their phone and google translate and eventually allowed us to camp in their driveway, then kept offering food, insisted Cath drink a 6pm coffee (Stephen got away without – imagine trying to sleep after that!), and stayed up to talk (via Google translate) until the sun set. And laugh at us for thinking there might be bears around.
We spent a rest day in Novi Pazar – recovering from the mountain pass.
We’re a couple of days into Bosnia now. We took a small detour to pass through Visegrad and now we’re in Sarajevo.
Between Visegrad and Sarajevo we again had to camp. At the appropriate time of day, we asked at a house by the road. Again, they laughed at us when we asked (via Google translate) if there were bears – after being warned only 30 mins earlier by a local (in perfect English) that there would be no problems camping from people but could be problems from animals. Difficult to know what’s going on – but it’s hard to imagine any self-respecting bear living where there are so many people, dogs and cars. It was amusing to our host that we wanted to stay; apparently other cycle tourists had stayed at the same place a few days earlier.
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So much history in this region, and Sarajevo has a real mix of people and architecture. Apparently, this is one of the few major European cities with representation from all the religions in one neighbourhood (Catholic, Eastern Orthodox churches, Mosques and Synagogues all packed together). The day we arrived was Eid ul-Adha, the second of the two main festivals in Islam. And the place was deserted for most of the day but came alive in the evening. We seem to keep doing this, arriving on holidays when shops are closed. It’s nice to see the city, but also nice to be able to buy food after arriving!
Today's ride: 569 km (353 miles)
Total: 12,187 km (7,568 miles)
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