Detour through Bosnia
In the hazy morning, I pause to warm up at a café - a working man’s place with the typical calendar posters of topless women straddling motorbikes. I ask for some information about the road ahead since there is a gap in my maps and they kindly give me a map of the area. I notice Srbenik in Bosnia Herzegovina, the place of the massacre in 1995 and decide to reroute from the direct road to Serbia, crossing at a border post one hour’s cycle away.
The roads in Bosnia are terrible and, again, remnants of the recent war are omnipresent. People are very friendly and each time I stop to rest, people offer me their house to sleep in. One man asks me to take a photo of his family outside his destroyed house and to give it to newspapers in Ireland so that people will send him money. The conversation goes like this: “Serbians (Over arm throwing motion), Grenade, Boom!” to which I reply with “In Irlanski, Ingliski (Over arm throwing motion), Grenade, Boom!” which reduced them to tears of laughter.
The call to prayers informs me of dusk and I keep cycling for an hour in the dark before pulling up to a farmer’s house and asking to sleep in the garden. They understand what I am saying but put me on the phone to their English-speaking niece just to double check. Tomic, a brother, arrives and we discover that we both speak French and have much to talk about, he having lived in Nice for eight years and having served on peacekeeping missions with the Yugoslav army in francophone D.R. Congo, both places I have spent time in the last six months. They cook me a lovely dinner and the whole family assembles to watch me eat it.
The next day I realise that Srbenik is unfortunately not Srebrenica (which is 200km further south) as I thought and I decide to take the most direct route to Serbia. I have coffee and rakija, a locally brewed whisky, for breakfast and head off. The rakija goes almost immediately to my head and I have to stop after 20 minutes to eat some cereal to dilute the effects. The day is tough going, and I have now accepted the Slavic translation of the English word flat to mean not extremely mountainous rather than the more commonly accepted definition. At a town approaching the border with Serbia, I ask some police for directions to the crossing and after some consultation they give me an escourt for about 5 kilometres, bringing traffic to a crawling pace, before stopping at a fast food restaurant off the road in the direction of the post.
P.S. Just to give you the quick update (as in to this date!), I am actually in Tehran at the minute and, contrary to what the lack of blog updates might suggest, I am still alive! Unfortunately, due to some work commitments, I had to speed up my trip by taking a train from Istanbul to Tehran in order to make it to Central Asia and will be flying back to London on the 5th of July.
Some of the highlights, which will be soon described, include a 21st birthday party in Southern Serbia, tailwinds through Bulgaria, being chased by a pack of dogs (my arch-enemies), a mayoral meeting in small town Turkey, a three day train ride and an unexpected drinking party in the mountains overlooking Tehran.
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You had me worried many times for lack of information. Glad to hear you are safe. John Hussey
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