Cycling > Articles > Bosnia on a bicycle

Somewhere between Trebinje and Mostar, my slow progress was brought to a halt by the menacing gaits and the broad palms of two burly Serbian policemen. There was no traffic and they were bored. That was just my bad luck. They picked through my passport, established that I was of no consequence and then slowly set about hauling my tired belongings out of my panniers.

I had just resolved to offer my sunglasses and a cheap watch as a way out of their boorish company when a white knight in a UN Land Cruiser pulled up.

“G’day, mate. John’s me name. Wanna lift?” he rhetorically asked in a throaty Antipodean accent as he began to toss my bicycle and bags in to the back of the truck.

The bewildered policemen got a fierce handshake each and we were off, bowling along the empty road through violet-grey hills and olive groves, laughing at my close encounter with Serbian authority.

I thanked John for stopping.

“Sawright,” he said. “We’ll take youz home and crack a slab. One good thing about Bosnia - the beer’s cheaper `an Coca-Cola. So what are ya doin’ and how long ya been here?”

It felt like months, but it was, in fact, only a week ago when I had caused a mixture of mirth and consternation trying to cross the border from Yugoslavia. Soldiers in miss-matched fatigues and without any official insignia, fussed about me, testing my bike and making tea while they attempted to find a rubber stamp to mark my passport. When the commanding officer - the splitting image of Telly Savalas - appeared, I wondered if I had dropped into the set of a Hollywood movie.

But Bosnia is not a place to be flippant. On that first afternoon, I had left the town of Visegrad an hour before sunset, largely because a surly skinhead had pointed a pool cue at me and accused me of being a journalist. I set off down the Drina River, expecting to pitch my tent in a village. Witlessly, I had not imagined that every village would be deserted and every building destroyed. As I rode through one after another of these haunted architectural graveyards, my mood spiralled into intractable gloom.

Night fell and two Serbian policemen drove passed me and stopped. I knew from the way they looked at each other that they had no idea what to do with me. The asked if I had a gun and on learning that I was not a Muslim, pointed down the river towards Gorazde (a firm Muslim stronghold during the war) and laughed. That night, I camped on the roadside, in a tunnel. I ate cold soup and surprised myself when ingenuous tears spilt down my cheeks.

“The Drina’s a spot,” John said. We were having coffee in Mostar. In 1994-5, he explained, the Drina River was the heart of Bosnia’s darkness. Some of the greatest atrocities against humanity (the ethnic cleansing of Muslims by Serbs) happened in this mountainous region on the eastern wing of Bosnia. Even now, over two years after the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war in December 1995, the horror was perceptible. I had felt the pain and regret every minute - I saw it lingering in the eyes of the people, in their lugubrious step, in the oppressive dereliction and in the operations to clear the unexploded ordnance.

The British Consul in Macedonia had warned me about the risk of stepping on a landmine. In a speech that was carefully constructed to discourage me from riding through Bosnia, he said that mine injuries occur daily, and 15% of them on the roadside, where landowners casually deposit whatever they have dug up in their fields. This news made leaning my bike up on the shoulder to take a photograph or go to the toilet an anxious experience. Every day, mini convoys of green Land Rovers rattled passed me, full of cheery British squaddies off for a white-knuckle session clearing mines.

John had become inured to the grief during five years working in the Balkans. I was still struggling to swallow what little I had seen. It was, he insisted, good to see things through a fresh pair of eyes again so I told him about my surreal experience in Ustlpraca.

I arrived in this village on the Drina just after dawn beneath a sky the colour of slate. The first building I passed was the school and in the playground, on its side, was an Italian 105mm Pack Howitzer. The windows in every classroom were missing and the facade was pocked with bullet scars and rocket holes. My gaze moved up the hill, away from the river, over the rest of the village. Every single building was shot up, few had any glass left and many had lost their roofs.

A little further on, in a new building at the road junction, a cafe was open. Shostakovich was playing and as I leant my bike against the wall, a tall man with white hair came out to breathe a double lung-full of damp air. He was wearing a blazer and a polka dot tie and had the demeanour of a yacht club commodore on the Sussex coast. We stood looking at each other for a moment, both completely aghast, before he hastily regained his propriety and pulled the chair back from a table to seat me.

When I had finished my breakfast - two pork steaks, a raw onion, green salad, a bottle of beer and an espresso - he sat down at my table. We had already tried my Serbo-Croat and his German, to little effect. He scrutinised me before turning his palm up and flicking his head back in a gesticulation that transcends language - ‘What was I doing here?’

I was not sure myself. Curiosity and the desire to see and learn had always fuelled my journey. I had ridden across rich and poor countries, autocracies and democracies, incipient countries and bold, jingoistic countries. But I had not, in over 20,000 miles, crossed a country so recently torn apart by war. I was also interested in history - I had studied Tito’s Yugoslavia at university - and I wanted to see more evidence of the crimes and follies of empires - Ottoman, Napoleonic, Austro-Hungarian and Russian in the case of the Balkans. And, I suppose, I was driven by vanity in that I thought my peers would be impressed by my sense of adventure. Ultimately, however, I was a tourist which news had brought a wry smile to the commodore’s face and now made John laugh aloud. “Tourists in Bosnia,” he exclaimed, “There’ll be goin’ on safari in Angola soon.”

Elsewhere, my green, tourist status had been better received. In a village on the Drina, between Gorazde and Foca, I had stopped in a shop to shelter from a thunderstorm. Across the road was an UNPROFOR personnel carrier with armed French troops stalking the pavement behind. I fell in to conversation with Andre, a Muslim who spoke some English and quickly became my interpreter for the inquisitive crowd that came to meet me. I asked Andre about the war. “War, war, war. War is over,” he declared, “Now there is peace. Drink one beer with me.”

We drank three and talked about my journey, whether or not I was married and where I came from. In a moment of calculated deceit, I told Andre that I was Irish. As I had expected, he associated Ireland with the war in Ulster. He jabbed his index finger in to his temple and threw his arms around me shouting: “Bosnia man and Irish man is mad man.”

They were genuinely delighted that I was nothing more than a tourist, not a soldier or a journalist, a war crimes investigator or an aid worker. Just by my presence there, I later realised, I represented a step in the slow return to normality, a sand bag to arrest the long humiliation of decay: If there were tourists, the war really must be over.

But it was not, John told me as we walked through the devastated medieval centre of Mostar. The night before, in Stolac, a town we passed on the road from Trebinje, the Croats had burned down the houses of several Muslim families who were on the point of being repatriated. “Bosnia-Herzegovina has a massive refugee problem. There are two million displaced people and returning them to their homes will stir up the same racial tension that started the war in the first place.”

We reached the Neretva river where we had come to see the ruins of ‘Stari Most’, the elegant, medieval, Turkish bridge that Mostar was famous for. It had been bombed and below us, in the swirling turquoise water, British frogmen were retrieving the stones with which they proposed to rebuild the bridge. I said that this was a pointless token and a waste of resources before John put me in my place: “They’ll build it up and then probably all fall out again and knock it down, startin’ the next war and that time maybe youz’ll come back and do something a bit more bloody useful than being a tourist”.

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