Jane & Rog’s Balkans Tour

[Poms_from_Adelaide]

LOL yep, read that about a few places in or near Bosnia - I think I'd take the guided tour to this one, just in case!

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attract...on-Rakovica_Plitvice_Lakes_National_Park.html

 

[Jane And Rog]

Good point - but probably means it’s not for us. Dogs probably not welcome, and thinking about it, Flynn and unexploded ordnance is not a great mix!

 

[Mike Warland]

Good point - but probably means it’s not for us. Dogs probably not welcome, and thinking about it, Flynn and unexploded ordnance is not a g

When we were on the campsite on Krk we had a terrific storm overnight and when we got up we had a 6ft deep gully between us and the road which they had to fill with a JCB before we could get off the pitch. We expected Croatia to be cheaper than it was from what we had been told. The drive along the coast was very pretty but busy. Plitvice Lakes had to be the highlight of our trip.

reat mix!

 

[jumartoo]

When we were in Croatia for a weeks orienteering competition, we were parked in a forest clearing at one of Tito's hunting lodges. Bears were seen in the surrounding areas so, be careful if you go out into the woods ...

 

[jockaneezer]

Your fish looks like a gilt head bream rather than a grey mullet ? Bream and bass are intensively farmed in "sea cages" all around the Med (bit like the salmon farms in Scotland) but you could have been lucky and they might have been line caught ?

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[Jane And Rog]

Your fish looks like a gilt head bream rather than a grey mullet ? Bream and bass are intensively farmed in "sea cages" all around the Med (bit like the salmon farms in Scotland) but you could have been lucky and they might have been line caught ?

Ah, probably - my fish identification skills are lower than my bird identification ones, and they’re not up to much. Fish was good thpugh.

 

[Poms_from_Adelaide]

When we were in Croatia for a weeks orienteering competition, we were parked in a forest clearing at one of Tito's hunting lodges. Bears were seen in the surrounding areas so, be careful if you go out into the woods ...

Very important to check local news stations to make sure it’s not the day they have their picnic….

 

[Jane And Rog]

Very important to check local news stations to make sure it’s not the day they have their picnic….

Today’s the day, so yes!

 

[makems]

Bears were seen in the surrounding areas so, be careful if you go out into the woods ...

in case you step in shit?

 

[Jane And Rog]

Maps, fashionably late as usual. As we’ve moved on, it will have to be Mundus screenshots. We stayed at Ježevac Premium Camping Resort. In the zoomed out view, you can see our previous night’s stop, Camping Opatija.

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[PxJ]

I have been following this thread from the start & for some reason it has started going into my junk Mail, anyone know why this happens?

 

[Jane And Rog]

I have been following this thread from the start & for some reason it has started going into my junk Mail, anyone know why this happens?

No idea sorry, but see who the email is sent from (Motorhomefun?) and white list it - that should stop it.

 

[Jane And Rog]

Just a quick post today as it was mostly a driving day. We stopped on Krk for a decent length dog walk, where Flynn saw a lizard for the first time. I recommend you view the following to get the idea - it’s hilarious.



I’ve never seen him startled like that before.

We’re camped at Camp Bear (divisional.gumdrops.combos) - a nice, grassy little site with a much less big business feel than the night before, and with a very friendly owner. Facilities not so top notch of course, but all in all, what we prefer. €22 including extra for the dog.

That night we had my much belated birthday meal. (On the actual day, some king or other decided to make a big thing out of wearing a new hat. It’s all me, me, me with royalty.) We went to Bistro Plum (inferences.punctuates.cubist) which we’d highly recommend for a treat.

There was lots of local food and wine. We got an a-b of local goat’s cheese and truffle, followed by potato soup with truffle for me and lamb paté for sir.

Mains were pork for him and lamb agnolotti for me.

We even had a pud, which we should have shared due to the internal pressure in our stomachs already over 10 Megapascals, but Rog wanted a millefeuille, which everyone knows is madness when there’s a decent lemon tart on offer. Total damage, just over €100.

 

[Jane And Rog]

Today’s map. I’ll carry on using Mundus maps, because you can see other things in the area that we think are interesting.

 

[Just smiffy]

what are the prices like now they are using the euro…?

Your mentions of money seem much more then when I was out there …

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[Jane And Rog]

We’re finding it very expensive. And not really any aires and wild camping is banned.

 

[jumartoo]

We’re finding it very expensive. And not really any aires and wild camping is banned.

As far as I can recall, wild camping has been banned for years.

 

[Jane And Rog]

Plitvička Jezera - the Plitvice National Park - is a wonderful system of lakes and waterfalls that is definitely worth a visit. The problem is that all of Croatia knows it (as does the population of Germany, Japan and numerous other nations’ tour busses) and by the time we left, about midday, it was heaving - queues for tickets, queues for the boats, queues on all the wooden walkways, queues for a close and personal view of my left armpit.

My advice would be to get there on the dot of 8am when the park opens. We thought sort-of-eightish-which-turned-into-just-before-nine would be fine, but there would have been many fewer people an hour before. Secondly, wear your big waterproof ankle-supporting walking boots. The wooden walkways are often wet and uneven.

We did route C which I would recommend. (You can do it in reverse, which would mean walking mostly downhill and getting the bus back uphill.) We started with a view of the largest waterfalls.

Then we continued to walk upstream, past many smaller waterfalls…

…until the middle section which is just a large lake, which we “sped” through in an electric boat.

The final, highest section was lovely too.

Once we’d seen that, a panoramic bus took us back to the lower station, from where it was a short walk to the car. Route C is supposed to take 4-6 hours, but we did it in 3. We (as in Rog, my little legs are going like billy-oh to keep up) do walk quickly though, so if you like to saunter or if it’s even busier, you probably wouls take longer.

After lunch came the dithering. Rog thought we hadn’t given Croatia a fair shot, and the weather was better at the coast. I thought we’d get coastline again in Montenegro and Albania, and it would be cheaper then, and Bosnia would be back to the sort of travel we like, fewer tourists, cheaper stuff, weirder experiences. We looked at campsites all the way down the Croatian coast, but in general they were still 30 - 40 of your good German euros, and some of them were full. I suspect a boat is the best way to see Croatia. Bosnia won.

The border was super easy and we were stamped out of the EU and out of Schengen, hoorah! That clock can stop ticking now.

Suddenly everything changed. There were no other motorhomes to be seen. Traffic lights around road works were treated as merely advisory, and oncoming traffic, knowing it was in the wrong, just headed off onto the pavement or gravel. One chap in a tractor gave us a massive grin and a wave and shouted something - Rog thinks it was “Manchester United!”
The countryside was lovely too - all rolling green hills and the odd small village punctuated with the tower of a mosque. Talking of mosques, Bosnia is, as you might imagine, a seriously weird place politically. It has a tripartite presidency (comprised of one Bosniak Muslim, one Serb and one Croat) and two semi-autonomous entities – the (mainly Bosniak and Croat) Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina and the (mainly Serb) Republika Srpska – each with its own president and prime minister.

It reminds me of that joke, “What is the maximum penalty for bigamy?” Answer - “Two mothers-in-law.” Just look at how little the UK gets done with one prime minister, and imagine how much less it would be if we had three!

Here in the far north west, we are in a mainly Bosniak region, hence the mosques. We parked up at Farm Stay Čardaklije ( multilayer.polymer.paper) where we miscommunicated with someone who didn’t speak English, but managed to grasp that we should move to the lower car park.

We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the sun and reading, interspersed with a little van work. I cleaned Denby’s insides and windscreen, and Rog lashed the handle of the kettle with paracord so that it doesn’t burn my delicate womanly fingers when I make tea. Flynn guarded the van.

Dinner was up in the farmhouse, which was a lovely place.

Luckily there was an English menu with pictures. (All menus should have pictures. It would stop all that neck craning that happens in the pre-ordering phase, when you’re looking around at all the food coming out and deciding what to have.) Both the lamb cooked under a hat and the beef cooked under a hat were off (national shortage of cooking hats?), so we had a metre-long sausage between us.

And here you can see why I don’t usually want to share food with Rog if I’m hungry. His side (far side) almost completely gobbled up, her side (near) barely touched in comparison.

He puts it down to having an older brother and sister who stole food from him when he was a tiny boy, but I think he’s had 50 years to get over that and it’s just plain greed.

 

[Grianan]

Looks lovely. Especially with restaurant on site. How are you finding your stops?

 

[Jane And Rog]

Mostly using Park for night with a little Search for sites.

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[Jane And Rog]

Here is last night’s map. You can see we didn’t travel very far from last night’s stop in Croatia.

 

[Wanders from Glos]

Really enjoying you trip, reading it from the side of Lake Maggiore. Bosnia is beautiful and the Bosniaks are lovely people who have been treated dreadfully Enjoy. .

 

[MartynShaw]

You are making want to go to Bosnia in the autumn, I wonder what the weather is like then ?

 

[Westbarn1]

Hi, just found this report, we did something similar 2 years ago and really liked Bosnia, maybe back next year!

 

[Jane And Rog]

Loving it so far, fantastic countryside, friendly people, not crammed or expensive like Croatia was.

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[Just smiffy]

The Japanese/Chinese at the lakes when I was there were like ants, all over the place and just like in the films everyone of them with a selfie stick doing a running commentary and taking photos of me..
In the queue for the boat the Japanese tour guide standing behind me rested on the back of my wheelchair and almost tipped me back over…
A few choice words obviously didn’t get through because he did it again.. and as I tipped back and spun around to push him away forcibly it ended up being a punch in the guts which sent him on one knee winded, but he got the message then..

I went most of the way round it in my wheelchair and had to get out and arse it up steps a few times but the place was worth it… (once)…

 

[Poms_from_Adelaide]

Bosnia Herzegovina sounds like my sort of place already! My (hopefully one day) daughter in law’s family are from there originally.

Will you be visiting Sarajevo at all? Not sure if it would be possible with Flynn but there is a ‘have dinner with a local family’ thing there I’ve been looking at which sounds an amazing way to really learn about what it was like during the frighteningly recent war there. My 7/7/7 plan is gradually morphing into a 4/13/4 instead.

Can’t wait for your next update. I look forward to it every day

 

[Jane And Rog]

Thanks! Yes, Sarajevo is on the plans. Do you have details of the dinner please?

 

[Jane And Rog]

After assuring that they’d be happy to let us roam to Bosnia for free, EE sent us an SMS last night saying that they’d like to charge us six quid for four mega (not giga) bytes. That would work out at £390 to stream Oasis’s 1994 meisterwork Definitely Maybe. So Definitely Not, thanks EE.

That added to the list of missing basic necessities: local pounds, diesel, lunch and now data to find out how to get the others.

We headed for Banja Luka (Bosnia’s Manchester if you will) where we thought we’d get all three. On the way we got stuck behind several logging lorries on steep hills. It pushed the diesel consumption through the roof and we had to stop enroute. Diesel costs 2.40 Convertible Marks (so called because they were pegged to the Deutschmark, and are now pegged to the euro at the same rate as when Germany converted to the Euro). Bosnia doesn’t like to make things simple for itself - they also have two different sets of currency in circulation, one for each sub country. To be fair, I guess the UK does too. Whatever, that’s just over a quid a litre.

As we drove into the mountains, we crossed over into Serb territory.

We arrived in BL and looked for parking. Sadly it was laid out before there were so many cars in Bosnia. My advice if you want to park a PVC or van in BL is don’t bother.

We took a hopeful second turn at the city and spotted a bank with free parking on the outskirts.

Money in hand we decided to chance six quid with EE to find a BH Telecom office and complete our mission. Jane managed to load the Google homepage before the 4mb ran out . Luckily we spotted a supermarket with parking just up the road and secured two sims from a nice lady at the information booth.

Cashed, fueled and simmed we got to the important business of touristing. The whole of the Vrbas valley from BL to Jacje is lovely. It’s about to host the world white water rafting championships (no, I didn’t know it was competitive either). We started our tour of the valley by driving up to Etno Selo Ljubačke Doline (currency.rationalism.wooed) a small collection of traditional houses and museum of olde-worlde businesses. We had a great lunch there: local meat and salted buckwheat donuts. (J edit - but best of all was probably the sour clotted cream / cheese called kajmak. Don’t miss it if you get chance!)

Then onto our night’s stop, Camping San (expanses.intermodal.daffodils), a tiny site basically in someone’s back garden. It’s expensive for what it is but it does front onto the river and we had it to ourselves.

We planned to eat at the restaurant next door but by the time we’d arrived (just after 6pm) they’d closed the kitchen. We hurried back to the van to set up chairs and table just in time for thunder to ripple along the valley swiftly followed by large plops of rain.

Flynn and I met Georgi, the owner of Camping San, this morning and he told me the rain caused 80cm of flooding in Banja Luka :-(

- Rog

 

[HugoBNB]

Thanks! Yes, Sarajevo is on the plans. Do you have details of the dinner please?

Have you tried e-SIM's (if your handset is compatible)?
I use the Airalo app. It might be worth exploring for streaming.

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