A Mog with a View

Just in case my last post left you in any doubt, we had fallen in love with Bosnia from the moment we crossed the border.

The people were kind and friendly, the country oozed a sense of calm and we were surrounded by nature. We sank into an atmosphere of rest and relaxation that we hadn’t felt in months.

After buying my own body weight in wine and figs from the Tvrdos monastery, we headed for the town of Trebinje. High on a hill overlooking the town was the Hercegovacka Gracanica, an ornate Orthodox church

It was very striking from the outside, and inside it had the beautiful blue frescoes and low hanging chandelier that is typical of many Bosnian churches

From the grounds we had a fabulous view over the town

With the Arslanagica Bridge in the distance crossing the Trebisnjica River

We drove down to the river, parked up close to the old town and started our explorations with a pretty riverside walk to the old bridge for a closer look

The bridge was built by the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s and later relocated stone by stone in the 1970s to make way for a dam.

In the old town we found a small mosque and the Andelkina Kapija Gate

As well as some interesting statues

But the whole area was full of construction works and much of the rest was new build – as much of Bosnia inevitably is after the devastation of the 1990s war.

We found the Temple of the Holy Transfiguration of Our Lord and had a wander inside

But then left the town behind and drove out to the Vinarija ‘Bojanic’ winery. I had contacted them a couple of days before and booked a wine tasting evening. The owner, Stevo, had been very friendly and we were looking forward to it.

We drove deeper and deeper into a small village, the roads getting narrower with every turn. But just as we thought we would never make it, Stevo appeared, waving and smiling at us. He gestured for us to follow him in his car and lead us safely to our home for the evening.

We pulled up into a small but beautiful corner of their land overlooking the vineyards with the village beyond

It was another perfect spot.

Later in the evening we strolled through the fields to the winery for our tasting. We were seated in a small room full of wine barrels and a table set with cheese, cold meats, olives, dips and a mass of other goodies.

Stevo was a great cat lover with seven rescued cats and counting. Two of them joined us for our tasting, the one in his right hand was called Garfield and they both obviously adored him

The wine was excellent, the food lovely and Stevo was very interesting to talk to about life in Bosnia

We left with another box full of wine – although James wondered whether we could fit the whole barrel into the Mog!

It was around this time that oil had started pouring out of the portal axles and needed urgent attention so the next day we found a remote park-up place by the beautiful Bileca Lake. The dirt road down took us well away from civilisation

And when we arrived we found plenty of space to spread out and investigate the problem

The views in all directions were gorgeous

There wasn’t a sound from anywhere apart from the breeze and the gentle humming of our fridge.

And, as I covered in a previous blog, James found that one of the breathers was blocked which was an easy fix. It had turned into another fabulous day in BiH.

After a good night’s sleep we headed to the small town of Blagaj and the Blagaj Tekija, or Dervish House.

I had found a campsite in the town that had great reviews on our parkup app. Apparently for the princely sum of 10 euros you get to stay overnight in the family’s large garden, are given cakes when you arrive and bread, honey and cheese for breakfast. It sounded almost too good to be true but cakes and home-made bread were enticing enough for us to try.

We were not disappointed. The garden was on a bit of a slope but the cakes were lovely and breakfast was so big we made ourselves feel rather sick!

The people were very kind and seemed incredibly pleased to have guests so late in the season.

The Blagaj Dervish House is a Sufi monastery built into the cliffs on the banks of the river Buna. We had visited before six years ago when we did a European trip in Henry so knew what to expect. I always call it the Whirling Dervish House but that’s probably not very culturally accurate.

We wandered around taking in the views

We didn’t feel the need to go inside the monastery this time and the boat into the cave only runs in the summer, but we did cross the river and find our way to the bank opposite where we got a picture perfect view

The Blagaj Fortress was only a five minute drive away – we would have walked but it was steeply uphill for 2km. The roads were narrow and overgrown but we got through without too much trouble.

It was a short but steep walk from the car park up a zigzag trail to the fort itself

And from the top we where we were rewarded with stunning views over the countryside

As we stood on the ramparts and looked out over the mountains, the stillness and quiet were food for the soul

It was time, however, to leave this calm behind and head for the famous city of Mostar. We were looking forward to exploring such a historic place but also slightly subdued by the idea of navigating the logistics of a city again.

We found a secure car park in the new part of town and managed to squeeze ourselves into a space. From there it was a short walk to the Partisan Memorial Cemetery – built to commemorate those who lost their lives fighting against fascism in the early 20^th century

Reading about the design and the symbolism of the memorial, it was clear that it had been a huge undertaking and must have been very impressive when it was first built in 1965

Today it is still interesting to see and is on a grand scale, but it has been left to fall into sad disrepair and much of its impact has been lost.

We walked down a pretty, tree lined avenue

To a small park where we expected to see a statue of Bruce Lee. Strange to have a statue of a martial arts actor here we thought, what was his connection to Mostar?

Well the story gets quite interesting, starting with the fact that when we arrived there was no statue…

It had first been erected in 2005 as symbol of unity in a city divided by war as Bruce Lee was loved by all ethnic groups. But in March 2024 it was ripped down and cut into pieces as scrap. Some say it was just a thief wanting to profit from the value of the scrap metal, others say it was politically motivated as the statue had caused controversy with some people saying it was provocative.

As we wandered away, bemused by the whole story, we had no idea that by the time I was writing this post about a month later, the statue would have been found, repaired and returned to its podium! Photos taken from a news article…

We were still in the ‘new’ part of the town and it was full of derelict buildings riddled with bullet holes, a stark reminder of the devastation wreaked by the 1990s war

Some visitors suggest that these buildings have been left as a symbol but when we spoke to locals we discovered that this was far from the truth.

The war ended thirty years ago and most people in Bosnia want nothing more than to put it behind them and look to the future with optimism. However, the buildings that have been left untouched – not just in Mostar but across the country – are those where the owners cannot be traced. The reason why they have vanished does not need to be spelt out but it has left a big legal problem in terms of what to do with such a large number of abandoned buildings.

The most famous such building in Mostar is known as ‘Sniper’s Tower’, previously a bank but used by snipers in the Serbian forces to horrific effect.

From there we walked to Alekse Santica, a street full of amazing street art. At first we thought that the art had been removed as there was so much new building works and no sign of any paintings. But right at the top end of the street we saw a wall full of fantastic images

And further along we found an estate of apartment buildings where every gable end had been decorated

We spent hours wandering around admiring it all, it was quite incredible.

We also spotted this motif repeated many time around the city

We thought we had missed a key part of BiH’s history but it turned out to be the local football club!

We had now done most of the interesting things in the new part of town and it was time to dive into the historic centre. Sadly the Hamman museum I had wanted to visit was permanently closed. When we asked our walking guide why it was shut the next day, he said it just hadn’t been very interesting!

So we carried on to the Crooked Bridge, so old that no-one knows exactly when it was built or who by. It was badly damaged in the floods of 2000 and painstakingly rebuilt with funding donated by Luxemburg

It was very pretty to look at from all angles

But the whole of the old town was paved with cobbles that got very slippery in the wet and it was quite challenging to cross.

The main attraction in Mostar, however, is the imposing Stari Most. Built in the 16^th century by the Ottomans but deliberately destroyed in the 1990s war to stop the Bosnian army from crossing the river

This bridge was rebuilt in 2004 with guidance from UNESCO to ensure it is an exact replica including reusing much of the original material and using the same building techniques

But in the rain it is treacherous – and we must have walked over it at least six times that afternoon.

We wandered around the old town for a couple of hours and it is absolutely beautiful

The Neretva River runs though the middle of the city with its ice cold waters cascading in a picture perfect, crystal clear, blue ribbon

They say BiH is where east meets west and there were certainly penty of eastern influences on display

We found a nice restaurant for lunch that served us so much food we could barely move and afterwards I bought some baclava and traditional Bosnian biscuits from a market stall just to keep us going.

The Kaski Mehmed Pasha Mosque is the largest and most famous in the town. It was hard to do justice to it in photographs as we couldn’t stand back far enough to get it all in

The Nesuh Aga Vucjakovic Mosque was lovely from the outside but sadly closed

Nearby we saw the Sehitluci Mostar graveyard where the ‘heroes of the Bosnian war’ are buried. It was heartbreaking to see tombstone after tombstone inscribed with names of young men and women who all died in their 20s and 30s within the space of a year or two

The whole city was fascinating with relatively modern, Ottoman style buildings

Sitting alongside derelict monuments to the past

Eventually, we decided to leave something for another day and wandered back to the Mog, buying pomegranate juice from a street seller on the way and discovering that Mostar is even more beautiful in the evening that it is during the day

We didn’t want to spend the night in the city itself so had found a place to park-up about 5km away on the banks of the Neretva River.

When we arrived it was very pretty although close to the road so a little noisy

But given we were only 5km away from Mostar it was remarkably peaceful

There was another camper there for the night and a couple of locals drove in and out taking their dogs for a walk or having a beer by the river, but the place was large enough that we had plenty of space to ourselves.

There is a strange conundrum in BiH. Out of all the countries we have visited, it has by far the largest number of public rubbish bins, most of which are large enough for our bin bags to be conveniently tossed in. However, it is also one of the worst countries for having litter strewn everywhere. Litter is all over the roads and pavements, it covers the parks and is even all over some of the most remote countryside. Almost every picturesque spot is spoilt by piles of plastic bags and bottles, wet wipes, rusting metal and sometimes even used condoms. And unfortunately, the banks of the beautiful Neretva River are some of the most polluted.

This park-up spot was no different, it seemed so sad. We cringed at the condoms and unnerving amounts of wet wipes and pushed the glass and plastic bottles out of the way.

We spent the next morning fruitlessly going from one autoparts place to the next trying to find bits for the Mog. To cheer ourselves up we went back into the old town for another huge lunch of chicken and vegetable platters, this time in a lovely restaurant with a very distinct eastern atmosphere

Our next stop was the Mostar Genocide Museum which was harrowing and we came out two hours later blinking in the sunlight and very subdued.

We tried to visit the Muslibegovic House which is a museum show piece from the Ottoman era but when we arrived we found that it is only open during the summer.

Instead we went back to the restaurant we had visited the day before for a hot chocolate and baclava which was just what we needed to cheer ourselves up.

We spent that night at the same riverside spot as the night before

And headed back into the old town for our final day late the next morning. We were joining our guided walking tour and were looking forward to learning more about the city as well as the history of the war – which just seemed to get more and more confusing the more we read about it.

Our guide was wonderful, he knew so much and talked non-stop for three hours about the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarians, the two Yugoslavia periods and the 1990s war. Our heads were reeling but we felt much more educated about it all.

There was another British couple on the tour with a very well-behaved dog and towards the end one of them came up to me and asked whether we were travelling in BigMog. Something like this has happened three times since Scotland and each time it has felt very strange to have a complete stranger come up and appear to know all about you. As it turned out, they were the couple in the other camper on our first night by the river and had seen the blog details on the side of the truck.

We got talking to them and found that one of them was a primary school teacher in the same London borough where my sister lives. For a moment we got very excited thinking she might be my nephew’s teacher – but the coincidence wasn’t quite that great!

We enjoyed their company so much that we all went to the coffee shop in one of the towers of the Stari Most to carrying on chatting

As we were sipping our tea and hot chocolates there was a commotion building outside and the owner of the coffee shop said that someone had been given permission by the Mostar Diving Club to jump off the bridge

This was very exciting, the bridge jumpers are one of the most famous things in Mostar but as the Neretva River is the coldest river in the world, they tend to jump only in the summer months. Locals are brought up learning how to jump and there are regular competitions, but visitors can only do so once they have been trained on lower platforms, learnt the proper entry technique and proven their skill. At least one visitor every year dies in the attempt. It is something that’s on many people’s ‘bucket list’ and we were thrilled to be able to see it happen.

The jumper was Polish. He looked very nervous which, given the shallowness and coldness of the water, the speed of the current and the amount of sharp rocks, seemed very sensible. I took this video with my breath held, I really didn’t want to inadvertently film someone’s last moments

Fortunately he did a great job, raising his hand at the end to reassure his audience that he was fine.

By now it was the second week in November and the weather was starting to noticeably cool down. The days were often still warm but the mornings and evenings were getting very cold. We were also just a few days from the official start of the winter season when snow chains become obligatory – if we don’t carry snow chains between 14^th November and 4^th April we would be breaking the law.

So, having done all our sight seeing, we spent the next day trying to find somewhere that sold chains large enough for the Mog – you can buy chains for cars in any supermarket for just a few Marks but HGV chains are a different story. We managed it eventually but it took all day.

Late in the afternoon, snow chains safely stored in the garage, we drove out of Mostar towards the town of Jablinica where we hoped to spend a couple of days by the lake. En route we found a pretty, out-of-the-way spot by a river and settled in for the night

The next morning was absolutely freezing with a low fog and I struggled with my training, ending up having to wear gloves to stop my fingers from going numb

We rooted out our big, down jackets and scarves and realised that things were going to change from now on.

Bundled up in warm coats and hats, our next stop was the Old Neretva Train Bridge, famous for having been destroyed once in the second world war and again some decades later to make a film about it. That film was called the Battle of Neretva and became very famous throughout the world

We spent an hour or so in the little museum learning all about Bosnia’s experiences in the war then walked down to see the bridge itself

Apparently the second destruction of this bridge was done with the approval of Tito himself who built the people a new and more modern bridge to replace it

The rest of the day didn’t work out quite so well for us. We continued on to the Jablinica Lake only to find that the water level was so low that all the boats and moorings were stranded on the bank high above it

Beautiful as it was, there was nowhere to park to see it close up and with the weather being so cold we didn’t really fancy a dip

We carried on to the town of Konjic where we had a nightmare trying to find somewhere to park and there wasn’t much to see. Over lunch we discovered that Tito’s bunker was very expensive and the process for getting tickets was unnecessarily convoluted so decided against it. We had planned to drive east to the remote village of Lukomir but heard rumours that it was so high up snow had started to fall and the roads looked dangerous.

So instead we drove west to Rama Lake, our first stop on the way into the northern mountains. The couple we had met in Mostar had recommended a place to park-up high above the lake and we decided to try it.

When we arrived it was absolutely spectacular

The view was jaw dropping

A couple of cars passed by on the road a little way away from us but other than that it was just us, a few birds and that view

In fact we loved it so much we stayed for two nights and spent the day in between trying to figure out how to attach our new snow chains to BigMog’s wheels

It took over an hour but James managed to figure it out in the end. BigMog looked very smart

We just hoped we never actually had to use them!

Conscious of the weeks ticking on, I spent the rest of my day booking our Christmas flights back to the UK and searching endlessly for somewhere safe we could leave BigMog whilst we were away. I finally hit on the perfect solution – a family run campsite on the hills above Sarajevo that happily agreed to give him bed and board for three weeks. They even offered to drive us to the airport and collect us again at the other end.

That evening we made ourselves the first fire we have had since leaving Africa

Life seemed to be falling back into place at long last.

In the morning we woke to find the lake had disappeared under a thick layer of fluffy, white clouds

Which slowly melted away as the sun rose over the tops of the mountains and warmed the day

On our second morning, my training was interrupted by two men who arrived with binoculars and guns and stood looking out over the hills. I went over to chat to them and found they were part of a hunting group hunting bears and boars. I am not a fan of killing animals for no reason and, whilst they were very friendly people, my overriding hope was that they would not be successful that day or any other. But I was also fascinated by the fact that there were bears and boars in the forests surrounding us…

We had been looking out over Rama Lake for two days so decided to go down and see it close up. As we drove down the switchbacks it was unnerving to see just how steep the road was in front of us

But, as ever, BigMog didn’t miss a beat and as we approached the lake the scenery was gorgeous

There was a church and monastery on one of the promontories with a small art gallery and museum. We bought tickets and went for a wander around

The sculptures in the gardens were interesting

But, as ever, the views were the main event

Some of the art appealed to me in a quirky way

And the museum was very sweet, with scenes from the past showing how the people used to live

As we were preparing to leave, James noticed a tap over an outside basin near the gate. We dashed back to the Mog and brought him over – any opportunity to fill our water tanks is gratefully taken advantage of

Everything was starting to feel very autumnal and more than a little Christmassy. It was all so beautiful with the leaves turning red and orange, blue skies and crisp air.

We drove further north to the Nekropola Stecaka Ravanjska Vrata, another UNESCO site of old stecci tombstones

It really felt as though we were getting out into the middle of nowhere, with dirt roads and rolling plains with the occasional small village dotted around

We found an off-road trail on Wikiloc and followed it for a few miles to make the most of our beautiful surroundings

This is where the lovely guys at our first Bosnian campsite had told us we could find wild horses but that was our mission for the next day. For today, we simply enjoyed driving around this remote and unspoilt part of the world

We found a small group of old buildings, clearly abandoned decades ago, with trees growing inside the shells

The wind whistled around us and as the sun started to dip in the sky we felt a bitter chill in the air

We had been keeping an eye on the weather forecast for the last few days and snow was on its way – lots and lots of snow

We had a couple of days before it was due to arrive though so decided to spend the night out here on our own.

It was one of best park-up spots we had found in a very long time and reminded me very much of parts of Africa with the yellow grass swaying gently in the wind as far as the eye could see…