Leaving Dubrovnik in the hot sun, we had our longest day of the trip so far. At dusk we found ourselves in Medjugorje, where tootling around town looking for a campsite, we became curious as to why ‘Paddy Travels’ appeared to be the largest tour operator in this part of the Balkans.
In the morning on realising just how touristy the town was we asked around and found out it had become a major Catholic pilgrimage site since 6 young people had had apparitions of the Virgin Mary here in the 1980s.
As we left town we thought we were having an apparition ourselves. A pack of freckly gingers so pasty that they surely weren’t from this world. But they were real enough, and from Donegal.
We set off for Mostar to see the new Old Bridge, but soon Neil had a shard of glass sticking out of his rear tyre, and his first puncture of the trip. Having convinced himself after surviving Albania that his tyres were invincible, this came as a surprise, but soon became annoying as it was to be only the first of 5 punctures in the same wheel that week.
In Mostar we took photos of our bikes and the bridge before cycling round the town, which seemed to have recovered well since the Yugoslav war – there were a few abandoned buildings, but plenty of new churches and mosques, and tourism was certainly booming.
It wasn’t until we headed north to the valleys around Glamoc and Sanski Most that the damage the war had left behind became more evident. Derelict houses and abandoned villages were scattered across the countryside and in an area that was a front line during the war, the ever-present Croatian flags that we’d seen up until now gave way to Serb ones. The only Bosnian flags we saw in our time in Bosnia were on police cars and in a bar showing a Bosnia football match on TV.
We left Bosnia via the Srpska Republic, and as the weather turned more wintry (we had our first frost and frozen tent) we recrossed Croatia. On our 40th day out of Istanbul we were back in the EU, in Ljubljana, the pint-sized Slovenian capital.