#winter travel
Christmas is coming
Near coffee shop in snowy day
Our van wheels crunched over unpaved road after unpaved road, kicking up mud and gravel as we bumbled along a series of winding dirt tracks which wove their way through endless pine forest.
This was the face of Bosnia & Herzegovina’s interior, a world away from the bustle and bullet-strewn concrete structures of its capital Sarajevo. Here, pretty little stone houses were strewn across scenic plateaus which seemed to appear mysteriously out of the dense thicket of trees that surrounded them and crept up to their doorsteps. Wild animals were known to roam these forests, and we wondered how humans could live so close to them without conflict.
We were still carving our route home out, ever Northbound, savouring these last few days in the Balkans before we would hotfoot across Europe back to England. We slept soundly that night, cradled by the forest, and coaxed our van into life with jackets bundled against the icy morning air. This was our pattern of travel these days; squeezing the most of every moment, battling with our van to get it home, the road our only constant as we went.⠀
As the forest dwindled and eventually gave way to civilisation we followed a winding little road partially covered by snow up to a ledge, where we spent the night sleeping underneath the remnants of Tito’s fist. Now a crumbling concrete structure, this bizarre object known as a spomenik had once been a monument to the Partisan soldiers who fought in the Battle of the Wounded in the valley below, but was nicknamed for its uncanny resemblance to Yugoslavia’s former leader ad the iron fist with which he ruled. However, shortly after the Bosnian War, a group of vandals planted dynamite inside and blew it to pieces, although its skeleton still dominates the skyline for miles around.
We were beginning to understand more of Bosnia’s chequered past, evident in every bullet-strewn building and every crumbling ruin we passed. Twenty years was not enough time to heal, but even after the visible reminders had long since been repaired, the memories would not fade for generations yet to come.⠀
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