Mayan Prophecy Countdown

Well, in the morning it looked like great weather, a tad cool mind, but mr fisherman was off early to check his catch. We packed and left the Family Radic place. For those interested it was very nice, contact senkaradic@gmail.com . The hills were shrouded in mist a bit higher up but there was some great riding following the coast, except for the traffic of course, I can imagine this place in summer! But, it was only about 30km or so before we stopped to look for our first cache for the day, next to a religious place, and although the co-ordinates were off and the ‘hint’ was useless, we managed to find it, job done 🙂

That was all we were doing in this country. Near the town of Split we now headed inland towards the Bosnian border, this was only a short distance away, but my GPS map stopped at the border, so it looked like being fun riding through there. And in fact we got through very easily, although we did have to fork out for a green card insurance, and you can see on my GPS screen in the photo, no roads at all!

We were now in a recent war zone, one place where if you camp wild, you may end up with a land mine going off, so you have to be careful. The road was great, nice smooth bitumen and as it climbed the mountain foothills, the rain started to set in, so we stopped at a convenient spot for some tucker which was goulash and chips and donned the wet weather gear, we expected this so no surprise, but it still makes the roads less enjoyable because you have to slow down!

After that it was more of the same, wet roads but in some cases when we went through the hills, they had used the road scraper across the whole road, this is yucky to ride on as it makes the bike twitch all over. It is a mind game, there is more traction so better speed is possible, but with the bike twitching on wet roads it is hard to overcome the reluctance to speed up.

As we travelled through we could see many houses left to fall into ruin, if they had not been damaged by the war. It seems a lot of folk just packed up and left, they had no choice because of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ so although the houses still belong to them, they have relocated as refugees. Many still show bullet holes, like the white house on the right below, but we also saw ones where the holes had been filled and many new paint and render jobs with people living in them and it does not look as desolate as I had imagined.

We had skirt the major city of Sarejevo and kept on heading though the mountains to the east, it was slow going with a lot of traffic at times and with the wet slippery roads, but it was not a big issue.

We eventually arrived near the location of a cache I had wanted to find as it was actually on the road we were travelling. But, it(the GPS) was telling me to turn right with no roads there, so we asked some people and we ended up finding a room at the local hotel, it was quite nice and had a great river view, this was in the town of Gorazdo, the location of some major conflicts during the war.

So, after a few beers we wandered over the bridge and found a kebab shop with real nice food, I could do with another in fact! In the morning we were going to try and find that cache, I had a feeling it was up on the mountain and we just needed to find a road up there.

Cheers from Bosnia
TravellingStrom