We Do Adventure

Today is FIS World Snow Day . Last year we were out on a very patchy piste making the most of some less than ideal conditions at the slope above Jajce. This year there isn't a ski lift working in the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina! You can't even say it's been a bad winter, it's barely been winter at all. There was a snow fall in November. A few resorts got enough of a base to open up for a week or two. We managed a trip to Vlašić on 21 st December, the day before World Snowboard Day . It was squeezed into a really busy period of work but the decision to head for the hills when we did looks better and better the longer winter waits to put in a proper appearance. Since the New Year the forecast has been promising snow 'next week'. It's well known that tomorrow never comes; next week has been showing even less intention to turn up. Locals tells us tales of a town virtually besieged by snow during their childhood winters. Even allowing for a little exagge...

Sunday was the culmination of many months of work for Rowan. Preparations for the Neverland street art day in Jajce had seen here crocheting long into the night for weeks, as our spare bedroom became an Aladdin's cave of inspired creations. There had been workshops in the local cultural centre, giving young people the chance to create, and craft parties for the twenty and thirty-somethings. What all this hard work needed was a good day to show it to the world - or at least the local community. It got it: a day, if anything, too good. Last year's event was interrupted by heavy thunder storms, this year the sun beat down unrelentingly and it was hot. Decorating the town started at 7am, the art intended for people to take was put out about midday. By the time the day finished with an outdoor acoustic concert almost everything was taken.

Things have been a little quiet on our blog for the past couple of weeks. That's usually a sign things are not quiet in our offline existence - and this has certainly been no exception to that rule. April has, thus far, consisted of scaling the steep learning curve of handling a DSLR for the first time, racking up the road miles around Bosnia and Herzegovina and hours of editing video footage. Tomorrow Novi Most, the UK-based charity we volunteer for, will begin releasing the first of the new photos and videos I have been working on. Whether you're a fan of Facebook , Twitter , YouTube or good old-fashioned websites you'll be able to get a fresh insight into the important work Novi Most is engaged in.  My hope is these new videos, images and editorial help increase people's understanding of the issues young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina grow up facing. Until tomorrow, here's a teaser...

Yesterday we enjoyed exploring a “new” playground - Ski centar "Raduša" . We'd been intrigued by the pictures on Facebook and the reality didn't disappoint. I had been looking for one sunny day of snowboarding this season and we finally got it! As ski centres in Bosnia and Herzegovina go this must be one of the newest; according to an article on a Croatian ski website it's only in its third year of operating. From our perspective it makes an appealing alternative to some of the more established resorts. I know people look for different things in their winter sports experiences. For some the a près-ski activities are more important than the slopes. At Raduša the a près-ski activity is driving home! It's not a resort in that sense, but what it offers is access to unspoilt countryside. There's no loud music, no corporate sponsorship banners, just a mountain top covered with snow, a few well placed lifts and some nicely groomed runs. All that and a decent...

Last night lightning stopped play. This was both disappointing and encouraging; disappointing because I was just hitting my snowboard stride, powering down the powdery slope in ridiculously poor visibility, but encouraging that the local ski centre didn't want to see its customers fried in a freak drag lift accident. Seeing lightning flash through heavy falling snow was a new experience. We know the prevailing wisdom is don't be on high, exposed places at such times so we headed inside for another hot chocolate. Ranč is our local ski centre. We know it's a mountain but it's easy to think of it as the local hill. It was the combination of questions from my brother and getting a G-Shock watch with an altimeter for my birthday that got me interested in finding out how high this “hill” really is. I took a reading on my watch at the top, I cross referenced it with an accurate (higher) figure from the internet. 1463m. For someone more used to measuring mountains in feet (...

This video was filmed during the first two weeks of this year. They were two weeks that proved beyond doubt there is no gain without a sizeable portion of pain. So much pain! Going from effectively no snowboard experience to nine consecutive days of intense snowboarding, with a healthy dose of long-distance driving thrown in for good measure, was a stern test of the resolve. However, and it's a big however, the trade off is we, and a group of the young people we work with, have learned to snowboard. Not just that, we've learned enough to pass those skills on to others. We're not the only ones excited about this. It won't be long before you'll be able to watch how far this story has come in just a couple of months. This video is just the beginning. (Bosnia and Herzegovina is a beautiful country that offers some great winter sport opportunities. We'd recommend anyone in search of new adventures to check it out. All our snowboarding was on mountains in B...

This morning I was in the Sainsburys that used to double as our local corner store, browsing the magazine section, when my eyes fell on an unexpected keyword: Bosnia. I've waited a long time to see a UK magazine write a positive article about the country that has been home to us for the past four years. I almost found one last year, an online version of an article snowboarding around Sarajevo by Outside magazine , but that didn't count as Outside is an American publication! What you see here is the January 2013 issue of The Great Outdoors . "Snow trekking in Bosnia" is one of the cover stories. Having already bought The Economist , Wired and Onboard (a snowboarding magazine) in the last two days I wasn't about to buy another magazine just for the sake of one article of interest. However, I did stand there and skim read the story to confirm it was, indeed, a positive one. We've long recognised that the great outdoors is one of the treasures of Bosnia ...

It wasn't so long ago that I wrote about a bus ride from Zagreb to Jajce. When I did I would have considered it quite a long trip. No longer. Last week was bookended by two 28 hour bus journeys. Sarajevo to Oldenburg, in northern Germany, and back again. In a little bus. 29 seats, 25 passengers and 3 drivers. As near to non-stop as was possible. Had the bus been able to reach the speed limit on the motorways the trip may have been many hours shorter but the seats did recline a little, the air-conditioning worked and it made no worrying noises! Needless to say this is my new benchmark for long-distance road travel. It was a trip of many firsts, many of them being borders crossed by young people who had never been outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina before. I'll leave comments on their interest in the comparative price of chocolate for another post and instead say something about the reason for such a bus ride. We were attending a international event for teenagers called Teen...

We recently came by a generous consignment of tortilla chips. Although they are readily available in shops here they are relatively new and comparatively expensive. Most of the young people we work with had never tried them before. It's fair to say most were not impressed when they came out of the box last week. This week, in an attempt to spice up the taste experience, our local colleague suggested we buy some salsa dip and make a more local-orientated dip, by mixing sour cream and ajvar – a relish made predominately from red peppers. This afternoon he gave a short talk introducing the concept of dipping chips and I joined him in a demonstration of how this is done. To their credit almost all the young people attending our Novi Most youth club session gave this culinary novelty a try. The mild Mexican salsa was deemed to hot and spicy by a few that I spoke to, nevertheless a couple of bags of chips were happily munched through. This is just another example of a ne...

I won't be watching this year's Eurovision Song Contest. This may not mean much to UK readers, less still to US ones, but it puts me firmly out-of-step with the prevailing culture here in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It's not that I'm boycotting the event or attempting to display some assumed cultural superiority, it's simply a case of a calender clash; that and the disappointment the act I favoured didn't make it out of the Semi-Final the other night. I am no longer bothered by Saturday's results. I was never going to root for BiH's entry – I haven't heard it but people who have haven't exactly encouraged me to – nor do I care for the crooning of old Engelbert. My money would go to Rambo Amadeus , partly because I have paid to see him perform in the past but mostly because his song is a brilliant satire of all things Euro. Unfortunately for Montenegro it seems that not everyone shares his sense of humour. The second Semi-Final is tonight. If I h...

I was going to get on my bike yesterday afternoon and head out into the countryside. I didn't. My excuse was the weather, that and trying to finish off some work. However, I did ride the Friday before, my first ride of 2010. Naturally, I wiped out my camera to commemorate the moment.

It is the preserve of travel writers to tell tales of the unspoilt natural beauty they have witnessed. I wish this post were one of those. Alas it is not. Last week we drove a section of the main road between Banja Luka and Sarajevo. Alongside the road runs the River Vrbas. It's not a huge mass of rushing water, although neither is it a trickle; about the width of the narrow two lane road next to it you might successfully navigate it in a canoe or small raft. Trees line both banks. Come spring it could be a beautiful sight, but it won't be. Instead mile upon mile of spoilt natural beauty with bear the scars of human wastefulness. In our experience the retailers of Bosnian and Herzegovina have a strange obsession with the dispensing of plastic bags. If the trend in the UK is for a sales assistant to make you feel guilty for using a bag – or make you pay for the privilege – here you are more likely to cause offence, at very least bewilderment, if you try to exit a shop without on...

I got home last night and picked up Martin Bell's book 'In Harm's Way'. Large parts of the book are his reflections of his time in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 90s. I read it before we moved here. Eighteen months later the place names are no longer historical abstractions but 'the place where so-and-so lives' or 'the place where we turn right to get to so-and-so'. This weekend three things made me remember his book; here are two of them. A Bosnian friend told us how she'd been on a trip in Serbia a few years ago. She'd been put up by a very poor but very hospitable Serbian old lady. At one point the old lady pointed out the damage that still remains from the American bombing of her area. 'Was your town bombed?' she had asked her guest. 'I didn't have the heart to tell her the Serbs bombed our town' our friend told us. As we sat at breakfast yesterday the TV played silently in the corner. Radovan Karadžić was making...

This is tomorrow here is Bosnia and Herzegovina. What's it all about? Google it! I say that because I don't want to appear either ill-informed or insensitive and I know enough to know there are different opinions about the day. Are such disagreements so surprising? Let me avoid any deep issues and give my less-than-totally-serious answer. Things surprise me less and less but I think, in a way, this is surprising. In the UK people don't seem to care what a Bank Holiday is for, just that it's a day off work. For example, I'm sure it's that inherent laziness, rather than deep-seated English pride, that fuels the annual call for St George's Day to get added to the list national days off. Here, it seems, people are perhaps more principled. Anyway I post this picture for the friend who was really excited when we saw this sign during a Sunday afternoon stroll through her town centre.

For some reason, the other night I caught myself thinking about the books I used to read as a child. I was thinking particularly about this one that was a collection of excepts from escape stories, conveniently collated by the good nice people of St Michael if I remember correctly. It was all boyish ripping-yarn stuff, well apart from the bits that were true stories – as the title of this post implies. But they were exciting too. This morning we were back running uni hockey training is a local school gym we hire. The equipment is of the same vintage as the old gym we had in the school I was at over twenty years ago. But that gym was glass on two sides with those old metal fire doors that were slightly warped with age, making them awkward to close if accidentally opened. The gym here in Mostar has probably fifteen foot of wall before you reach the windows and just one door; the one linking it to the school. No fire exits. So it was that between watching the practise I started concocti...

Reading an article about an unpleasant challenge facing British expats in the south of Spain reminded me that I was going to write about the International Living Quality of Life Index. Their website is a mess but dig around long enough and you'll find the 2009 Index. (I've just refound it and it seems to be in a different order than when I last checked.) Undeterred, I will continue as planned because I don't believe the list anyway. internationalliving.com says "to produce this annual Index we consider…nine categories: Cost of Living, Culture and Leisure, Economy, Environment, Freedom, Health, Infrastructure, Safety and Risk, and Climate. This involves a lot of number crunching from “official” sources, including government websites, the World Health Organization, and The Economist, to name but a few. Once the data is collected, we also take into account what our editors from all over the world have to say about our findings." It's at that point you realise...

The BBC are reporting that Baroness Ashton says the hope of EU membership is the 'glue' that is holding Bosnia and Herzegovina together. Far be it from me to disagree, I merely want to underline her statement that the EU needs to 'reach beyond the political leaders, much more into where the people are and explain to them the benefits.' In our experience there often seems to be a huge disconnect between the political posturing that gets reported as life as it is lived by the majority here. Many people we've spoken with laugh at the prospect of EU membership; perhaps they dare not hope. I once heard someone say that by the time Bosnia and Herzegovina gained entry all the other countries will have left! Given the tangled political situation in the country it is understandable that people seem reluctant to get their hopes up. There may be benefits - freedom of travel within the EU zone would be a huge one for Bosnian passport holders - but perhaps the EU should be care...

“Mr Writer, why don't you tell it like it is? Why don't you tell it like it really is? Before you go on home...” Yesterday afternoon, as the Stereophonics sung these words in my ear, I had one of those moments of conscience. Am I guilty of not telling it like it is? Come to think of it do I really know what it is like? The ‘it’ is probably life in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the land of contradictions that is broadly the subject of this blog; our life and work in Mostar being the particular focus. I am aware, often painfully so, that our life here is nothing like that of a great many of the population. For one, I have a Passport that allows me to live and work around Europe. Bosnian Passport holders need an expensive visa just to visit the UK. Such restrictions affect how you see life’s possibilities. My brother commented on the video I made of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s World Cup playoff defeat to Portugal that at times I could have been Alan Green. Sometimes I do feel more like a c...

‘You will hear of wars and threats of wars, but don’t panic.’ I’ve read those words many times and now they’ve taken on a new meaning. Jesus said them, St Matthew recorded them, but I’m reading them for the first time against the backdrop of a seemingly growing media discussion about the possibility of civil war in the country we’re living in. We’re not panicking but it does make you think a bit. ‘Don’t Panic’ is perhaps more famous for adorning the cover of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. That comic masterpiece involved the destruction of the whole world, an event that, while treated as not funny in the book, is really not funny. We live on a street where I can still see the sandbags behind which people defended their patch fifteen years ago. The thought of this country plunging itself into another violent mess when it hasn’t cleared up the remains of the last one is far from a joke. Into these sober thoughts burst an anthem that practically had me dancing around the living roo...

The Dervish House at the source of the river Buna, at Blagaj, is one the classic tourist images from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The water streams clear and cold from a cave entrance at the bottom of a steep cliff face. It is a dramatic sight. Today we were slightly farther downstream, using the Hotel Ada for one day workshop with our local team members. The sun was out and after lunch we took the (really) short stroll from the restaurant to the waterside, where I made this quick video.