We Do Adventure

Yesterday I led a mountain bike trip for a group of young people. I used to do this back in the UK. The big difference: the distinct lack of mountains in the south of England. Here we were up at around 1000m, or 3300ft, depending how you like to measure your elevation above sea level. However the basics were the same. Giving hire bikes the once over, making sure seat heights were appropriate and that sensible gears had been selected. Like the in the UK, the aim is to ensure everyone in the group feels they have been challenged, but not freaked out, by the ride. Some of this is achieved by allowing people to ride certain sections at their own pace before regrouping, another part is in setting challenges that focus people to think about elements of their riding. One of my favourites for this the slow race. You set a short, straight course – about half a dozen bike lengths – and race head-to-head. The last person over the line wins. I was never a rider who enjoyed flying down hil...

I should have got this online about a week ago but I needed a little longer than a moment here or there to get the video edited. So in the spirit of 'better late than never' here is what the outward leg of our recent 60k cycle ride looked like. I didn't film the way back so you miss out on the increasingly heavy rainfall the accompanied our journey home, and the collision between a brake-less BMX and the rider in front of me that left one of them tasting tarmac!

If yesterday I pulled my van over to snap a view I was particularly enjoying today I was indulging in a bit of drive-by shooting! Okay, technically, this picture is actually the result of a ride-by: I was out cycling by the lakes in Jajce, soaking up the last of the autumn sun as sunk slowly behind the mountains. I don't know what Ansel Adams would have thought of the digital revolution. Did he ever grab a photo one-handed whilst riding a bike? I doubt it. However, he did create art . Nevertheless, I'm not complaining about this image. Under the circumstances it does a great job of capturing the moment. Less than an hour later the moon was up, but those photos won't find their way online!

Internet arrived in our apartment this morning, two weeks after we did! As the title says, we're now living in Jajce, in central Bosnia. Here we are promised a long winter, with snow, but at the moment it's autumn and the trees are looking seasonally appropriate. Over the next couple of months things will begin to take shape as we look at the best way to begin our work with Novi Most here. Obviously there are ideas but we wanted to relocate before making definite decisions on the way things would be. In a good way, we have a lot of unknowns.

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.

I don’t often post on the political situation here in Bosnia and Herzegovina but when I saw this article today I had to make some kind of comment. It quotes Milorad Dodik, prime minister of Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity of Republika Srpska, from a column published on Monday in Austrian daily Der Standard as saying: “Some countries accept that the people of Bosnia must be allowed to self-manage. Others seem to fear that when the training wheels of this international experiment are removed, "the bicycle" might fall over together with the child. But Bosnia and Herzegovina is now 15 years old. Is it not the time to give it a try?” He is explaining his argument for the closure of the Office of the High Representative (OHR). I can see how what could be seen as a babysitter for the international community could be seen as patronizing. However I’ve done a fair bit of mountain bike instruction over the years with young people aged 11-15. You learn that some riders can be surpris...

I learnt some new vocabulary today. That’s not unusual. We’re learning things all the time. Mondays and Thursdays are the days we usually have language lessons so, this being a Monday, it’s particularly not unusual – if that makes sense! What is unusual is the some of the words we learned. We keen to learn relevant language; words and phrases we’ll actually use. When we have to do exercises it’s good to do them around things we really do rather than hypothetical situations. For example, in today’s lesson we had to make a sentence starting “in my opinion...” Well, in my opinion it’s easier to ride up a mountain than down one. The speed and possibilities of grisly crashes make down a much more tense experience. (Tense is not helpful to smooth riding!) Explaining all this I went not to recount the fact that I turned round during this afternoon’s ride up a mountain road after hearing two very distinct gunshots! The shots seemed reasonably close and as I was further up than I’d been before ...

If I say ‘eating problems’ you’re probably already thinking about not-eating or over-eating or allergies. My problem, if that’s what it really is, is none of the above. It is that I have a bad habit of scoffing my food too quickly. I’ll often catch myself and make some annoyed-sounding noise through an unfinished mouthful. Tonight, as we had dinner with a friend who’s about to embark on a short trip to Scotland, I managed to pace myself. Slightly different from this morning when I bit of more than I could chew – although, admittedly, only metaphorically. It was a fine morning for mountain biking and I set my sights on the somewhere near the top of one of the mountains around Mostar. As I’ve yet to find a detailed local road map I consulted Google maps to check my options. Even here you have to use the satellite view as they’ve only mapped the one big road through Mostar. There is, however, enough zoom on their images for confident route planning. The terrain view told me I was planning...