We Do Adventure

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...

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...