We Do Adventure

One of the temptations I constantly fight during much of the driving I do is the desire to enjoy the view. All too often something spectacular is trying to catch my attention, but narrow, twisty roads are notoriously unforgiving of lapses in concentration. This morning was a rare treat. I was alone in the van on a empty mountain track with the sun breaking through the clouds, bringing the snowscape to life. The view was amazing, although it made for a very stop-start decent as I kept stopping to take photographs. As usual, these fail to fully capture the beauty, but they have a good go. With the track completely covered in snow, I also took the opportunity to check how our van would handle emergency stops, the odd swerve or two and generous tugs on the handbrake. Over the next few months I'm likely to do a lot of snow driving so I figured a bit of foreknowledge about any quirks wouldn't hurt. While I don't plan to make handbrake turns a habit I'm happy the report ...

Today I did a quick 'there and back again' to Sarajevo. This was made all the quicker by the completion of another section of motorway since the last time I made the trip; that was mid-May, if my memory serves me right. It's strange to think that the six-and-a-month gap between that trip and today's represents my longest absence from the city in the last five years. We arrived to wintery-cold in the country's capital on Thursday 29 th November 2007, on a now discontinued BA flight from London, at the start of our first trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since then large parts of the city have become familiar stomping grounds. But while we can look forward to faster journeys to Sarajevo in the future we are unlikely to see any change to times to Mostar. Geography dictates the winding mountain roads are unlikely to ever be widened. We are taking some of the young people who attend Novi Most activities in Jajce to Mostar this weekend. The temptation is to try to ...

The other day the M40 cropped up in a conversation with a friend. We discovered we have differing views on this sweeping stretch of motorway that connects London and Birmingham. I used to look forward to it as a relatively congestion-free chance to actually drive after grinding around the M25. She was too aware of the accident statistics people playing this kind of catch-up caused to ever enjoy using it. At 89 miles long, or 143.2 kilometres, the M40 alone provides almost exactly double the amount of motorway capacity that the entire country of Bosnia and Herzegovina has. It is a country with only two sections of motorway: around 40 kilometres between the mid-Bosnian towan of Kakanj and Sarajevo, and around 30 kilometres heading north from Banja Luka to Gradiska, on the border with Croatia. I have driven both sections end-to-end several times. The good news is more is on its way. BiH's Federation government has just signed an agreement worth 115 million euros with a...

I've never owned a games console but I've played a few. I remember a friend getting Sega Rally and the hours of driving that ensued. It was all high-speed fun and sliding round corners; clouds of dust or spraying snow flying in every direction depending on the terrain. The best bit was that when it all went horribly wrong the car magically reappeared, blinking, in the middle of the road, counting down three, two, one until you were off again. The part of the UK we lived in was not the sort of countryside that got to model for games like Sega Rally, at least not the roads I spent most of my time driving, although I did once get airborne, all be it microscopically so, accelerating hard down a bumpy bit of single track on the South Downs in our new Mini. To date my only other real-life Sega Rally moment had come driving a dirt track through the Joshua Tree forest on the our way to and from the West Rim of the Grand Canyon. Yes, I did get the hire car sideways at one point. No, ...

I’m sure I’ve mentioned a few times before the exceptional quality of the early evening light in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I might not have mentioned the incredible starry night sky we witnessed a week or so back. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the night sky look so beautiful. It provoked a friend to ponder if perhaps there’s a correlation between the increase in light pollution and decrease in belief in God. But tonight a drive in the dark back from Sarajevo gives me two very different light-related tales. There is but one main road that connects Mostar and Sarajevo. For almost the entiretiy of its length it is single carriageway, breaking into three lanes only on its steepest sections, for the benefit of those desperate to overtake a painfully slow lorry grinding uphill. They go painfully slow downhill too but for that you must supply your own patience! In the two and a bit hours it took to drive home I must have seen more than a dozen cyclists chancing their luck with no lights on their...