We were up quite early and packed the last few bits and pieces into the van. Dandy had checked the oil levels and declared that ‘she hadn’t used a drop of oil’. I smiled wryly and thought ‘apart from the two gallons that had emptied itself all over the side, underside of the van and the poor gits following behind us’.
We had decided to pay a visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina, a well known tourist destination. So we set a route on Thomas and off we went. We were stopped at a border checkpoint by an armed policeman and his mate who rigorously checked our documents and asked us various questions about our insurance. Things weren’t looking good, it seemed that our only option was to head back on the road we’d come on and try to purchase insurance in a town about 60 miles away. Suddenly the conversation took a new turn and after finding out that we were from Edinburgh Dandy and official chap had an engaging conversation about Hearts FC who had been gubbed by a Sarajevo club in a UEFA Cup match a few years previously. A sudden change of heart and he waved us across the border. His mate had a prosthetic arm, probably blown off in the war 16 years previously, an armed man without an arm I thought!
I had been to Bosnia two years previously and had visited the city of Mostar where the bridge was blown up and most of the city shelled during the conflict of the early 90’s so I thought I knew what to expect. As we drove into Bosnia we had a feeling that we shouldn’t really be there. I was driving and wasn’t too confident about the insurance situation and given Dandy’s fidgeting and barking he wasn’t either. We found the area and the small towns quite depressing after Croatia, so after a few hours we decided to head back to Croatia and chalk it down to experience.
We found a great campsite nearby the Plitvice Lakes National Park, Dandy’s eyes were out on stalks at all the fancy camper vans. We found a nice spot, cracked open a couple of beers and people watched, one of our favourite pastimes. We ate in the local restaurant that evening and had a great meal washed down by a litre of local ‘yellow’ wine.
Day Twenty Four – Friday 30th July, 2010
Dandy was dispatched to get milk and bread for breakfast from the campsite shop. Sometime later he returned empty handed and looking rather sheepish. He admitted to having got involved in conversations with other camper van owners en route and the shop was closed by the time he got there. I held my tongue as I know what he’s like.
We set off towards Ljubljana in Slovenia with very little fuel and Thomas was being absolutely no help in trying to find us some, he seems to be an expert in locating fuel stations that went out of business many years before! We rolled into a small town on the border of Croatia and Slovenia and we were shocked to see so many shell attacked houses next to undamaged ones and could only surmise that when the war was taking place it had turned neighbour against neighbour during the ethnic cleansing. We found out from a local cafe owner that the area used to border Serbia and was the scene of terrible fighting. We stopped to view an outdoor homelands war museum in the same town, which was quite shocking as well.
Two Mig jets at the museum and one of the shell blasted houses
In Slovenia the roads were narrow and the driving just plain silly, they seemed to have no idea what the white line down the centre of the road means, Dandy predicted we’d see a crash that day, I hoped that we wouldn’t be involved in it. He was right and we saw two, neither involved us! Being a right hand drive vehicle the driver had to rely on the passenger to check for oncoming traffic at junctions, we had a bit of an altercation that day as Dandy couldn’t distinguish my ‘go’ from my ‘no’. We compromised with ‘go’ being replaced with ‘yes’ which I found quite difficult to remember.
We started to look for a campsite late afternoon and found quite a basic one beside a river. I got out to inspect the toilets as I feel that it is quite important to have clean loos, they didn’t meet my high standards. When I came out I was aware of a heated argument going on. Being a nosey type I took a stroll in the general direction of the voices to witness an angry Frenchman and a hippyish looking woman with a baby in a pushchair shouting at each other. I went to tell Dandy about it and he being the nosey type too wandered over and struck up a conversation with partner of hippyish woman about places to go in Slovenia. The argument had ceased by now and the man was very helpful and recommended that rather than head for the touristy area around Lake Bled we should head west towards the Slovenian Alps. The chap was dressed very strangely in brown corduroy breeches, a harlequin type top and funny pointy shoes, a small sign on the back of their van read ‘small elf on board’ so we surmised from this that they were a family of elves on holiday, they looked liked extras from a Lord of the Rings film.
His advice was good and the scenery was amazing. It was getting late and we’d hoped to stumble across a campsite or small hotel but we saw nothing and it was now 8pm. Thomas had informed us that there were no campsites in Slovenia at all. Finally when we were ready to give up and camp out at the side of the road we came across a guest house high up in the mountains and looking down the valley. I negotiated with the owner in my best Slovene and we got a nice room and evening meal for a reasonable price. Mine host served up a hearty meal of goulash type broth followed by chocolate pancakes washed down with some local ale.
Outside the guesthouse in Slovenia
We had been told that a woman would probably be arriving late and leaving early in the room next to us and to expect some minor disturbance. We retired to bed but the pulse laden broth had played havoc with Dandy’s alimentary canal and he relieved his wind problems loudly outside the bedroom doors in the early hours so as not to disturb me. He had thought that the woman had left and he was safe to do this but it transpired that she was still in her room with her door slightly ajar and had probably witnessed the full trumpet voluntary.
No comments:
Post a Comment