What We Found in the Fog of Bosnia
Not just an ice cream called Slag
#32. Bosnia
‘Don’t start a war.’
My colleague’s parting words rang through my head.
Sometimes I just can’t help myself. The call to adventure’s not a whisper for me; it’s an ever-present hurricane, a tinnitus swelling in my chest and pushing me further and further into the darkest corners of the world, desperate for something, anything, in the void beyond to quieten the void within.
I was trekking via Jeep Renegade with my wife from Split, Croatia, a modern tourist destination with big, clean roads fenced in by big, clean road signs, glimmering green under the Dalmatian sun. We pushed past the city limits and snaked up an eerie mountainside towards the Bosnian border. Soon, ours was the only car on the road. It stayed that way for miles, empty horizon stretching both behind and ahead as we rolled up to the sleepy border crossing, where moustachioed men eyed us suspiciously as they flipped through our passports and sanctified our crossing the threshold into the dark woods beyond.
Don’t start a war.
It was deserted on the other side. Our tiny road threaded across the mountainside into the distance. After a few minutes, we had to slow – there were wild horses on the road.
Other than that, no one. No cars at all; not much of anything. Driving for four hours across the entire country, we didn’t see a single McDonald’s, nor a Nando’s – not even a Little Chef. Passing a sporadic petrol station, the odds were even it would be shut down. (Yet, even so, meandering around the steep, winding roads of the Bosnian foothills, at one point we were subject to one global constant – a BMW driving up our arse.)
The drive was stunning.
One long, flat road stretching through golden fields covered our windshield in so many bugs, we couldn’t see through it. It carved through rugged rocks of mountain, clumps of dark green trees sprouting from the sides like broccoli; the occasional building, half-finished, concrete guts spilling into the landscape, a tree bursting through its crumbling roof.
We rolled through a little outpost, all log cabins and flimsy facades like an old west frontier town. Under a faded motel sign, several men lounged on crates drinking from cans. Two ominous figures clad in black shambled alongside the road brandishing what appeared to be a minesweeper (in fact, two elderly Orthodox women with a cane).
The road thundered on through towering trees – so many trees - and then massive slate cliffs, smooth like a giant pebble, the river running alongside us flat and wide like molten silver. Among the steep winding hills, an occasional smudge of rubber smeared over the bend of a cliff edge (hopefully, a BMW). Once, a tractor carrying bales of grass in front of us, the grey head of a dog poking through the green – not a dog, we saw as we passed, but an elderly woman laid supine.
Finally, we arrived at Banja Luka – a charming city of pastel buildings and pale faces - and settled into our Airbnb, a modern apartment with a breakfast bar and wide windows opening on to the verdant hills peppered with red roofs beyond.
Dusk threw its purple cloak over the city, and we fell onto its streets in a trance, making our way to dinner and using the brutalist and futurist monuments as breadcrumbs to find our way home. Banja Luka was an anachronism, a vision from the 1970s of what the future would look like.
Nowhere was open. The one restaurant we’d found glittered at the top of a high-rise, all windows below it deathly black. We pushed through the ground floor door into the darkness, a ghost town of shuttered offices and shops. Another pair of diners walked ahead, ball gown and tux. My wife - jeans and trainers - started to bicker about whose fault it was that she was underdressed (hers). The anomie didn’t last long: ‘Look, look!’ she screamed, pointing at an ice-cream display. There was a brand called Slag.
We ascended past every defunct floor in a creaky old elevator, emerging into the twilight of a restaurant creaking with old furniture and bric-a-brac. Our waiter, six foot seven with a thick brow and gold-buttoned red suit, lurched towards us brandishing menus and boasting their sous-vide technology. From our antique wooden table, looking between the purple satin curtains, we could see a graveyard of desolate concrete. Massive, fluorescent spotlights under a flurry of pinpricks of bugs lit up a city stadium, mounds of earth half-moved by a truck. Golden lights twinkled in the hills beyond the shadows.
The chicken parmigiana with homemade gnocchi was delicious.
We walked home, round the back of a stadium, through deserted streets where scattered halogen lamps discarded light over vintage graffiti, walled in on all sides by concrete.
Jasmine gripped my hand tight. ‘What’s that?!’ she gasped, shrinking back from movement in the shadows. It was a frog.
‘Don’t be silly, Jasmine.’
In the corner of my eye, a white van crept slowly behind us. I quickened my step.
I felt danger in the shadows in Banja Luka. The city felt suspended in time and place, like it had been stuck in a snow globe by an old gypsy’s curse – a land of mountains and meandering rivers, of mischief and monsters hiding under the surface. Was it just my imagination? The people were lovely - but there was the sense of something, some thing, squatting just out of sight, in the in-between, the twilight between light and dark.
With dawn came resolution. We drove home via winding, unmarked roads big enough for one car to Krupa Na Vrbasu, a fairy-tale village next to a babbling brook spilling over lichen-covered rocks into thundering waterfalls, all sapphire and turquoise and silver and brown, under the trees’ deep and light greens. We squeezed through a crevice in the rock, and past local maidens selling homemade cake and heating coffee on a gas burner, old log and stone cabins milling flour, and twinkling pools dancing with fish. Here, in the enchanting morning sun, looking over the hills and valleys below, mysteries twinkling under the glimmering water, we were totally at peace.
In the end, we didn’t start a war. Not even a little one. Maybe the war had been inside us all along? All we found was a frog, some wild horses, and an ice cream called Slag.
In the morning light, it was almost possible to believe we'd imagined it all.