Day 2 – Thursday, August 7, 2025
Breakfast was served at 7 am and I was down – to see that other people had beaten me, not necessarily hotel guests, but early birds of Zvornik, enjoying their coffee, chatting – and, alas, smoking. As I have noted on my earlier trips, tobacco consumption is pretty high in the Balkans and in some places, it is even allowed inside restaurants, an “experience” that I do not miss at all back home.
I ordered an omelette with sausages, which was good but nothing special. What was really tasty was the “lepinje” that was served with it, the oven-baked bread typical for the Balkans. I washed this all down with a tea, then a coffee, and by 8 am I was ready to roll.
First breakfast
The youngsters from the previous evening were fast asleep, but the town was full of “grown-ups”, people lining up in front of banks and other offices, doing their grocery shopping. On the map I saw that a road headed south on both sides of the border. Someone told me the Bosnian side was easier to ride than the Serbian one, with less traffic, so I set off.
If making good distance was one of my goals, I failed at it that morning. A few kilometers outside the town the River Drina made a curve – and a beautiful restaurant/hotel was built there, with a lookout. As I enjoyed the views, a car with an Austrian license plate, from Gmunden on the Traunsee, pulled up next to me and a lady in her early thirties got out. I asked her in German, jokingly, “you are not really from Gmunden, are you?” She laughed, “Yes, I actually am, but was born here.” We started chatting and she recommended we go inside the restaurant for coffee. There was a large deck from where the view was even nicer and we sat down and chatted for over an hour, she enjoying a breakfast, me sipping a freshly squeezed orange juice.
Pleasant view #1
Pleasant view #2
Time flew, and it was around 11:30 when I started riding again – and it was a very scenic ride, along the banks of the River Drina.
So peaceful...
An Orthodox church on the Serbian side
After about 30 kilometres came a junction, one fork leading into the hills, the other rolling on next to the river – it was the latter one I picked. Despite low traffic, the surface of the road was not all too good and there was a continuous slight incline. The internet connection, which was so good the previous day, got flaky. After quite some riding, some 25 kilometers on an uneven surface, I reached the bridgehead of a crossing into Serbia. It was strange – coming from the north, I had to stop even if I did not want to cross the border, then the lady officer pointed me to the road continuing in Bosnia.
There I stopped for a while at a gas station to freshen up, then got to a small town called Bratunac. There I found a haircut – if I recall correctly, I paid €3 to the lady, who spoke a few words of German. Now it was just a couple of kilometers on even surface to the memorial of genocide at Srebrenica, where over 8,500 Muslims were systematically murdered – not only from the city beaning the name of the genocide, but many others in the closer vicinity and further out. The cemetery resembled that of American soldiers, the last I had seen being in Normandy the previous year ([here the link to the France trip][(https://bikerbalazs.com/blog/2024 france/introduction.html)).
Memories of the genocide
Some of the 8,500 names
There I met a fellow biker from Scotland, who was riding pretty much the opposite direction to me, him having started in Greece and was working his way north. He told me there would be quite a climb waiting for me.
He was right. I left the even surface and now came quite a climb, through the Zeleni Jadar Mountains. To make the climb more bearable, I devoured the delicious blackberries growing on the side of the road. After about 10 kilometres, I reached the town of Srebrenica itself, with a mosque and a Christian church next to each other – proof that religions can co-exist peacefully.
Today, religions do co-exist
Further up continued the road and I was riding on the Bosnian highlands – very pretty, hardly any traffic, the road actually having a pretty good surface. What goes up must come down – after quite a long climb, I then enjoyed a descent, which was also pretty long.
Bosnian highland
Skelani was the name of the last village in Bosnia. Researching for the blog you are reading right now, I learned that it had greatly suffered at the hands of the Serbian forces, many men and boys being slaughtered in front of their wifes and children. I found the border crossing, where, on the Bosnian side, the young officers were having a chit-chat amongst themselves – I had to ask them if they wanted to control me. Apparently, there were a few cars across the bridge which were allowed to go unattended. They jumped up, checked my passport and I rode to the Serbian side, into a town called Bajina Basta.
This was not my first time riding in Serbia – I had done that close to the southern Hungarian border, south of Szeged, with no lasting memories, flat, agricultural landscape. Here, the Serbian side was a lot more developed than on the Bosnian side, with proper control booths and multi-language signs greeting the arrivals.
A quick detour: something that was interesting for me. In multiple languages there was a sign posted at each Serbian border booth proclaiming they would indeed accept passports and ID cards issued by Kosovo and carried by citizens of the country called Kosovo. However, Serbia claims they do this just to make life easier for travelers, but this acceptance does not mean that Serbia in any way recognizes the state of Kosovo. Here is the text: "Enabling the use of Identity Cards issued by Pristina (Kosovo) is done exclusively for practical reasons, for the purpose of making the position of individuals easier and for enabling their freedom of movement in accordance with the Agreement on Freedom of Movement reached in dialogue in 2011; it cannot be interpreted as recognition of unilaterally declared independence of Kosovo." Interesting, eh?
I quickly made it through the crossing. The data plan I had purchased for €5 the previous day was no longer working and in the age of WhatsApp chats, Google Maps and internet browsing, I (quite unfortunately) cannot really imagine my life without a proper data plan. As such, I wanted to acquire a new one, preferably an eSIM card, but as it was past 7 pm (and I was no longer in never-sleeping Bosnia), my options were limited. There was a petrol station with a physical SIM card available for purchase, for €10.
Here the girlfriend? daughter? of the petrol station attendant spoke perfect English. She was wearing a very tight tank-top, showing off her firm belly (guys, my apologies – no photo available). She came to my help, taking out her earring to open the SIM holder of my phone and helped place the card inside. An online verification process was needed to activate the SIM card, where I had to take a photo of my ID. She tried and failed, then tried again and again, failing each time. We suspected it was the quality of the photo – it was getting dark, so we tried with various settings, with and without flash, taking the photo inside and outside the petrol staton – but nothing helped. I will admit, I did not mind spending time with her. After about half an hour, I asked her to hand the phone to me, then I promptly noticed the cause of the problem – from a drop-down list, defaulting to Serbia, one had to scroll to my country of origin. Once done, the card worked and I was almost ready to roll.
She helped me in one more matter – I saw on the online map there was a campground some 22 kilometers away. I asked her to call and make sure they were open. She did, and yes, they were expecting me, so around 7:45 pm I set off.
The road was much better on the Serbian side and overall, it looked more developed than in the mountain villages of Bosnia. What I did not expect was a very, very steep climb, starting already in the town of Bajina Basta itself. In town, I wanted to take a short-cut, which backfired, as I had to get off the bike and haul it – so steep was the road, the people watching me like I was a nut pushing and hauling his fully loaded bike uphill at dusk. Once on the main road, the road kept on climbing and climbing, with the kilometers passing slowly, very slowly. At dusk, I heard someone coming behind me – it was a local road biker. He took a video of me struggling uphill and asked me in English where I was heading. He passed me and after a while, he waved at me, now riding downhill past me – he had just made a quick circle. It quickly became apparent I had no chance of reaching the campground that evening, now the question became where to sleep.
At one section of the road, I saw a couple of red-roofed houses below the road on the right and a nice patch of relatively even lawn on the opposite side above it. There were people in the courtyard of the house, so I shouted to them, using a mutual word between Serbian and Hungarian, probably stemming from Turkish, “sátor”, meaning “tent”. I think they understood and said something to the extent of “nema problema” – at least that is what I hoped I understood (also referred to as “wishful thinking”). So I climbed a few metres, found a flat surface, which was even partially protected from the road by a bush, and set up my tent.
Moonrise at 9:45 pm, as viewed from my tent
To be a good citizen, I called the camping, telling them not to wait for me that evening – I had found my own private campground. I actually slept quite well, despite the road being close, as there was hardly any traffic at night. A nice second riding day.
I rode about 97 kilometers and had an elevation gain of 1,833 meters – the latter seems a bit too high, but it is possible, considering all the uphill struggles I experienced that day.