On the Piste with the Flying Dutchmen

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Amongst the motivations for extending my tour in Bosnia was that while my TA Soldiers had been most impressed that I had volunteered to come here in the first place, by the end of the last training evening before my departure several of the Balkans veterans were muttering things about my being a “summer tour lightweight”. Having mentioned earlier that Bosnia in summer has lots of weather of the scorching one moment, drenched by rainstorms the next it bears reporting that the winter can be pretty special too. In fact while neither the hottest or coldest place on earth this part of the Balkans can easily lay claim to being the most extreme in seasonal variation. Our first fall of snow was in mid-December and gave a dusting several inches thick. Temperatures, which had been fairly chilly, dropped to below freezing so I dug out the wooly pully (as the classic Army jersey with patches on shoulder and elbow is known) and turned up the portable radiator in my office, the air conditioner having been disabled as in use it would have exploded because of the cold outside. The Factory looked fairly festive for Christmas but by Boxing Day a thaw set in and the place was filled with muddy coloured slush. Just as we had got used to this we had a heatwave, then it froze again. In four days the temperature went from seven below freezing to nineteen above then to minus twenty, catching out the Royal Marine contingent who had been mincing around with their sleeves rolled up, initially looking tough yet now appearing blue and goose-pimpled. We then awoke to an inch of snow, followed by two feet in a day. One good thing about the snow is that it covered up a multitude of sins and the cold kept the local aroma away (although during the heatwave the nappy reek did reappear, this time overlaid with the smell of damp). Those whose corrimec doors opened inwards were buried in small avalanches when they tried to get out while outward opening doors kept the inhabitants trapped within (or at least that was their excuse for not coming in to work).

The Dutch Second-in-Command was delighted by all the snow as he is a mad keen snowboarder. Within minutes of the first fall he had recce’d the hill outside camp for winter sports potential but was dissuaded by the lack of lifts and of sufficient gradient to get up a decent lick of speed. A couple of days later he came into the office with a glint in his eye having heard about a slope at Mrkonjić Grad and a plan for a Sunday trip out. I was denied a place on this trip as the Second-in-Command had already filled his minibus with Dutchmen and thus was sorely tempted to meet his party on their way out and tell them that they couldn’t go as Field Security wouldn’t clear the location. In the event they were off far too early and the comparative warmth of my corrimec at that ungodly hour dissuaded me from spoiling the day out. In fact I did not need to be the dog in the manger as in the early afternoon I saw a downcast looking Second-in-Command who had had a three-hour round trip to find the Mrkonjić Grad piste was all of 100 yards long and they had not even bothered to get out of the bus, let alone don the snowboard kit. Finally, the following Monday the Second-in-Command came in to my office and told me to get my ski gear packed and be ready to leave at six am the following day. Somewhat incredulously I checked this with the Colonel who from within a pungent cloud of pipe smoke told me to go off and enjoy myself and that this was the only way he could see of making me take any exercise more vigorous than volleyball.

Our destination was to be Šišava, a couple of hours drive south-east on Route Clog, highly appropriate as I was travelling with the Dutch. In fact this location had at one point been a Dutch camp where they had had the sense to take over a hotel at a ski resort rather than an old factory built on a swamp at the bottom of a bowl of hills. The Dutch PTI swore that he knew the route to Šišava like the back of his hand as he had once been stationed there but judging by the time we spent lost en route he was either wearing gloves or demonstrating the map-reading skills necessary for obtaining a Commission in the British Army. Route Clog runs over some quite impressive hills and it was always a surprise to round a corner and find yet another village in the middle of nowhere. These were real blink-and-you’d-miss-it places although naturally the one thing that hadn’t missed the lonely groups of houses was a considerable amount of ordnance during the war. The biggest surprise of all was to find Kneevo at the top of the mountain, a relatively sprawling light-industrial town with attendant pollution, car washes and crumbling concrete all covered in a dirty mantle of snow. Despite it being Orthodox New Year’s Day (the previous night in Banja Luka had sounded like the siege of Stalingrad thanks to all the celebratory fire) the place was fairly bustling with locals out trying to punch through their slivo hangovers. The terrain from here on in was very wild with the road following frozen rivers through steep valleys and then passing huge drops. At one point I looked up to admire a boxy rock formation towering into the sky above us only to realise that we were driving over it a few minutes later. We also crossed several bailey bridges which had been erected to replace those blown in the war: the remnants of the old bridges lay toppled yellow handrails and all beneath the new. In another village in the middle of nowhere where we were pursued by a pack of dogs. It was here that we realised that we’d taken a wrong turn (partly given away by the fact that the road had quite literally run out as could be seen by the pile of snow covered asphalt waiting to be laid) and we had to run the gauntlet of the dogs again. We also stopped for a brief leg-stretch outside a hotel where an inquisitive bear lives in a cage and was most amused to see us pass. Apparently the hotel owner occasionally gives him a bottle of beer so perhaps the bear was pleased to see us as he hoped we’d provide: we didn’t but could empathise with being stuck behind wire with limited alcohol. Up here under a bright blue sky on a mountain plateau covered in snow as far as the eye could see all seemed very crisp and clean until it became evident on looking down that the traditional Bosnian beauty-spot rubbish-tips were hidden in the drifts, given away by the rather sinister looking raven-type birds picking at God-knows what in the filth.

Šišava itself was, however, something of a revelation. True the hotel was battered, the lifts showed alarming quantities of rust through their swimming-pool blue paint and we were greeted in the car park by a rubbish tip and a villainous local demanding a considerable wad of local currency to mind the car, but hey we were about to go skiing and being paid for it. After negotiating for rental of some very new kit including carving skis and a lift pass (all for the princely sum of £9, and that was inflated as we were SFOR) and persuading the hire man that I would not leave any of my ID cards as security I strapped on the planks and headed for the lift queue. Here our fellow sportsmen proved to be Dutch Soldiers (all in uniform) and the local well-to-do. For any winter sport veteran a note: Bosnians in a lift queue make Continental Europeans in the Alps look like the more self-effacing members of the Athenaeum Club having an “after you, old chap” competition. It seemed essential to smoke incessantly in the queue, bellow into mobile ‘phones and generally rampage forward in a fug of slivo fumes as if the lift was the last flight out before the fall of Saigon. A group of Dutch Soldiers, considerably narked by this behaviour, actually linked arms to prevent the queue-barging but only succeeded in holding back some of the locals while the children merely slipped under and around them and between their legs. Despite the dilapidation of the lift it was a drag type with a choice of T-Bars and buttons so I felt safe as I would not run the risk of plummeting to an early death as might have been the case if it had been a chair-lift. Unfortunately I still managed to fall off the T-bar that was offered to me after ten yards and spent the rest of the day engineering the use of the (cracked) buttons on the basis that a bit of pain to sensitive parts of the anatomy was better than failing to get up the hill at all. There was no problem with this as the locals were more than willing to push past for the next available means of ascent.

Sadly, four years on, this remains a work in progress…

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