Road Trip

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A gag runs here that those who work within the Factory are a rare species known as “Factory Moles”, because in summer they emerge from the Stygian gloom of the building itself into the incandescent sunlight (which reflects from all the (handily) white surfaces outside) blinking, unable to see for several minutes and a hazard to themselves and traffic. A similar effect happens to those of us from outside when going in as we can see nothing in the dark and walk around with arms outstretched like zombies feeling our way about until the eyes become accustomed. The only way to tell for the first few minutes if a Welsh Guardsman is creeping up to salute is to listen for approaching footsteps to become even more regular, the sharp intake of breath of bracing up and the sound of eyeballs rattling in a smartly turned head that accompany a Pirbright-perfect compliment being paid. I’ve suggested the issue of Night Vision Goggles to all but this has been turned down as for many life would become too much like the last reel of “The Silence of the Lambs”. I had in my own way become a mole as a fiendish number of discipline cases had arisen and as I lopped off each incident like a Hydra head two more grew in its place. I can only assume that all the naughty soldiers had come out of hibernation and were gambolling free in the surroundings of the Factory finding mischief to get up to. I had had the prospect of a buckshee trip home courtesy of HMG and the taxpayer to attend an appeal court hearing, but thanks to a problem getting witnesses together this was cancelled. Accordingly when my friends with the Backwoods Bosnia Visiting Cards offered me the chance of a run ashore I leapt at the chance even though it meant eschewing my Sunday lie-in.

This country can be particularly elemental in many ways and the weather has been positively out of the Old Testament in recent weeks: stepping outside at noon leads to a sweat drenched shirt within seconds while at four p.m. the sky invariably fills with racing black clouds in the lead up to one of the tremendous thunderstorms I have described before. On one particular day the wind hit force 10 (before the anemometer was blown off the roof of Springfield Ops) and the window to my office was cracked by flying debris. To have darkness fall within minutes in the middle of the afternoon is an experience that one never gets used to however often it happens, and prone to induce jet lag. Luckily the sun generally struggles through bravely in time to allow us to stand outside the mess with the pre-prandials, admire the blue skies and scenery and enjoy the fresh air. The unfortunate bit is that all this rain rehydrates the swamp that the Factory is built on and mosquitoes of such size that they need their own landing pads and air traffic control come out to pester those who have not showered in citronella or Deet. The return of the sun combined with earlier rain also means that the corrimecs are so excessively sauna-like at night that the Scandinavian contingent on camp are now feeling very much at home, albeit gasping for air. Happily the morning of the road trip dawned bright and clear with just enough breeze to be comfortable. Our itinerary for the day included Prijedor, Bihac and Knin on the basis that the group leader had forgotten his camera on his last trip and that some of us had not seen these places before.


The beginning of the trip up Route Pegasus is by now familiar as it is the way to the Simici ridge and on a recent trip out we scoured with no success up and down the road looking for the side turning that leads to the VRS museum. It was not long before a name well known for all the wrong reasons appeared on the road signs: we were entering Prijedor. The town itself did not make a huge impression being much like most others I have passed through. There was a small railway station which was like something out of “Murder on the Orient Express” and attendant goods yard full of wagons that had rusted up so solidly they are unlikely to move ever again, these adding to the mile or so of sidings full of trucks in a similar state outside the town. Beside the road on the outskirts of town stand factories, some modern and one a splendidly Victorian dark satanic mill built in red brick with a chimney that Fred Dibnah would take a professional interest in. One of these was the infamous concentration camp during the war. We continued up the road following the railway line which cuts into very short tunnels with portals like those on a train set. Elsewhere on the railways are magnificent viaducts built with high stone arches, all this engineering necessary in a landscape which doesn’t so much undulate as expectorate cliffs from the valley floor. The occasional service passing by looked like something out of the film of 1984 with slightly battered and mismatched rolling stock, and one train consisting of a locomotive and a single carriage full of soldiers which would have been thoroughly at home in the Second World War if the engine had been steam not diesel. Looking at the rusty rails with plants growing between them and the unguarded level crossings it was evident that trains were few and far between, or that Railtrack has been given the maintenance contract. The river Una also meanders back and forth to join up with the road and is the same inviting colour as the Vrbas with similar rapids which run so smoothly that they look like white glass. Further along the route the hills rise up sharply and are covered in firs; a castle like a Bosnian Bonsai version of Ludwig the Mad’s confections perched at the end of one spur and occasional minarets pushing towards the sky like rockets with gold or bronze nose cones. The soundtrack to the journey was Sanja Ilic and Balkanika’s “BaLKan 2000”, an LP which was highly appropriate and atmospheric for a trip through this formerly Muslim area. The music sounds like a James Bond or Indiana Jones incidental theme played by Zorba the Greek with additional bagpipes and wailing and would be great played over an establishing shot of a city in the mysterious East. Think a Balkan Enigma CD and you won’t go far wrong.

Finally, under a conical mountain which was Silbury Hill writ large, we came to Bihac. Before the war a predominantly Muslim city, we saw some quality bullet damage in the already ancient and crumbling plasterwork of the outskirts and passed several venerable Muslim cemeteries with their turban-topped white marble gravestones decorated with intricate filigrees and abstract patterns. We had an obligatory stop for photographs in the centre near a cathedral bell-tower which appeared to have been used for some fairly extensive target practice by various calibres of weapon during the fighting and I was delighted to find a gravestone with a relief of what looked like a couple taking their cow for a walk on a bit of string accompanied by a pack of dogs. Nothing changes in the countryside here, although there was no mysterious mobile haystack depicted. More modern art was a socialist realist relief showing in one panel clashes between Turks and Knights and in the other Partisans and Germans, the latter getting a predictably hard time. The outing also paused for a coffee in Bihac’s answer to Morale Street where some members of the team took surreptitious photos of the local lovelies at an adjoining table and I learnt a totally obscure Serbo-Croat word: talog meaning the grounds left in the bottom of a coffee cup. We then reembarked into the cars and set off for Knin. The scenery was initially familiar and we passed a wood planted out to spell TITO in several hundred metre long letters made of pine trees. Ahead of us lay the Dinaric Alps which stretched out like a watercolour with each line of peaks receding to the horizon getting paler and paler until it was hard to tell if the last was a mountain range or low, faint cloud. On the way up to these hills stood signs in Latin and Cyrillic characters detailing the reconstruction that was going on including an EU cow restocking programme. Hope they will supply the bits of string for leads as well. Once in the mountains it was easy to see how the Krajina Serbs held out for so long as this is real partisan country. The closet analogy would be an inland Amalfi coast road with the carriageway clinging halfway up the cliff and going round the most amazing hairpins to gain or lose altitude, the sole protection for vehicles from the drop flimsy crash barriers with rust breaking through their faded yellow paint. The grey peaks, some over 2,000 feet high, stood out from the trees and vegetation like a row of mossy, broken teeth or the spine of a lizard. At the top where there was flat pasture it was remote and empty, land fit only for goats or for growing stones, a crop as plentiful as the sweetcorn down below. The interesting thing is that wherever I have been here in however remote an area one still sees stooped, black-clad grandmothers or young girls in their finest attire walking along the road going God knows where. The border crossing into Croatia was a real outpost and not nearly as Checkpoint Charlie-esque as that at Bosanska Gradiska on the way to Zagreb. A bored-looking border guard waved us through, watched in a desultory way by his colleagues who were having a siesta in the shade of their hut.

Knin itself is not far into Croatia and was a Krajina Serb stronghold until they pushed off one night and left the town for the Croats to take in a single day during Operation Storm. The town lies in the foothills of the Dinaric Alps and has long been strategically important for lying on the route between Zagreb and the coast and thus has a spectacular castle. The castle stands on a huge plug of rock jutting up in a bend in the river and even in its currently part restored condition presents a formidable aspect. Naturally this was a golden opportunity for some quality posing for happy-snaps by HM Forces. Not only were the views off to the Alps fantastic, but one can look almost vertically several hundred feet down onto the roofs of the town and a splendidly Italianate church with two domed towers in maroon tilework atop light stone walls. After clambering over the castle, which because of its steepness was a bit like doing the CFT at Chilwell, it was back into the vehicles for the trip home by the scenic route. We crossed into Bosnia by the same checkpoint as before where the guard was by now morally asleep under a sombrero and took route Rat. This was another contrast as it runs through woods on the side of a hill (I’d always wondered what hid in the woods that I’d seen on other trips) and is little more than a dirt track. At one point the vehicle hit loose shale and skidded: if it wasn’t for the skill of the driver and the fact we drifted away from the edge we could have discovered quite a quick way to the valley. The route is primarily used by loggers (these, one hopes, legal as they are quite overt) and is lined with what look like tall, spindly, lilac foxgloves; rocky outcrops which are grey but veined with a rainbow of reds, oranges and purples; and vegetation which appears to have been covered with icing sugar such is the effect of the light dust that is thrown up by the passing vehicles.

After some confusion as to the exact route which led to a couple of extra miles being added to the journey (relax, I wasn’t map-reading and I was assured that we were not lost, just that sometimes the path wanders) we descended the flat once more. Here again was a huge contrast as the land was as flat as a prairie and stretched in a similar manner for miles. The land here did not grow stones, however, but discarded kitchen appliances, a sort of cooker graveyard. The two-lane road we were on suddenly opened out to six lanes of die-straight tarmac for just over a kilometre and when we spotted the bunkers in the small patches of trees we realised that this was part of a communist-era covert airfield. Eventually we came across towns again, and saw a useful adaptation for cleansed houses: if not too full of unexploded ordnance they make handy storage places for mobile haystacks. One of the party also reminisced in one village about how on a previous Sunday jaunt he had come across the end of some kind of celebration or festival and how every man, woman and child had been absolutely weaving or paralytic on a heady mixture of pivo and slivo. Unfortunately there was no festival on this day, and even if there had been we would not have been allowed to join in.

Finally after something approaching 500km in twelve hours we returned to Banja Luka via Mirkonjic Grad and MSR Gull. At one point we had an all too predictable thunderstorm which only served to make the local population drive more quickly and overtake more daringly in order to get home sooner. Despite the Whacky Races outside I don’t think I will ever tire of travelling MSR Gull, especially when doing it at a different time of day and seeing the valley in different light conditions. To photograph it would never do it justice. Slightly numb in the posterior (these vehicles are more comfortable than Army Landrovers, but only marginally so after so many miles on the road) we returned to the home sweet home that is the Factory and I came back to earth with the thought of the week’s work ahead.

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