Balkans loop on a single backpack

22 August 2024 · Ljubljana → Sarajevo → Skopje · ~7 min read

I had two weeks, a 38-litre backpack, and a half-formed idea of going from Slovenia south, by bus, until I ran out of patience or money. In the end I ran out of neither. I ran out of clean socks, which is a different problem.

The starting point was Ljubljana because the train from Munich is cheap and because I have a fondness for cities that you can cross on foot in twenty minutes. I stayed one night near the river, ate an enormous and very salty piece of fish at a place where the owner argued cheerfully with three different people about football, and was on a bus to Zagreb the next morning at seven.

From the hostel terrace in Mostar. The light was kinder than the rooms.

The middle

Most of the trip happened in the middle five days, between Sarajevo and Skopje, with a long detour to Mostar that I should have planned better. Buses in this part of the world are not slow — they are deliberate. You sit, you doze, you watch the country change colour through a window with a piece of duct tape on it, and eventually the driver puts on the radio and you arrive in a city that smells different than the last one.

Sarajevo I spent three days in, mostly walking. I went up the hill to the abandoned bobsleigh track from 1984 with a small group from the hostel; we got rained on briefly and then dried off in a café where the owner refused to let us pay for our coffee until we had also eaten cake. There is, I have learnt, a particular kind of Balkan hospitality that involves slightly bullying the guest into accepting more food. It is, against expectation, very pleasant.

Mostar was the detour. I had a half-day there, which is not enough for Mostar, and the bridge was full of people in swimming trunks waiting for someone brave to jump from it. I bought a cold drink, sat in the shade for an hour, and got back on a bus to Sarajevo wondering when I would come back.

Somewhere south of Sarajevo. The bus stopped for thirty minutes for reasons nobody explained.

Skopje, and home

Skopje at the end of August is hot in a way that surprises you even when you are expecting it. I walked through the centre at noon — which was a mistake — and then spent the rest of the afternoon on a stone bench by the river, reading a paperback I had bought in Belgrade and watching small children chase pigeons with the seriousness of professionals.

On my last evening I ate something with peppers that I cannot translate and that I keep meaning to learn how to cook. The owner asked where I was going next; I said home, eventually, by way of Thessaloniki. He nodded and brought me an extra slice of bread.

The cheapest plums I have ever eaten, by the way, were on the side of the road outside Pristina, sold from the back of a small white car. They were probably not the cheapest plums in the world; they tasted as if they were.