The Green Interior – Day 1

Day 1 of 7

Baščaršija to Lukomir

Nine in the morning, already hot, so It is a perfect time to hide inside the woods.

We left from a full Baščaršija, the old bazaar still half-asleep, pigeons and the smell of fresh “somun” bread, engines warming under minarets. Nine in the morning and already hot. Ninety percent of the group is on single-cylinder bikes, and singles in slow city traffic are a bad combination. They heat up fast, they protest, and they let you know that city is not their perfect surrounding. So we took the trail out of the city from the start, cutting toward the Misoča canyon to find cool air before anyone’s engine decided to have an opinion.

Twenty minutes of urban riding, the part nobody enjoys, and then the trail begins. You feel the canyon before you see it. The temperature drops, the road narrows, the city noise disappears behind the first bend. This is why we do this.

“Ten kilometres in, Francisco is on the ground. He’s the only one on a maxi-enduro – a Suzuki V-Strom 800, and the trail has made its opinion of that known.”

He’s fine. Bike’s fine. His pride is fine, mostly. We establish the rule on the spot: every rider who goes down buys the next round of beer at dinner. Francisco nods. He already knows. The group files it away for later.

Note for riders!!!
On certain sections of the Misoča trail you’ll see signs marked “Mine”. Those are leftovers from the war in the nineties. They are not decoration. The marked trail is safe. The fields beside it are not your business.

Stay on the path, enjoy the canyon.

Two and a half hours of riding later of good riding, the kind where you stop thinking about anything else after we entered Semizovac and the restaurant “Kod Kule”. It’s 13:00. The French contingent in the group is satisfied. The rest of us would ride until dark and eat cold, but lunch at one is a small price for good company. The food is honest: grilled meat, fresh bread, the kind of meal that costs almost nothing and tastes like it cost everything.

After lunch, we pick up the road toward the start of the Lukomir trail. Lukomir is the highest permanently inhabited village in Bosnia and Herzegovina — 1469 metres, no tarmac, the same stone houses they’ve been building there for centuries. The trail up is the best of the day. We ride it in late afternoon light, the sun already low and orange, the mountain grasses catching it sideways. Nobody is in a hurry.

Day one photobook

We arrive in the village. Half the group drops onto benches with a beer and a glass of rakija and stays there. The other half, the restless ones, follow me up into the hills above Lukomir for a short loop between Bjelašnica and Visočica. Walter turns back after a while, so I ride down with him. The others come in twenty minutes later. They’ve seen enough. Dinner is ready anyway.

Dinner is what this whole day was building toward, even if we didn’t know it. Homemade pita — zeljanica with cheese and spinach, sirnica, burek. Salads. Things brought from somewhere nearby, made by someone’s hands. The group — eleven riders from five countries, strangers at breakfast that morning — are now loud and happy around the table, comparing falls and debating tomorrow. Francisco is buying the first round. He pays cheerfully.

“Later, more than one person will tell me that dinner in Lukomir was the most real moment of the whole trip. While we talk, the gloves are drying on the “bubanj” stove where the pita was baked.”

I split them three and four to a room. Basic rooms, heavy blankets. I wonder for a moment if it’ll be too cramped. Fifteen minutes later I walk past the corridor. Everyone is already asleep.

Day 2 takes us west. The canyon roads get narrower. Someone is already asking about tomorrow’s trail difficulty — which means they haven’t learned anything yet, or they’ve learned exactly the right thing.