Biketouring in Bosnia and herzegovina

  Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Tuesday, August 18, 2009

During the past 10 days we traveled through Bosnia and Herzegovina. We crossed the borders between different parts of the country (Serbian Republic and Federation of Bosnia). Especially around this borders there where zones which show signs of the time of war: bullet holes, mines, abandoned houses. In the Serbian Republic I experienced quite some nationalistic attitudes. People signing Serbian songs, Serbian flags, people who tell me that Kosovo is still part of Serbia. Its hard to communicate with locals in the villages we pass, some talk a bit of German, but no English. But it's great to see people being surprised about a group of international cyclists that pass their mountain village. They are really curious and seem to wonder if we are completely out of our mind...

In bigger towns like Sarajevo,Zenica and Banja Luka we distributed flyers to mobilize people to attend film screenings, organized together with local environmental groups, of the movie called Home  (see it yourself). This movie shows how people proceed to abuse the natural resources in ways that destroy the ecosystems we are living in and which is crucial for survival of human beings and other life forms on this planet. By our focus on producing and consuming more and more without thinking of future shortages of petrol, woods, clean water and air etc. we create unpredictable and fast changes in this ecosystem and become responsible for huge disasters that can destroy our shared habitat. In Banja Luka there where around 60 people that attended the movie.

The last days I feel that the biketour group is functioning much better. We seem to make decisions faster, to some extent we seem to do what we planned and during the resting day in Knezovo we even did lots of workshops. I attended the following workshops: learning to weave baskets of willow by Andrea from Italy (we made a huge basket for the food trailer),a presentation/discussion about Chernobyl by Sergei and Andrei from Ucraine, who work in the zone and a presentation about ecological living and permaculture, composting and solar ovens with pictures of personal experiments of Barkan from Israel. Besides this I even had some time to clean my bike and wander around in the area. Kenzovo is a beautiful village near to waterfalls where we discovered
some playful Otters, a huge butterfly and loads of falling stars in the night!

If you want to see and hear more about biketour check these weblogs!: http://tabordaontwowheels.blogspot.com/
www.ecotopiabiketour.net