A Trip Up Route Gull

During my first tour in Bosnia I wasn't working in a normal infantry platoon. The job I was doing got me out and about all over the country and I routinely journeyed from one end of the Battalion area to the other.

This suited me fine and the more of the country I saw the more I loved it. One day I hope to go back with my wife and travel along some of the routes.

My favourite stretch of road was Route Gull. Wending its way north, following the line of the Vrbas river. A trip along it was never dull.

Beginning in the fertile, farmed areas you'd overtake hand drawn carts piled impossibly high with hay. The wife stoically plodding along while the husband sauntered along, scythe over his shoulder and the inevitable cigarette smouldering away.

Not surprisingly, the plains had seen much fighting and as you drove through some villages with not a single house left with its roof, you could see the progess of the battles.

As Route Gull connected up with the river the terrain changed. Foothills sprung up either side of the road. The route, orginally a cattle path, had somehow been clawed out of the space between the steep rocky walls of the valley and the river.

Hairpins every hundred metres or so combined with the eccentricities of the average Bosnian driver made this stretch of the route intresting to say the least. You would have thought that the presence of the rusting hulk of a car every mile or so in the river bed would have served as some sort of warning. Whether the war had made life cheap or whether the average Bosnian driver actually believed that they were invincible is a debatable point. Whatever the case maybe overtaking on hairpin bends was the norm rather than the exception.

As the route moved further north it climbed up one side of the hillside giving views back down onto the river. Perched on top of a small rocky outcrop on the other side of the valley, a small decaying stone hillfort dating back to the Ottoman Empire, offered a reminder that the situation here dated back hundreds of years.

Eventually Route Gull pops out of the Vrbas valley into the plains near Banja Luka. I can't remember exactly where the route names changed but eventually you'd join up with a 'motorway'. This offered its own unique driving challenges. A single lunatic driver overtaking on a hairpin was one thing. A steady stream of lunatic drivers convinced beyond doubt that they were the only individual with right of way was a completely different kettle of fish.

For anyone interested I found a great collection of photos of Bosnia here.