Navigating the Ciro Trail

My four friends and I rolled our bikes to a bar one sunny afternoon near the town of Zitomislici on the banks of the emerald green Neretva River in rural Bosnia. We stopped at Neretvansky Gusar, as the bar is called, to restock our water supply. “I only have ice-cold beer,” apologised the long-haired proprietor, Nikola Bevanda, who prefers the nickname Svabo, slang for “the German”.

We looked at one another, and simultaneously dropped our bikes. A few minutes later, we sat with cans of cold beer in front of us on the outdoor picnic table. My four friends and I were pedalling the Ciro Trail, a two-year-old bike path that follows an old railway line from Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina to Dubrovnik in Croatia. When I’d heard the 160km trail is flanked by fields still littered with land mines, past villages abandoned since the Balkan conflict of the early 1990s, and by old railway stations converted to hotels and restaurants, I knew I had to do it.

Bikers pack up after camping overnight along the Ciro Trail. (CREDIT: Laura Boushnak/The New York Times)

We were cruising through the town of Surmanci when we hit the brakes for an outdoor market. We were about 6.5km from Medjugorje, where in 1981 six children claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary; the town has since been a major pilgrimage stop. After sleeping in the comfortable but no-frills Motel Jelcic in the unremarkable town of Capljina, we began day two by pedalling past sleepy villages and across rusty iron-lattice train bridges.

The path would often gently curve along a mountainside, revealing its former self as a train line. The first train chugged out of Dubrovnik toward Mostar on July 15, 1901, with dignitaries seated in carriages as the train was met by cheering crowds. In 1976, the rail line was closed by the then-ruling Yugoslavian government. About 8km into the day’s ride, we came to a fork.

The signposts indicated we could take the easier paved route or power through the uphill gravel trail that directly follows the old rail line. We opted for the latter and were rewarded with views of Hutovo Blato, a nature reserve that is mostly made up of marshland and tall, dark green, pyramid-shape mountains, part of the Dinaric Alps. That night, our last in Bosnia before crossing the border, we feasted on grilled meat and sipped local wine at the hotel restaurant.

The next day we followed the long, gentle curve that stretched along the side of Popova Polje, one of the largest valleys in Bosnia. Here the road signs began to change from the Latin alphabet to the Cyrillic. We were now entering Republika Srpska, a quasi-autonomous strip of Bosnian-Serb land that was the result of a compromise that ended the Bosnian War at the Dayton Accords in 1995.

Bikers pack up after camping overnight along the Ciro Trail. (CREDIT: Laura Boushnak/The New York Times)

Just after passing through the village of Hum, a haunting hodgepodge of grazing cows and abandoned 19th-century buildings, many in a state of disrepair (and where apparently about 10 people still reside), we began seeing ominous signs on the side of the trail brandished with a skull and crossbones and the word “MINE” in Cyrillic.

Then we came upon a group of guys, some wearing bulletproof jackets, standing around smoking and chatting. They were part of a Bosnian team from Norwegian People’s Aid, an NGO that locates and defuses land mines. The group’s leader, Nerven Stonic, said: “We’re trying to rid this area of land mines with the hope to open it up to tourism – making it better for people like you to ride through.”

The guys picked up their metal detectors and went back to work, and we picked up our bikes and pedalled the last five or so miles before reaching the Bosnian-Croatian border. In the now-abandoned town of Uskopje, we went by the railway station, now populated by cows. They watched us bike by, seemingly unfazed, and then, in the town of Ivanica, we reached the border.

After a quick stamp of our passports, we coasted down a steep, paved path that delivered us right into Gruz Harbor in Dubrovnik. We sailed past the former railway station and right into the bar at a new craft brewery, the Dubrovnik Beer Company, where we had one last celebratory ice-cold beer.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.