When I looked at the notice in town (my dictionary and I) I wasn’t quite sure how long the walk would be - but thought it was about 4 hours long. No beans stew though, the notice said ‘hrana – iz torbe’ . A BYO day.
(Did I mention that I splashed out and bought myself a new back pack – one of those super dooper things with pockets and clip things, padding and places everywhere to put stuff. Red and Grey. Mmm)!
So, the destination is Kamesnica (a ‘sh’ over the ‘s’) which is in Bosnia Herzegovina. The notice board said that we would be leaving at 6.30 and back at 5 in the evening. And despite my telling Danica and Samuel that it was a 4 hour walk, well, it wasn’t. Transport is by kombi which means all piling into cars and sharing the cost of benzin.
It’s about an hour and a half from Makarska, involves a passport check which I must tell you about – only because we don’t have a perspective on internal boundaries as New Zealanders. Unlike the passport office that you go through on the coast road to Dubrovnik, this one is on a little back road – just a couple of portable offices on the ground. First you hand your passports to the Croatian Police who flick through them and hand them back, then you drive two meters, hand your passports to the Bosnian Police who flick through your passports and hand them back. They don’t share the same office, but I wondered if they knew each others names, chatted when business was light…
Anyway, half an hour later with cars parked at the edge of a little village, we started walking, twenty eight of us snaking through the forest – a few grassed bits, then very quickly into a steep beeched forest – we saw a mole (dead) and heard a cuckoo or two. (Interesting aside, the word for cuckoo is kukavica, which is the same word applied to a man who is a coward, a pathetic man).
The ‘stick envy’ thing was apparent with Samuel who quickly found a stick for himself – then two for Danica, and then twisted my arm to try one – I’ve been converted. They do make life easier when you are going up (and we were ) and I discovered that they are good when you are going down too. Who knew. There was a lot of up – Danica made grumbling noises about why she had been convinced to do this…. But she quickly got into the rhythm of it.
We stopped at the mountain hut (Planinare Kuca) and had marenda (a snack) and then carried on (some stayed behind and waited there). The destination was 1856 m high – up through the forest, then onto a massive karst ridge and then up to the summit.
Looking down at one point there was a massive man-made lake which feeds the hydro electric plants – and then one of the guys told us that all of the villages that we could see from up there were empty after the war, with all of the local people bar a few hundred, killed. I wasn’t sure what to say because it would depend on where the sympathies of the story teller lay.
To get to the summit took just over three hours – with a quick mental maths calculation you will see that our 4 hour day is at least 6 ½ hours now. A bit of muttering was had by those who had been told it was a 4 hour tramp. With a lot of steep up. But the company is good and the walking quick – Roko is seventy five and the fittest finest man.
At the top we posed for photos, ate a bit more food ‘iz torbe’, then it started to get a bit cold and we headed down again – a lot faster going down but not necessarily easier!
Back at the mountain hut we finished off what was left in our back packs, but in addition, the open fire was smoking away when we arrived, and the most beautiful sausages were cooked on a wire frame, with succulent pork and slabs of fresh bread (kruh) – a feast! Samuel really enjoyed that. A bit of singing, a bit of sleeping in the sun…water from the fresh spring (delicious)… a lot of sunblock.
And then the black clouds which had threatened at the top decided that they wanted to be taken seriously and the thunder started (‘grom’) - we headed back down. It didn’t rain, but the atmosphere in the forest with the thunder was wonderful.
Nearly seven hours of walking, 1856 meters up and down, delicious food, music….we are stinky smelly sweaty, and ready to rest… but first you have to stretch and limber down (because everyone else is doing it!).
Hope you are impressed by these photos, by the height that we walked, especially the two guests who weren’t expecting such a long day – it was fantastic.
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