ADVENTURE ON A BUDGET | TRAVEL BLOG
In Summary On our 2019 first visit to B&H, we barreled through the popular tourist destinations of Mostar, Trebinje and Sarajevo in 10 days. This year, we returned to Sarajevo for five weeks, and chose it as our annual Medical Month destination, having put it on our list of “Known Knowns.” Turns out, that wasn’t the best decision for us……
We certainly didn’t get to explore as many small towns or natural attractions as we had originally anticipated during our six-week stay in Bosnia & Herzegovina. Thus, for our last and coincidentally my birthday week, it became the top priority to seek out its wonder as we headed to the charming town of Jajce from Banja Luka. This was after…
From Sarajevo to Banja Luka It was time to head north from Bosnia & Herzegovina’s first biggest city, Sarajevo, to its second biggest city of Banka Luka, which feels like a whole other country thanks to to its position as the capital of the "Republic of Srpska." Now, one might think going from Big City 1 to Big City 2 should…
Despite being next door neighbors, the train experience in Bosnia & Herzegovina versus the train experience in Serbia could not be more dissimilar. In Serbia, everything is now easy, modern and requires little effort. Here, it’s a bit more convoluted, vintage and backpacker-y, despite the tremendous potential for train travel in this mountainous and beautiful terrain. Why? The war was a…
The 1984 Olympics Bob Sled Track On July 4th, we arrived to another “Known Known” of Sarajevo with the plan of camping out five weeks. We first visited in 2019 for about five days, and really appreciated the East meets West vibe tucked into a spectacular setting encompassed by rolling mountains…an ideal escape from a baking Europe thanks to its…
Arriving to Zvornik from Valjevo From Valjevo, our next destination was Sarajevo, where we’d be spending the next five weeks. Unfortunately, there was no train option. The railway heads southwest into Montenegro, not Bosnia & Herzegovina, so for the first time in Serbia we had to rely on buses. We figured getting to the border—and then Sarajevo—would be simple. Wrong.…
In Summary... On our 2019 first visit to Serbia, we only got a small taste of the country in the cities of Belgrade, Niš and Novi Sad. To be frank, we weren’t enamored, which is not surprising given our affinity for smaller towns, villages and more off-the-beaten path locations. However, we did fall for Subotica, which we discovered on a…
Getting to and Exploring Valjevo En route from our one month in Subotica to our next five weeks in Sarajevo, we wanted to check out some other parts of the Balkans, so we settled on Valjevo in Western, Central Serbia. It was convenient to access by train and offered hiking in a beautiful gorge, which we were desperately hungering for…