Thursday, October 1 - Long Drive out of Sarajevo to Prague

So Thursday was a long travel day with 1060 kilometers or 660 miles between Sarajevo and Prague. Google Maps pegged it at just under 12 hours, but when you figure in stops I figure that would be closer to 13 hours. Not exactly fun but manageable. However the time quickly started to build as an old man from Azerbaijan parked his Mercedes about 12” off my driver side. How do I know it was an old man you may ask? I saw him trying to park the day before and he was having a lot of trouble doing it so I figured I would let it go and simply crawl across from the passenger side.

What I did not count on was the fact that I did not have enough room to back up and make the turn due to a chain. With his car is 12” off my left and a high curb 6” off my right and at 6:30 in the morning after about 30 minutes of moving forward and back in inches, putting scratches in the old man’s bumper and my rental car, and scratching the paint on the back hatch of my VW on the chain that I had to rub against, and I finally managed to back the car out of the space. Good thing I took out the full insurance on the car.

As for the old man’s car, to hell with him I did not leave a note, he is lucky a few bumper scratches are all he got from me given what he made me do. I was not happy about it, even with the rental insurance, but a little after 7:00 am I’m on my way.

At least that is what I thought until about 20 minutes later I got stuck in a huge traffic jam that took me over an hour to move 1/2 kilometer! There was an accident on the only road out of town and my GPS did not know enough to route me around it. Somebody crossed the center line and collided head on with another car, not surprising given how they drive in Bosnia, and they had a busy road shut down to one lane for both directions. You would have thought the police would have pushed the car out of the way once the people were removed, I saw the ambulance after about 15 minutes of being stopped so they had time. Nope, they just stood there waving cars around the wreck not a tow truck in site after what must have been over 1.5 hours after they got there. Jack asses!

I am always amazed by the police and their lack of help in accidents like this at home and abroad. I know it is not exactly a glamorous part of your job but it is a part of your job to help manage traffic. Suck it up and deal with it instead of letting traffic fall into total chaos. I actually saw people walk past me, only to walk past in the opposite direction 30 minutes later. I literally only moved about 3 city blocks in the first half your of being stuck.

The roads out of Sarajevo are winding two lanes through the mountains with speed limits typically around 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph). But it is a really cool drive with a lot of switch back turns and traveling through a lot of ravines with rock walls on either side. After being stuck in Sarajevo for so long going nowhere it was a nice way to get into the drive.

After about 100 kilometers the hills start to flatten out a bit as you get closer to Tuzla and the country opens up into more industrial areas with mines and farms. One would think that the roads would get a little faster but nope, they speed limit average stays about the same with just as many blind corners but now you drive through a lot more urban areas so the limits drop to 50 kilometers per hour (31 mph) and you have things like horse drawn buggies now to deal with too. I did not expect to see this and had to pass several of them. I saw this in Bostwana but that is a 3^rd world country, Bosnia is not exactly 1^st world but it is a lot farther than Botswana.

Horse and home built buggy in Tusla Bosnia

It was like this all the way to the border with Croatia, than other than about 30 minutes on major highway, all of Croatia was two lane roads through towns too. Cross the border into Hungry and more of the same. Now I am starting to freak out a bit because I have been traveling for 5 hours already and at the rate I am going it will be midnight before I get into Prague. I can’t believe the only way to cross 1060 kilometers is through every little town along the way.

Road just across the border in Hungry

Finally I get onto major highways in Hungry where the limit is 130 kilometers per hour (80 mph) but even that does not last more than an hour as my GPS takes me off the roads again and starts running me through small towns. Then without warning I am in Bratislava Slovakia, which is a big city and now I am going right through the center of town.

There probably was some warning but I have no idea what any of the road signs are saying so I have to take it as it comes. It is somewhat a cool way to drive across Eastern Europe but I’m getting rather concerned about how much distance I have to go. At 6:00 pm I still had 300 kilometers and the GPS has me on streets with stop lights and 50 kilometer limits. I have been wondering what the deal with the thing was for several hours and when I see the D2 highway running off to my left and my GPS did not route me on it I finally knew for sure something was wrong.

I still don’t know what it was doing but I figured out how to re-route myself on the D2 which was major highway with 130 k/h speeds all the way to Prague. I have to wonder how many hours I farted away with the stupid thing as it took 16 hours by the time I pulled into Prague. I am just happy I managed to get onto major highways before it became totally dark.

Couple of things I found interesting on the drive;

The highways in Bosnia and much of Croatia and Hungry are small and just two lanes, one each direction, and must be what it was like traveling Route 66 before the interstates were built in the U.S.

This is not exactly right but it is more or less the route I took. I crossed Croatia closer to Serbia and followed the river up to Budapest before taking the route with the red dots to Prague.

Bosnia has all these weird looking hay stacks that dot the landscape. I did not see these south of Sarajevo so they are only north and I did not see them anywhere else. They literally stopped as soon as I crossed the border with Croatia.

Weird looking haystacks of northern Bosnia

Croatia seems to have the tightest border controls of anybody in the area and they were fairly religious about stamping my passport whereas Bosnia and Hungry did not worry as much about it. Just about every stop I made at the Croatian border took time too, up to 30 minutes between Bosnia and Croatia. After entering Hungry the borders are all open so I have not even had to stop at the borders.

The Croatians have strung a lot of barbed wire along their borders. That and they have all sorts of gates you need to traverse and it reminded me of the border crossings you used to see on TV before the Soviet Union broke up. They have guards with guns, dogs, coiled barbed wire, big steel gates, and so on. No other border I have crossed has this.

Barbed wire rolled out along the Croatian border with Hungry

Hungry is a lot like Wisconsin, rolling hills with farmland and cows, some forests on the southern border, and quaint little towns.

Bratislava Slovakia is a much bigger city than I would have expected. It is the capital but I did not expect such an urban setting with modern buildings and bridges.

I drove right across this bridge in Bratislava