Cycle Touring In Kosovo: A Disputed Nation Filled With Barbed Wire, Land Mines And Germans Soldiers

After nearly an hour of cycling on an abandoned Albanian freeway, I reached the country’s border and prepared myself to cross into Kosovo, a tiny landlocked country of 2.2 million in the middle of the Balkans. Kosovo, for those who don’t know, borders Macedonia to the south, Albania to the west, Montenegro to the northwest, and Serbia to the north and east.

This tiny country, which many people still associated with the Kosovo Wars of 1998 and 1999, was a part of the former Yugoslavia, but as of February 17th, 2008 has declared its independence and is currently recognized by 61 UN countries as an independent nation.

However, not everyone agrees on Kosovo’s independence (Russia, China, and Serbia being some of the opposition leaders). This disagreement over land and freedom has not only left Kosovo in a precarious state, but leaves many wondering if Kosovo’s problems are far from over. Commercials I had seen on TV warned of land mines in the country and residents in Albania cautioned me about the people I might meet.

As I rolled up to the border, I fished my passport out of my panniers and placed this important document on the small window sill outside the border official’s shaded booth.

“Where do you come from?” the dark-haired man said to me as he scanned my documents and flashed me a friendly smile.

“Switzerland,” I told him. “And I’m going all the way to Greece.”

“Ah, der Schweiz! Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Ja. Ich verstehe wenig Deutsch.” I replied in my very best German.

Our conversation ensued for another thirty seconds or so before an elderly border official approached on foot and broke up out booth-side chat. Apparently my German speaking friend was a bit of a social butterfly and the boss was keeping an eye on him in an attempt to keep the line of vehicles flowing.

“Ciao!” I yelled back at the friendly border guard as I cycled into Kovoso and thought to myself, “I like this place already.”

The first twenty kilometers or so were nice. The sun was shinning and the roads were relatively flat. The streets twisted and turned… and there was even a few inches of shoulder to separate myself from the passing cars speeding by on my left.

At the top of a small climb a group of boys, no older than fourteen, stepped into the street and blocked my path. Signaling me to stop and not having anywhere else to go, I did exactly that. As soon I put my foot to the pavement, my bike was instantly surrounded, just as it had been time and time again while cycling in Albania. And again, just as in Albania, the boys were simply curious. They squeezed my brakes, stroked my panniers, and patted my tires.

A boy wearing purple pants said something to me in a language I couldn’t understand.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re saying. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

Lucky for me, it turns out he did (speak German that is).

For the next twenty minutes or so I stood on the street corner of this tiny town in Kosovo, talking to this small group of boys as old men looked on from the shade of restaurant awnings far across the street. I talked mainly with the boy in purple, whose German was far better than mine and who acted as an interpreter between myself and the other boys in his gang. He told me the boys’ names and ages, explained that they liked to play football (soccer), and that they simply loved Americans.

I, in turn, told them about my travels. I explained that I was from California, from a small city near Los Angeles, close to the beach… but that I now lived in the snow in a state far away from the place they had seen so many times on television.

Before I left, I gave the boys each a copy of my business card and told them to check out my website and email me if they pleased.

Just minutes after saying goodbye to my teenage friends, the sky grew dark and it began to rain. For the first time that day, I fished out my rain jacket and put it on.

Cycling in more than six inches of rainfall that flooded the streets and forced passing cars to spray me with huge waves of water, I cycled on toward Prizrin, one of Kosovo’s largest cities and my final destination for the night.

After pausing to rest and escape the storm for a few minutes under a long row of tall and narrow trees, I cycled on, hugging the shoulder, my panniers submerged in the rain water that had collected in the gutters, and quickly found myself on the outskirts of Prizren – a beautiful, busy and dirty city.

The man at the desk of the first hotel I stumbled upon said there were no rooms available, despite the fact that the building was completely empty. I think it was my bicycle and the fact that I was covered in rain water that really made him really turn me away.

So I continued on, into downtown Prizren, where I found the Hotel Tirana, located on the second floor, directly above a bank.

The young man in the bright pink shirt who checked me in said the room would be 30 Euros for the night, which seemed a bit steep after paying only 20 in Albania and being told that that was expensive. But I took the room anyway and quickly found myself in yet another shit hole hotel.

Cigarette ashes covered the desk where a broken TV was perched. The sheets were folded but dirty and again, there was no real shower, but instead a simple hose running out of the wall and a drain in the floor to collect the water. But by this time in my travels, I didn’t really mind. “Home, sweet, home” I thought to myself, as I lugged my gear up the stairs and locked up my bike in the hotel’s main lobby.

After hosing off in the bathroom and putting on my freshest pair of pants, I stepped out into the streets of Prizren and started to explore. The goal: Try and find some food! I was absolutely starving.

In the town’s center, the streets were a buzz. Couples were dinning in sidewalk cafes. Swarms of teens and young 20-somethings walked hand in hand (men with women, women with women, and men with men), and young school children ran around squirting each other with water pistols, which I found amusing, because it was still pouring rain.

There were few restaurants still open, so I stepped under a large red awning and ordered myself a large vegetarian – an item you may have guessed by now, is my go to food when traveling here in Europe. They make pizza just about anywhere and ordering a vegetarian pizza pie is a surefire way of making sure you get a half-way decent meal.

While I waited, I spoke with two German militia men, who were seated at the table next to me. I had been in Kosovo for just a few hours, but nearly every conversation I had had thus far was entirely in German.

My pie eventually arrived and I said goodbye to my German friends before carrying the pizza back to my room and devouring it in a state of joy.

By the time I finished my meal, it was dark outside and it was still raining, but I was surprisingly wide awake. So rather than going to sleep like I should have, I stayed up past midnight, listening to music on my laptop and playing countless games of chess against the computer.

The next morning I showered, packed and hit the streets. The road leading into the Sara National Park was right outside the hotel, so I knew exactly where I needed to go.

After cycling through the city for no more than a kilometer or two, I immediately began to climb the long and winding road into Kosovo’s only National Park.

Despite the fact that the road made an occasional twist or two, the incline was not substantial and it made for easy going. “I hope it stays like this” I thought to myself. But any good bicycle traveler knows that this is never the way it works out.

After passing through narrow gorges and riding under steep rock faces that dropped suddenly into the flowing river to my left, I approached a sign signaling me not to take photos of any kind.

A few meters up the road I passed a military base, which was guarded with rows of barbed wire and manned by men in camoflauge perched high in brown wooden towers looking out over the nearby land. It appeared to be a training ground of some kind at first, but on the eastern side of the base I could see the entrance, where there appeared to be a large office, storage bunkers of some kind, several military vehicles and a handful of camouflaged men carrying AK-47s.

I have to admit, but I really did want to try and snap a picture. But I didn’t have the guts to try. So I cycled on, waving at the men in uniform and trying to act as though cycling past military bases was something I do on a daily basis.

After passing the military base, the barbed wire along the roadside grew increasingly thinck in parts. Long rows of circuled barbs had been covered by wild greens growing along the roadside. In some places, the barbed wire was so completely covered that you would brush up against a passing bush and miss the flesh-eating spikes buried beneath by only a few centimeters.

After a while, the road began to get steeper and my pace began to slow. I could tell that the valley I was riding in had come to an end and there was a long series of switchbacks I would have to tackle before I got myself out of the hole I now found myself in.

It started to rain again, which was great, because I was working up a terrible sweat having to climb in my lowest gear. I put on my jacket once again, but took it off just a few minutes later because it was making me hot. “I’ll take the rain, thank you very much” I said to myself. “Switchbacks and sweat are not a fun combination.”

After more than an hour of slow and steady progress, I finally reached the top. There, perched between these two giant valleys, was a tiny village and roadside carnival, which, much to my surprise, was swarming with people.

Old dilapidated carnival rides were positioned in various locales and children ran back and forth, their parents chasing, as they jumped from one rusty ride to the next.

I wanted to stop and eat some ice cream or a meal of some kind, as it was nearly noon by this point, but I felt like pressing on. So I mounted my little red steed, clipped my feet into my pedals, and took off down a long descent that would last nearly all the way to Macedonia.

After completing such a long climb, not having to pedal was a welcome relief and  making such quick forward progress felt fantastic. I zoomed doom the hills, around sharp turns, past crashing waterfalls, through tiny villages, and eventually bottomed out in a beautiful, dry, flat, and empty land of farm houses and cows.

There was only one more turn I had to make before reaching Macedonia and before I knew it, I was at that crucial intersection.

Suddenly, the small country road I had been traveling on for almost the entire day was now a bustling highway, not unlike many of the roads and highways I have traveled in the past, back in the United States and Canada. Cars honks, men zipped by on motorcycles, and for the first time in months, I was sharing the road with semi-trucks.

Still pedaling downhill, I passed the small town of Doganovic and continued on toward Kacanik, where three police men and a single police woman pointed me in the direction of a hotel located on the second floor above a highway restaurant.

A twenty-three-year-old man named Amir showed me to my room and quickly returned to his customers in the restaurant below.

After taking a shower and unpacking my things, I came down to the restaurant below and ordered some food. With no other place in town to eat, I had little options for my night time meal. The food was bad, but the company was good.

The two young men who were working the restaurant brought out their computer and told me it would be okay if I checked my email. After doing so, they began to ask me questions. Unfortunately, their English was poor and my Albanian was worse.

Despite the language barrier, we were able to hold a relatively long and in-depth conversation. A man who entered the restaurant a few minutes later spoke German and he joined us at the table, acting as an interpreter between myself and the boys.

“It’s hard for young men to get jobs in Kovoso.” He told me. “There is no opportunity. You either work with cars or you work in a restaurant or hotel. Otherwise, there is nothing else to do.”

I could see what he was talking about. All day long I had seen little more than a few tiny farms and row after row of street-side shacks where food and drink were served.

“Maybe you could learn to use the computer?” I suggested to the boys. “I make all my money from doing computer work,” I explained to them.

I continued for a good fifteen minutes or so, explaining how I run the website at BicycleTouringPro.com and how I have several other online ventures which manage to produce a full-time income for myself.

“You’ve got a computer, you’ve got Internet access, and you’ve got the time. When there are no customers in the restaurant, you should be teaching yourself how to design websites, or market on the Internet, or figure out something else that could be profitable online. If you can build up a specific skill with computers you can work and make money from just about anywhere!”

The young men thought it sounded like a good idea, but I doubt they’ll follow through. Learning to survive on the Internet is hard work and few people have the determination needed to succeed in such a crowded and competitive marketplace.

After my meal was finished, the boys asked if I had any pictures of California on my computer.

“Hmm…” I thought to myself. “I think I do.” So I ran upstairs and fetched my laptop.

The previous summer, my German friend, Natalie, had come and stayed with my family in California and we had taken her around to all of the major tourist attractions in the area. Luckily, I still had the pictures on my computer, so I pulled some of them up and quickly ran through a few of them with the boys.

I showed them pictures of Snoop Dog’s house, David Beckham scoring a goal for the Los Angeles Galaxy, and William Friedkin’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“I want to come to California,” Amir whispered to me when the other boy stepped away.

“Well, if you ever get out there, you’ve got a free place to stay” I told him. “And I’d be happy to be your tour guide and show you around.”

But it didn’t sound like he’d be making it to the States any time soon. “We have problems with Visas,” he explained to me, and again rehashed how difficult life was in this tiny town just a few miles north of Macedonia.

It was well past dark by the time our conversation came to its natural end, so I walked across the street to the gas station painted all in green and purchased two ice cream cones and brought them back to my room for dessert. Unlike the previous night where I was up till early morning, I hit the hay early and was out like a light.

“Kosovo is all right” I thought to myself as I drifted off to sleep. “I wonder what Macedonia will be like?”