On our list of places to visit was the old Olympic venue in Sarajevo. Old, abandoned, neglected — but still worth seeing.
The Winter Olympic Games were organized here in 1984. Back then, this place was teeming with life. Today is quite different. To this day, only the distinctive concrete bobsled track and a few old ruins of buildings have survived.
With a bit of imagination, we organized our own bobsled race, running around the track. In summer, no sleds — crazy, right?
Then we decided to drive down to the city center for lunch.
Google Maps navigation showed us two possible routes, one half an hour long and the other 15 minutes and shorter. We trusted navigation and chose the shorter one. And that was a mistake…
At first, the road went steeply downhill and after a while I knew that turning back with a fully loaded van would not be possible. Adventure time — no way back. We drove into the first residential area, the road was getting narrower. People came to their windows, staring at us as if to say: “where is he driving?”. Later, it was even more fun, because the road was only wide enough for one car, with no room to pass oncoming traffic. It got narrower with every meter. Finally, we reached the end of the road and when we thought we had succeeded, the most difficult part of this “shortcut” was ahead of us.
Mirrors folded in, the passage was literally centimeters wide. Our bus is over 5 meters long and maneuvering it on a steep downhill slope is not easy. After a few minutes of fighting, we succeeded, although with a small scrape on the running board. I was watching the body panels, but the running board sits slightly lower and caught on a concrete step. Oh well — adventures are part of the trip.
We parked the car in the center of the town and went to a restaurant for lunch.
We still had a short stretch of road ahead to our accommodation – a campsite on the Tara River. As it turned out, this campsite is a starting point for people who go rafting on this wild river.
