Day 20: Imotski-Neum (95 km, 901 m ↑)

After many days in Croatia, we have reached our fourth country on this trip now, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The original plan was to cycle to Mostar yesterday, but when we studied the weather report the night before in Imotski and saw the storm warning with strong winds and heavy rainfall for Sunday, we decided to skip Mostar, go directly to Neum on Saturday and take a rest day there on Sunday to sit out the storm. Neum is located at the small spot on the map, where Bosnia has access to the Adriatic coast. We thought, it would be a touristy town, but it seems like the tourist season is all over, and the town is pretty dead.

The ride here was very beautiful though. We got up early in the morning, and it was chilly six degrees in Imotski. Therefore, we had a longer coffee break to start the day with and left when the sun had started to warm the air.

We reached the border to Bosnia already after six kilometres, leaving not only Croatia, but also the EU for the first time. We are going to go through four more non-EU-countries on our way – Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, and Turkey – in addition to Greece. Yesterday, our route crossed the border three times: Croatia to Bosnia, back to Croatia, and finally back to Bosnia again.

The scenery was beautiful. In the beginning, we crossed many small towns. At some point, we went through a village with a big wedding party. Later, we went passed the Kuti lake in the river Neretva delta, which is surrounded by mountains on all sides. One of these mountain passes, we had to pass to cross the border to Bosnia for the second time. Here, we made a little mistake: On the map, it looked like there was a shorter way to Neum than the one that Komoot (the app we use to plan our routes) suggested. After climbing up that pass (I reached it a bit before Udo), I met a semi-friendly officer at the border station explaining to me that this border crossing was only allowed for locals. So, we had to turn around, cycle down again, cycle up the other way and make the detour to take the other crossing.

As mentioned before, we can rest our legs today. I have cycled more than 1600 kilometres now, which is more than half the distance we need to cover to go to Istanbul. Our planned next tour goes to Dubrovnik, which is going to be our last stop in Croatia before continuing to Montenegro.