This region offers the joys of Europe, without the crowds
Dubrovnik is both the obvious and odd choice of city in which to begin a Balkans tour. Obvious because it has the comfort of familiarity and good airport connections, making it easy to get there.
Yet, that very familiarity – Dubrovnik is one of Europe’s notoriously overcrowded tourist cities – makes it the odd one out in a region that features many cities barely on the tourist map for most visitors to Europe, let alone Australians.
Old town Dubrovnik, Croatia.Credit: iStock
I’ve certainly heard of Sarajevo and Mostar, although for all the wrong reasons, as scenes of terrible war in the 1990s. I haven’t been to them, or to Karanac or Osijek. That’s why I’m here. Time to get off the predictable European tourist trail and onto the road less travelled.
The Balkans have long been in my sights. Negative stereotypes of this region abound, but old rivalries have settled down, living standards have risen, and crime rates are now below western European levels. Recently, the Balkans have been attracting more travel attention, and I’m keen to find out why.
I’m on an escorted journey with Collette, a company that specialises in interesting tours that focus on particular countries or regions and adroitly combine better-known sights with more unusual alternatives.
Dubrovnik is, in fact, a good place to start because it demonstrates why I want to get beyond Croatia’s holiday hotspot coastline. For all its wonders, Dubrovnik has the polish of a tourist trap and provides no feel for the ordinary local life I like to encounter while travelling.
Summer in Perast, on Kotor Bay, Montenegro.Credit: Alamy
Much of the rest of this tour, however, will bring me into less charted territory on a rugged meander across the rapidly transforming regions. I’ll benefit from the insights of accompanying tour manager Jana Stepic, who was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has a degree in cultural studies, and has been a tour guide in these parts since 2006.
As we head out of Dubrovnik through a valley dense with pencil pines and terracotta roofs, I see no evidence that Jana’s enthusiasm for this corner of Europe has waned. She makes interesting observations about passing sights and her life growing up in what was then Yugoslavia, but is now the several separate nations we’ll be travelling through.
Shortly, we’re out of Croatia and into Montenegro, where we stop for lunch at Perast, a marble town prickly with church steeples that faces glorious Kotor Bay.
“If you were rich in the old days, you didn’t buy a Lamborghini, you built a church,” says Jana about this elegant old town, the former lair of sea captains and traders.
Kotor, further around the bay, is our base for a couple of nights. The miniature fortified city is visited by cruise ships, but it’s the only well-known place in Montenegro. I’ve been before, so I’m off on Collette’s optional excursion towards Mount Lovcen.
A spectacular road takes us from the Mediterranean shoreline into rocky, sheep-haunted mountains. At Njegusi, we stop for the prosciutto and cheeses that are a specialty of the region. Then we plunge seawards again, swinging above the bay at Budva.
This is the key to escaping crowds on a Balkans visit. Even seaside tourist bases are surrounded by inland places you haven’t heard of, where you’ll find elbow room galore amid glorious Mediterranean landscapes.
Next day, we’re into barren uplands zigzagged with dry-stone walls. Jana passes our time on the coach with informative chat. Our destination is Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has one of the world’s most famous bridges, albeit a recreation of the 16th-century Ottoman original.
Stari Most (Mostar Bridge) was infamously destroyed by Croatian shelling in the Bosnian War and became a symbol of attacks on cultural heritage. Its lovely reconstructed arch links two parts of a delightful old town of mosques, hammams (Turkish baths) and vine-shaded restaurant courtyards where lamb sizzles.
Mostar’s bridge has been reconstructed.Credit: iStock
After Mostar, our coach slides between limestone mountains above a canyon of fast-flowing green water. Balkan landscapes are wild, rugged and starkly beautiful. At Sarajevo, a wide valley opens, prettily green and overlooked by hills dark with pine trees.
Sarajevo is our base for three nights. For a place infamous for its siege during the Bosnian War, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a revelation.
It’s like no European city I’ve been to. The minaret-punctured old town looks Turkish, but is surrounded by an elegant Austro-Hungarian outer ring of art deco apartments and pastry-filled coffee houses.
Our local guide, Achmed, takes us on a tour and chats over baklava and thick, short, Bosnian coffee in a coffee house where old men twirl their worry beads. That evening, I sneak out alone and find locals watching soccer on a giant screen in a square, licking ice creams.
Next day, some Collette guests are off to explore the bunker of the late Josip Tito, communist president of the former Yugoslavia. I’ve opted for Lukomir in the highlands behind Sarajevo.
Lukomir village in the hills above Sarajevo.Credit: iStock
This part of Bosnia is green and cool. Wildflowers splatter the meadows in valleys ringed by stony peaks. Sheep weighed down by long wool lurch across the landscape. Occasionally, farms appear, their vegetable garden penned in by wooden fences.
Sometimes I see a local hoeing a field. The only tourists are Bosnian and German motorcyclists, Mad Max warriors in leather gear trailing plumes of dust.
Lukomir is a tumbledown but picturesque farming village 1495 metres above sea level on the edge of a canyon. Some of its houses are abandoned, others survive as low-key agritourism stays. Medieval tombstones and graves sit lopsided in the grass.
The young have all left for jobs in western Europe. Lukomir’s older folk produce hearty country food. We lunch on delicious cheese-stuffed pastries, grated cabbage salad and sweet elderberry juice.
The following day, we follow the Bosna River, from which Bosnia gets its name, that eventually flows into the Sava and then the Danube. Valleys and rivers are green, towns and minarets white, tumbledown Yugoslav-era steel factories rusty orange.
I like this ride, which roller-coasts over the saddles of hills between corn and tobacco fields. In small towns, some buildings are pockmarked with old bullet holes. On others, chic cement has barely dried.
The old ways are here – chicken sheds, gardens full of plum trees, beehives – but the road is lined by billboards on which soccer players spruik air-conditioning units and shampoo.
Then suddenly we’re back in Croatia. Hills and mosques are left behind, replaced by church steeples and the vast Pannonian plains.
Osijek, Croatia, is a stylish, historical town yet to be discovered by international tourists.Credit: iStock
This part of Croatia, Slavonia, is nothing like the tourist-frequented coast. The countryside is pegged with vines and ripe with fruit trees. Dainty villages with baroque churches are filled with lopsided dahlias and creaking weather vanes.
Osijek is a stylish, historical town that anywhere else in Europe would be scarred with Irish pubs and souvenir shops. International tourists, however, are yet to discover the modest but appealing charms of this buzzy university town.
History and street life side by side in Zagreb, Croatia’s capital.Credit: iStock
The ancient Romans came here, though. So did the Ottomans and Hapsburgs, who encased it in a whopping citadel. Our guide Jana likes Osijek, and it’s easy to catch her enthusiasm. It has history and fine architecture and bakeries selling old-fashioned pastries.
At last, we’re in Zagreb. Here, foreign languages swirl, but the Croatian capital still only gets a fraction of Dubrovnik’s visitors.
Put Zagreb on your list. It has everything you might want in a European capital – little museums, beer halls, street markets, architecture muddled by the centuries, picnic-worthy parks and a lively old town, but all without weekend jet-setters and stag parties.
For that matter, put the Balkans on your list. It has many of Europe’s joys without its crowds, although each year more visitors arrive. Albania is the latest place to be “discovered”, which suits me fine. All the more reason to return for more.
THE DETAILS
TOUR
Collette’s latest Balkans itinerary starts in Zagreb, visits the destinations in Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro described here (although in a different order), and is extended into Albania and Greece. It finishes in Athens. The new 15-day “The Balkans: From Coastal Croatia to Legendary Greece” tour has regular departures until October 2025, which resume from April 2026. From $7549 a person twin share, including accommodation, transport, select meals and tour guides. See gocollette.com
MORE
tourismbih.com
croatia.hr
montenegro.travel
The writer travelled as a guest of Collette.
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