Where We Could Pull Over

We'd finally found a pull off spot after an hour's drive through the Scottish highlands.  The last of the day's light was about to disappear behind the stream-veined peaks and thick swaths of grey cloud.  Merlin scurried up a hill with his camera, I stayed below and mostly took pictures of his silhouette.  Nikon appendage against an IMAX movie backdrop.  There'd been a castle at the water's edge just a few minutes earlier, there was an island with a single tree standing up from it like a flag just a little further along.  But this is where we could stop.  And we were more than willing to drink as much of it in as possible.

This is a wide shoulder on British country roads, a foot or so between the pavement and the stone walls.  This is in the Yorkshire Dales, England.  Our car was left a few hundred meters back, in the parking lot of the White Scar Cave.  Our jeans were still wet from the rushing water underground and, at only 3:45 PM, that beautiful twilight was already setting in.  So, we walked along the shoulder.  A tight squeeze even on foot.  Most of the time, there's no space at all, hardly enough room for two cars to pass each other.  Our GPS did an admirable job at keeping us on the scenic route, on leading us from one place to another over narrow stone bridges, off pavement onto dirt, through the villages within National Parks and always, always steering clear of private roads that lead off into the woods to a secluded estate.

Pheasants make their way across the road at their own speed, pulling that long, pretty tail behind them like an airplane over the Jersey shore, going extra slow so you can read the promotion banner it drags behind it.  Land Rovers filled with dapperly outfiitted hunters take a sharp turn onto one of those private roads.  And all you want to do is pull over to take a picture.  But there's just no darn place to do it.  So, you snap a photo from the window of your car.  You're in the Lake District now, the English countryside at its most storybook.  It's the land of William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter, where dogs sit at their owners wellies in all the pubs.   Rolling green with grids of stone walls, cottages with curly cues of smoke rising from their chimneys, farmsteads with gorgeous old barns.  Sheep in their winter coats.

Back in Scotland, up on Cow Hill, there were Highland cattle, squat, long-haired animals that are more Mr. Snuffleupagus than Bessie the Cow.  Sturdy animals for this difficult landscape - one filled with powerful winds and heavy rains.  Other then them, we were alone on our Highland hike, in the shadow of Ben Nevis with views down over Glen Nevis and the Loche Linnhe.  Our car was down at Braveheart Car Park, built for the crew of that great Mel Gibson epic.  Somehow to keep the trailers and equipment trucks while they filmed here on Cow Hill.  I almost began to hear the Braveheart soundtrack in my head, the bagpipes and strings, but my brain kept getting stuck on Titanic.  All James Horner sounds the same.

There's a rugged beauty to the Highland landscape, one that just feels like wild red head and rough wool.  The thistles and gorse that cover the landscape with purple and yellow when flowered, make for a blanket of thick thorn and spikes at the dawn of winter.  Driving along Loch Lomond in Trossachs National Park was spectacular.  "National Park" doesn't mean the same thing in Britain as it does in America.  Here, the area is not so much "parkland" or nature reserves cared for by rangers. They are whole areas deemed too special to develop.  They are unspoiled and pristine, and also the home to thousands of people in villages throughout.  Just off to the right of this photo,  a white house sat in the blip of flat space between two sweeping hills.  It was like an ant between a camel's humps.  The narrow dirt path of pull-off room we'd found was probably the very start of their driveway. 

There are castles and ruins, barns and walls, old towers and bridges all through the British countryside.  Old stone reflected in puddles and the waters of lakes and loches, structures half covered in bright green lichen.  They mostly blend right in with the scenery, a natural fit like a cloud in the sky.  The Ribblehead Viaduct was an exception and, in a rare stroke of luck, we were actually able to stop our car fairly close by.  Twenty-four arches stretch across the valley of the River Ribble in North Yorkshire, England.  It was a marvel of modern technology in its day, a project that resulted in the death of at least 100 labourers whose graves doubled the nearby cemetery.  An incredible structure, young for these parts at only 128 years old.

We just arrived in Wales yesterday, our final stop in the United Kingdom.  The final days of our entire trip - and the weather has begun to look up.  Clear skies make photos easier, but there's still the issue of finding a place to stop.  We drove across The Cob three times (insert corny joke here - ha!).  Back, forth, back we traversed the rock and slate causeway, a sea wall across the Glaslyn Estuary.  To our right (and then our left, and then right again) was this view of the Estuary.  We finally found a construction site a few minutes' walk away and left our car with the workers'.  Then, we strolled The Cob leisurely on its lower level, next to the cars.  Above, on the other side of the causeway more people strolled, alongside the old steam train track which still gets use most days of the week.

When we'd left Warwick, England for Wales that morning, we were warned about recent weather.  "Oh, Wales is flooded,"  a young woman said with wide eyes and a shake of the head.  While its true that parts of Wales experienced terrible flooding, we found most of it still above water.   Nothing compared to the deep water we'd driven through two days before in England.  These tractor tracks were filled with rain, but otherwise the land was dry.  This was a terrible place to pull to the side of the road, by the way.  A tight squeeze for the two-way traffic, a nerve-racking reemergence onto the road.

Just a few minutes further,  Criccieth Castle cut a beautiful silhouette into the sky.  The village  of the same name stood beside it, tucked inland.  As good a place to pull over as any.  We walked along the pier, which jutted out into Tremadog Bay and looked at Wales all around us.  I don't remember the last time I was able to see as far into the distance, the sky was so clear.  Water to sand to stone to dirt to hills with more hills behind that and more behind that.  We parked the car and ourselves for the night, checking in to The Lion Hotel which was hosting "Christmas Evening" for a busload of seniors.  Mince pies, turkey, a raffle and holiday sweaters.  Our car collected a thick coat of frost by the morning.

At the Edge of the Ocean

It's easy to forget that the meeting of land and water isn't always gradual - that a coast isn't just beaches and harbors, docked boats and storehouse-lined bays.  You forget that the ocean is the most vast wilderness there is and that the people living on the edge of it feel governed by its every whim.  Even in the most remote mountain regions, you have a sense of the peak, of the beginning and the end.  But that's just not the case with the ocean.  We'd driven the Copper Coast with a setting sun in our eyes and no place to pull over.  We'd stayed in coastal Dungarvan, but tucked inland at Kilcannon House.  The Bay of Galway was a calmed pocket of coast without even the audible lapping of water.  So, our cliff walk in Ardmore was our first real encounter with the wild and woolly Irish coast.  Below this stone ruin, far down where seafoam marked the water level against the cliff, was the bent crane of a 1987 shipwreck.  A few minutes back, we'd found a notebook tacked to the outside of a simple wooden structure.  A whale watching station and logbook.  Five days ago, someone scribbled a report.  One minke whale spotted. 

With all the green, it's easy to forget about the blue.  But the blue is at the heart of the Irish identity, I think. "I feel for Greece," a fellow boarder in Kinsale named Michael told us.  "They're like us.  Most of its an island. And we're ancient civilizations, us and Greece.  We have our own pace.  We can't expect to be Germany with all its neighbors and its modernity."  He was talking, of course, about the economics and EU membership.  And though I understood his point about Greece, I immediately thought of Iceland - - and its No Thanks, EU! billboards.  For an island that has survived, by the skin of its teeth at times, self-sufficiency is key.  It's the exact thing that gets compromised when joining a coalition.  All of a sudden that precarious setting in the wild Atlantic doesn't just reap benefits for those willing to live on the brink of it.  Its bounty is available to trawlers just passing through.  Men spoke of the coastline like an alma mater, like other men talk about their college football team that's gone to hell.  Because as close as all Irishmen live to the Atlantic, there's also a huge number of them that have lived on the water itself.

"I miss the people.  The ones that take to the sea because they don't fit in anywhere else."  Pat Ormond was described as "the best sailor ever to come out of Dungarvan" to us by the town historian.  (A true historian, not just a guy with that nickname at the pub).  This was the first summer Pat hadn't spent on the water.  Money's dried up for a lot of the people who usually hire him out for the season.  So, he was around with the guests at Kilcannon House.  A lifelong transient among travelers.  We felt a kinship - often likening our own strange existence these past two years to living on a floating island, a deserted one with just Merlin and me.  Pat equipped us with hand drawn maps of the coastline in County Waterford and West Cork.  There were two rocks off the coast of Baltimore named Adam and Eve ("avoid Adam and hug Eve"), all the harbors were drawn in and the public restrooms on the dock, but no clear road to get there. "Oh, I've left those out haven't I?  I'm always looking at it from the sea!"

To borrow a term from Merlin, Ireland is "the breakwater of Europe," an island stationed in the thick of the Atlantic, after miles of unobstructed free rein.  The coast represents every obstacle and opportunity, and the dramatic shift between the two that life (and history) so often is.  Stories of the coast included boatloads of Irishmen setting off for America, pioneers of a sort, setting an Irish satellite in a far off land that still holds a deep connection.  News of hurricane Sandy played at a pub in Clonakilty, the waitress offered her condolences.  "If that'd been us, we'd just be gone.  8 million people in New York, there are only 6 in Ireland!  A storm like that would just swallow us whole."  The town had serious flooding earlier this year, more than once there was 2 feet of water in the pub's main room.  Storefronts had signs that said they'd be "closed indefinitely" due to the flooding.  Buildings still had sandbags at the base of their front doors. 

Clonakilty's claim to fame is its blood pudding, the best in Ireland, but what locals will tell you about first is the old carpet factory.  It supplied the Titanic, of course.  Titanic tourism is actually a thing.  For the Irish, death is just a part of a conversation.  You may describe what your grandmother looked like, they'll tell you how and when she died.  I can only think the coast has something to do with it (and the Roman Catholic beliefs about afterlife).  It doesn't really matter that the ocean took the Titanic, it left the land a majestic work of craftsmanship.  So, why not brag about a connection? A love leaving on a boat or leaving your love on land is the subject of 'lament' ballads.  The crown jewels of Irish sightseeing are on the coast. "You going to Kerry then?" Everyone asked when we said we were driving along the coast  Well, no, not this time...  Not going to County Kerry was a little like not having the dessert a restaurant is famous for because you're too full from the appetizer, entree, cheese and drinks that you enjoyed so immensely.  We have no regrets.

Kinsale would evoke dreamy emotion in everyone.   "Oh, you'll have to stop in at the Tap Bar," a man at the Ardmore craft shop told us.  Pat personally recommended The Spaniard pub, which wound up being one of our favorites of the trip.  A yellowed newspaper hung over the cash register shouted the news that the Lusitania had sunk only 11 miles offshore.  Their own claim to fame.  The bartender was an instant friend.  "Say hello to..." was a common addendum to a pub recommendation.  We wondered, often, how people choose their pub in Ireland.  The selection and prices are almost always the same - and in towns with more than one (and as many as ten) the regulars are loyal.  But we think it's about whose tending the bar more than the bar itself, what friend you can visit, whose ear you can bend.  On the coast this is especially important.  This is your time back on land to give confession or have a laugh; to flirt or learn or be silent with an old friend. 

But the dreamy sigh that would sound at the word "Kinsale" was almost always attached to one thing.  A quick facebook message from an Irish coworker of my father's had "Kinsale - the Irish Riviera - great chefs." Other people were more specific.  "You have to go to Fishy Fishy" - man in Ardmore.  "Now you're making me want to take the drive to Fishy Fishy!" - woman in Dungarvan.  "Of course, there's Fishy Fishy." - Pat.  The food scene in Kinsale is renowned and the mother of it all is Fishy Fishy, a seafood restaurant that's an institution in Ireland.  Their Surf & Turf is scallops and blood sausage.  Their daily specials outnumber the printed 'menu.  The monkfish and parsnip puree was an indelicate bulk of flavor, a sense of pub under the supervision of great chefs.  My sea bass came as a pile of three crispy skinned fillets, set atop a mound of mashed carrots and topped with fried leeks.  You have to go to Fishy Fishy.  And The Spaniard, while you're at it.

Northern Roads and Reflections

At the Hotelli Inari, in far northern Finland, people come more to drink than to sleep.  There are beds upstairs, according to a pricelist, but we're not sure what kind of rough-edged person might sleep in them.
Downstairs in the bar, a full range of Lapland characters came out on a recent Wednesday night.  Bleary eyed men sat slumped over beers.  Young women in perfume and high-heels gathered to laugh and chat. A group of Norwegians were in town to celebrate something.  Inari is a Sámi town, on the shore of a many-armed lake of the same name.  The arctic circle is some two hundred miles south.  There are four different languages spoken in Inari's woods and along the back roads.  A man and woman came to set up Karaoke in the bar.  When they turned on the machines, a waitress told them to wait a bit - the music was too loud for the regulars.  This is the slow-simmering life in Finnish Lapland.

The landscape in this part of the world is flat, wet and mossy.  Lakes and ponds appear everywhere in the northern forests, and dry land can seem only temporarily firm - walk anywhere in these woods, and you'll find places where the ground is soggy and soft with water.  Lake shores aren't exactly distinct boundaries, the liquid bleeds into the low rock like watercolor paint over a pencil line.  One could get lost forever here, in such featureless space.
In October, the Arctic days didn't feel too short, but the feeling of darkness approaching had soaked into everything.

Why would people live here, when it seems so much like a wasteland?  Reindeer and salmon.
Finnish Lapland is also called Sápmi, just as the indigenous Lapp people are known as Sámi in their native tongues.  The native people have lived here for thousands of years because their home is extraordinarily rich in food.  Even today, fishermen pull sixty pound salmon from the Tana river, and herds of reindeer are kept in the forests and fells.  We came across these traditional riverboats up near the border with Norway.  Boats like these are used for checking and maintaining the Sámi salmon nets that are strung from trellises in the water.  Nowadays, angling is more popular than netting.  We passed many signs advertising fishing excursions on the roadsides.

Driving in Lapland is a hypnotic experience.  Trees and water pass, the horizon opens and closes, the distances become almost theoretic.  In some ways, it reminded me of traveling in the American west, where two hours away is "close by."
When a house or a gas station does pop up, it's an event.  At Kaamasen Kievari, which sits somewhere close to two intersections, a traveler can eat, drink, sleep, gamble, send mail or just get some diesel and coffee.  It's not a big place, but it has most of what anybody could need.  The menu was heavy on reindeer, most of the daytime crowd was drinking, the sound of slot machines was a quiet constant.  The road outside is flat and fast through the trees.  If you don't need to stop, there's no reason to slow down.

A big part of the local economy here is Norwegian bargain shopping.  Finland's wealthier neighbors come across the border to buy beer, liquor and gasoline.  Näätämö is a nothing town.  It's no more than a few muddy parking lots, two supermarkets, some rusting cars and fuel pumps.  There aren't any houses - at least, none that you can see from the road.  We know someone must live in Näätämö; there was a row of mailboxes beside the K-market.  The border is ten minutes away.  Square-jawed men and women come down from the northern fjords with petrol cans and leave with bottles of vodka.

We felt, traveling here, that even manmade things had somehow become wild. There are boats everywhere, but we never saw one out on the water.  They just sat, pulled up onto the shore, filling up with rainwater, their engines taken off, looking more like driftwood than transportation.  Log trucks are common, but seem more animal than human as they careen down dirt roads.  Mailboxes sit on the roadsides, with no house in sight - they look like giant mushrooms that have sprung up in the rain.

Ivalo stands out as a metropolis in this emptiness, with its few supermarkets and three roundabouts.  We pulled into one of the two gas stations for lunch. Dolly Parton was on the radio, men in chainsaw chaps stood by their pickups outside.  The lunch buffet was popular with the locals - people sat down quietly with trays of reindeer-hamburg pasta and squash soup.  There were video slot machines at some of the tables, two euros for five shots.  Some of the old men wore cowboy hats.  Included in the price: coffee, bread, salad, herring, juice and lingonberries in syrup.

Finnish Lapland doesn't feel particularly European.  In a lot of ways it feels like parts of remote middle America - I was reminded of Michigan's upper Peninsula more than once.  The people are of a similar type: independent, citizens of vast spaces.  That's not to say that it felt American either.  Maybe better to say that there's a kinship between northern places, as though the circular world near the pole is a separate continent from those attached southern extremities.  Every part of life here is edged in tradition, but the existence is modern - the Sámi part of the land's identity is a picture frame, not the whole portrait.
We stopped the car often to get out and look at one lake or another.  Sometimes the water stretched miles into the distance, sometimes it was just a pool in the grass.  We got caught up photographing the reflections of trees and rocks.  It rained and cleared up.  We hoped to see northern lights at night, but there was nothing but darkness and clouds.  Lapland in October is a meditation more than experience.

The Loftiest Berry

"We're cooking cloudberry jam today!" the woman behind the counter at Syltkrukan, ("Jam Pot,") announced.  We'd just been served our light lunch and coffee, a slice of rye bread each - mine topped with hard boiled egg and herring, Merlin's with liver pate and pickles. A man had just come out to fetch more empty containers to bring into the back room, of which we could make out the gleam of steel machinery and busy people.   She could tell we were curious.  Before we could take another bite, we were whisked back into the work room to behold the spinning of gold.   Cloudberry jam is a delicacy in Sweden and we've been looking out for it since arriving. Stumbling upon the jam family business was a little like finding a cloudberry, I'd imagine. We were muddy-booted and off the beaten track, it was tucked away in the Uppland forest.  It was magical.

A heavy box that said "FRAGILE" once arrived at the doorstep of our New York apartment. Inside, were a half a dozen jars of jam all the way from Sweden.  Merlin had taken a trip to the country recently and fell in love with the never-before-tasted cloudberry and lingonberry preserves.  The delivery, which he'd ordered, had three of each.  Most of the precious cargo was repackaged and sent off to family for Valentine's Day, but one jar of cloudberry was tucked away in our cupboard.  Merlin knew that once it was opened, it would vanish (and that each jar had cost nearly $20).   Swedes take cloudberries just as seriously, as was affirmed by our visit to Jam Pot.

"We call it Norrland's Gold," Per Wetterholm told us in the jam making room at Syltkruken.  An average of 50,000 tons of wild berries grow in Sweden's forests every year and about 96 - 98% of them go unpicked.  But not cloudberries.   If they are there for the picking, they are found for the jamming.   Hjortron, as they are called in Swedish, are rare for a number of reasons.   They are difficult for even the most skilled forager - of which there are many in Sweden - to find.  Tucked into swamps, marshes and bogs amongst fern plants, they have only one berry per stalk if that many.  It can take up to seven years for a fruit to be produced.  Some years, there are no cloudberries at all.  Cultivation would make matters a lot easier, but even a group of Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish scientists whose job it is to figure some sort of commercial production out have pretty much written cloudberries off as un-farmable on any large scale.

The berries - which look like pale yellow raspberries - are found, picked and then flash frozen before being sold and made into jam.  They are considered too tart to eat raw.   Per told us that in Sweden, almost 99% of cloudberries picked are made into jam and that jam is almost always eaten warm over ice cream, waffles or pancakes. There is tradition and reverence in the consumption of hjortronsylt.  And the making of it.  They say that the higher the fruit content the better the cloudberry jam. Syltkruken's was delicious, with 60% (that fancy imported stuff we got years ago only had 45%). What does it taste like?   I'd say tart, but bright.  It reminded me of fresh apricot, Merlin of honey, someone else of sour apple.  Maybe there are as many impressions of cloudberries as there are of clouds.

Snæfellsnes Peninsula

"I wonder how many car commercials are filmed here," Merlin said.  We drove through the lava fields of the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, the road cutting through the seemingly endless stretch of jagged basalt rocks.  Cooled lava.  A yellow moss covered whole patches of rock like a golden crumb topping over baked blueberries.  In the far distance, you could see the chartreuse grassy patches of the next terrain in an endless progression of surreal landscapes.  You could almost hear the car commercial voice over speaking slowly and deeply about natural beauty, the open road, horsepower.  Intrigue.  Beauty.

We'd see only one car at a time on the road.  Mostly, we were alone, free to stop for photos, brake for sheep, turn around for signs that read "Dead Whale."  At times, I was reminded of the lunar landscape of Pag Island, Croatia, whose desolation was achingly beautiful.  Then, the lusher landscapes would conjure up childhood memories of watching The Secret of Roan Inish. 

It's impossible to really compare Snæfellsnes Peninsula with anywhere else.  Real or imagined.  It feels so surreal and otherwordly that Jules Verne chose its large glacier as the setting for A Journey to the Center of the Earth.  I think Merlin really put it best in our daily notes on our first night: "This looks like a fictional land, made up to be filmed in New Zealand and computer enhanced to become unbelievable."

The largest town on the peninsula is Stykkishólmur, the sort of town you can imagine being painted and glued down piece by piece by a pair of enormous hands creating an idyllic setting for their model train set.  The cookie cutter houses mostly date back to the late 19th century and have been protected from the harsh weathered fate of most harbour buildings by the big, basalt island right off shore.  It stretches out like a protective wall, its lighthouse blinks away mist at the top.  Once can imagine this scene being mostly the same over a century ago.

People call Snæfellsnes Peninsula "Iceland in Miniature." You can get a taste of the diverse natural beauty of the whole island in a drive around its western appendage, they say.  You've got your fishing villages with bright orange mussels and your lonely farmstead in the shadow of a hulking mountain.  You've got the sea, the springs, rivers, lakes, sheep, horses, birds galore.  Corrugated tin roof houses painted bright colors and prefab cottages with red or blue roofs. 

Black stone beaches, golden sand ones, water brimming with islands or lapping up in turquoise turning to foam.  This beach, on the northern coast of the peninsula, was flanked on both sides by craggy, imposing 'bird cliffs.'  There were no birds at the moment, but their plentiful white droppings acted as a "we were here" tag.

There are viking ruins, ancient water sources, elf cathedrals, craters and fresh water pools, fjords, cliffs, museum cafes selling 'love balls.'  And very few people.  Every house seemed to hold court over its own mini kingdom, a majestic buffer zone between it and its closest neighbor.  

As we left Snæfellsnes Peninsula, taking the road east on the northern coast, the scenery became downright pastoral.  The first trees we'd seen in days popped up, carefully planted around houses to offer some privacy.  The whole experience, the last 48 hours, started to feel like a trip to Oz as we left.  Except that here we were in a technicolor Kansas that was as fantastically beautiful as any of the rest.  I'm starting to feel a little bamboozled by all this awesomeness. 

Dead Whale

The sign, handpainted and hung low enough that it could have been a child's handiwork, was simple, but baffling. Dead Whale.   Sounds pretty self-explanatory, and if the words had been Fresh Corn or Yard Sale we could have easily taken it at face value.  But the words, again, were DEAD WHALE.  It's the sort of sign that stops you dead (ha!) in your tracks.   In our case, it had us reversing our rental Toyata Yaris after a few seconds of discussion.   "Do you think it really...?" "Is there actually a...?"

We weren't the only ones who followed the lead.  Along a rocky ridge, we saw a family of five and a young couple standing and looking out toward the water. As we moved closer, we noticed that their chins were tucked into their necks.  They were all looking down at something.   Maybe they were looking down at nothing.  The three youngest gazers turned and walked away silently and we took our place up on the viewing platform.

I'm not sure why I was so startled by the enormous lump rising from the rocky shore.  Why I yelped, "Oh my god!" and slapped my hands over my face.  What else was I expecting?   I hadn't really thought it would be a hot dog truck named "Dead Whale" to reel customers in as I'd joked.   (Though Icelanders do love their hot dog trucks).   This is what I was hoping for, what we'd turned off the road to see.  A dead whale it was, plain as day.   A young woman climbed on top of the beached whale while her boyfriend took a picture.   I imagined her hitting a soft spot and falling straight through into the rotting corpse of a giant whale.   Jonah! the horror movie.

The thing is - the waters surrounding Iceland are some of the best for whale watching in the world.  Humpback, minke, fin, sei and blue, they're all regularly sighted around the coast.  So, I arrived in Iceland with anticipation.  Would I get to see a whale?!   I guess that's what made the dead one so jarring.   It was a whale all right, my very first outside of the technicolor captivity of Sea World, but I wasn't really getting to see it any better off than Shamu.  It was still amazing to see the majestic creature, a little smushed but without swarming bugs or snacking seabirds disturbing its rest.  There wasn't even a stench.  More amazing was the fact that we'd found it following a sign put up on the side of the road.  Just another day of driving around Iceland.

Una, The One and Only

Like everything else in the Balkans, the Una river's name has a legend behind it - this one from Roman Times.  "The one and only," a foot soldier declared when spotting the river. He had never seen anything quite like it.  Even though there are 7 major rivers in Bosnia and Herzegovina and around 28 smaller ones, the Una is widely considered unique, a treasure, almost mythic. They say that it's a place of meditation and enlightenment.  We met it at the very end of the second rainstorm in two days. We'd just been thinking that the sudden, intense showers had made us feel our first real sense of "summer." Standing at the side of the Una, we had a realization, because I guess that's just what happens on this river. What had given us that familiar feeling of summer was all the green. The Northeast corner of Bosnia is a constant landscape of lush fields, and after weeks of Mediterranean climate, it felt familiar. It felt like summers throughout our lives.  And there it was, the Una River showing its powers of enlightenment right off the bat.

For most of its 132 mile length, the Una is surrounded by gorgeous, untouched nature.  It's as if people have known that if an eyesore was built by the Una's side, she'll punish them by reflecting their mistake back clearly and brightly.  The water is remarkably glassy, its reflections are a stunning study in symmetry above and below the horizon line.  It's also so so blue that when a duck glides over its surface, it's as if its tail is pulling down a zipper sewn into blue satin.  Down at the very bottom, the riverbed is smooth limestone.  Shelves of it can be seen raised up above the water in some spots, giving the river a unique and intriguing look.  It feels more like a mountain river than a valley river.  The dense forest rising up on each side, painted in the river's reflection, only adds to that feeling.  It is truly beguiling.

Fish can be seen darting around in such abundance that you feel like you could just throw a net or even a hand in and come up with a shiny, slinky fellow.  If it were only that easy.  This fishing house, set up on stilts, stands behind a roadside restaurant named "Stari Mlini," (Old Mill).  The restaurant's building, much newer, also stands in the river on stilts, between which mill wheels turn.  We'd gotten out of the car to look at it and were then distracted by wildflowers and these amazing blue dragonflies with velvety indigo wings.  Beyond them, we spotted the wooden relic out there alone.  The green river grasses have grown up at the same rate as the structure has broken down.  Even a river can sit still for a moment, this scene communicated to me.  My own little lesson from the Una, from which Bosniaks have been drawing inspiration and wisdom for centuries.

Young couples sit on the banks, staring in to see how good they look together.  Maybe they drop a pebble in to distort the reflection, so the rings of their two faces move in toward one another.  To see what their children would look like.  This young boy came to shore in his skiff, using a thick stick as a paddle.  His two friends stood on a bridge above him, poking fun at his makeshift oar.  This isn't to say that the locals' relationship with the Una is purely serene, contemplative, laid-back.  Rafting is exceedingly popular and big, heavylooking rafts were strung upside-down to the tops of vans that past by.  We saw one red tray carrying a sixpack of yellow helmets cruise by, but were a few days too late for the big spectacle that is the annual Una Regatta. 

Thousands of participants from here and abroad take to the water in rafts, canoes and kayaks, conquering the many waterfalls along the Una's course. It is a non-competitive "race" that takes 3-5 days. It's a celebration of the river, a bowing down to its powers and probably just a really great time. We went to Bihać to inquire about the event, and were welcomed by a sign that read "Bihać: A City in Love with the River."  There would be no point in specifying which one.  The river is the Una, here and throughout Northeast Bosnia and Herzegovina.  She loves this country as much as it loves her - which can only be assumed by the way she keeps bending toward it.  For most of the Una's length, the river runs right along the border of Croatia and Bosnia.  At three different points, though, it deviates from this clear path and curves in to the nation that adores it so much.  Bihać is situated at one of these points, a very pleasant, small city/large town with short, simple bridges arching over the river and picnic tables, parks and cafes edged up to the waterside.

Many say that the people of Bihać are the most ecologically minded Bosniaks in the country.  So, they don't just profess their love of the river, they really let it guide their decisions.  Which is wonderful.  Unlike other beautiful bodies of water we've visited recently, the underwater inhabitants of the Una are not currently at a risk of endangerment.  While fly-fishing is a popular recreational activity and fishing is touted as a unique tourist experience, the licensing system is responsible.  Unska pastrmka (Una river trout) are widely available on riverside menus, but larger species like carp and the prized grayling are left more to the fishermen themselves. Let them eat carp!  I'm happy with pastrmka. The trout of the Una happen to be uniformly plump, pink-fleshed and delicately flavored.  Trout is something that carries a huge dose of terroir and you can taste the purity of the Una.  No muddiness or earthiness, these trout taste like crystal blue water.

In Bosanska Krupa, we came across the young boy pictured earlier while walking across a wood-planked bridge, trying to get a nice photo of the three yellow, red-roofed houses set on stilts above mills.  Their placement is at the end of a mini peninsula, their surrounds are wholly water.  Across the way, a castle sits atop a hill.  Old guns, painted blue, point down directly at the quaint trio, an unfortunate coincidence.  On the other side of the hill is an amazing sight. A mosque, a Catholic church and an Orthodox church stand literally side by side, or at least across the street from one another.  Following the waters for a few days, visiting it at one spot or another, letting it speak to me like the locals told me to, I really felt that the wide expanse of the river right at this point had to do with that successful coexistence.   There's just something very magical about the Una. 

Fikjo, The Cutest Macedonian

I was taking pictures of a white Zastava 750 on a hot day in Prelip when the owner came out on his porch.  “Zastava,” I said, pointing at the car and feeling silly.  “Take it,” he said, making a shooing motion with his hand.  “Please, I don’t want it.  Take it away.”
The car’s seats were broken and threadbare, rusted cracks fanned out around the headlights, it was missing its front fender. But it was still endearing.  This is one of the cutest and most memorable cars of the trip, a pipsqueak with personality.  It’s also uniquely Yugoslavian, a kind of makeshift symbol of the Balkans – Macedonians lovingly nickname it “Fikjo,” but this is a machine with many monikers.

Italians might sneeringly proclaim the Fikjo nothing but a Fiat 600 with a different emblem on the nose.  Americans would be confused by the name Zastava – we knew the company as “Yugo.”  But we Yankees would be surprised to find such a capable and winning car made by the company that gave us this, and the Italians aren’t quite correct.  It’s true that the 750 is based on the Fiat 600, but there are some differences.  The Fikjo is a little longer than its Italian cousin, and it was scaled down a little inside to make it more economical.

They’re ramabout, wheezy-voiced, easily dented or fixed.  Fikjo, the name, is a Macedonian derivation of “Фићa” (“Fića”), a Serbian newspaper comicstrip.  It’s fitting, a kind of plucky, amusing identity.  It’s the kind of car that we Americans find romantic because we don’t have them anymore and Europeans find unappealing because they need to live with them.

We’ve seen dozens of Fikjos in Macedonia.  At first, it was difficult to tell exactly what they were because so many of them are missing their faux-chrome emblems. But we were attracted to the bright colors and tiny bodies.
It’s testament to their durability that there are still so many examples tooling around the streets of the country.  Their 24 horsepower engines emit a laughably impotent drone, something like that of a mo-ped carrying too much weight.  Zastava’s own estimate (I’m using that word to mean “hopeful guess”) proclaims that the car could accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour in 51 seconds.  It would take someone brave to get this little tin box going that fast, though, and probably a long downhill stretch.

The Zastava 750 was immensely popular in Yugoslavia. Capable, affordable and government made, the car brought about the dawn of the automotive age in this part of the world, playing the part that the Model T did in America, or the Citroën Deaux-Chevaux did in France.  The factory in Kragujevac (in modern day Serbia), produced some 930,000 of these little things between 1955 and 1984, almost all of them sold within the Balkans. 

In recent years, a few Fikjo driver clubs have been created and the model has begun to see an upswing in popularity.  Parked near the oil wrestling in Çalıklı, we saw a shiny 750 with racing stripes and a rear spoiler.  There are fan groups in the UK and France as well as here.  The car has suddenly become a piece of nostalgia.

Zastava fell on hard times after the wars of the 1990’s, and eventually was completely subsumed by Fiat, which had a major stake in the company for years.  The old assembly plant is being retrofitted to begin producing modern Fiat cars, but the process is slow and the future seems uncertain.

In most cases, the old communist underpinnings in these countries have been covered up and plowed under.  But there are beloved reminders of those days, too, that transcend hardship.  For someone born towards the end of Tito's reign, it's easy to love the Fikjo.  It's one of the few bits of history left, roaming the streets, coughing at red lights, clanging with life.