 |
| Uta Ibrahimi poses at the start of the Cycle Kosovo for Children |
What people notice most about my photos and stories from Kosovo have to do with cows, and this seemed to start from my arrival here. Cows are perhaps one of the best ways of describing what cycling is like in this country. Everyone remembers the photos, and no one seems to believe the stories. I meant to be writing about the Cycle Kosovo for Children ride, which started yesterday- but two days ago I was struck down by a norovirus, and this is my first time even looking at my computer, let alone a bike. I had to let all my friends ride on without me. They ride into Albania today, likely facing 100F (38C) heat, as they ride between Peja and Gjakova.
 |
| Rugova Valley near Peja, Sept 2015 |
Kosovo is almost the exact opposite of where I grew up and started biking in Wisconsin. Hilly where Neenah, WI was flat, wild instead of placid, confusing instead of being built on a grid system of roads, etc. The county of Kosovo is quite young in some ways, only gaining its independence from Serbia in 2008 (and that is still disputed), following a brutal war in 1998-99 that was ended by NATO occupation. The NATO troops are still here, and the country is still rebuilding, dealing both with its Yugoslav past and a largely unregulated pattern of building since 1999. The country is only 4200 square miles, about the size of Rhode Island in the US or Cape Breton in Canada. It's surrounded by hills along its border with Serbia to the north and East, and two mountains ranges along its borders with Montenegro, Albania, and Macedonia. With a population of around 1.7 million, its largest cities are the capital Pristina (pop. 200-300K, depending on who you ask), Prizren, Peja, Gjakova, and Mitrovica.
My wife Tracy and I arrived here in August 2015. We had been in Budapest earlier in the year when I was hired, and I'd spent the summer training for hills and not having any idea what to expect when I arrived here. I'd brought one bike, my older Trek1000 trainer, and only a small handful of shorts and jerseys. The first day out was not promising, I had put on new tires and tubes, and after only 2km one blew out a sidewall, destroying the new tire. A second ride confused me terribly, as the Google maps bore no resemblance to actual roads in the city, and I could only leave by cutting through someone's backyard at the top of a climb. Starting in the spring before I arrived I'd been following two people on Strava, Tolga Kerveshi and Gjenghis Torbance, who both wondered what this guy from Washington, DC was doing giving kudos to all their rides. But Tolga noticed the moment I first rode out on my bike in Pristina, and started showing me the local roads.
The roads here don't always follow a logical pattern, even when new. Main roads connect towns and villages, with spurs leading off to side streets, once in a while connecting elsewhere. New roads are often being paved (for the record, mountain biking was not popular here for a long while, owing to risk of landmines in certain places), but they don't always lead anywhere. The role of 'scouts' is to check these new roads, which often climb 300 meters to nothing more than three houses and a large dog. We mostly avoid the main roads, instead leading through farmlands and small villages in the high hills and mountains. Studying Strava rides is done constantly by people here, and others notice immediately if a new road is found, because there are certain patterns and only certain possibilities through the mountains and hills. Straight out-and-back routes are more common than loops, and
some of the loops we've defined from Pristina can be quite brutal. And there are cows.
 |
| Jen's introduction to Kosovo |
When Jen Whytock visited in September of last year, on her first ride we took her to
Batllava Lake for a 100km route. On the way back to Pristina was a long climb and a very steep, sweeping descent. At the top, I warned her of the hairpin corner at the bottom, but also how the year before I'd
nearly killed myself going 40mph (65kph) around a corner only to face a herd of cows standing in the middle of the road, which had not been there only ten minutes earlier. When we descended, there were the same cows. They had been part of her warning package (mostly dealing with traffic behavior), but I always sensed that people thought I stopped every time I saw a cow, not that the roads were lousy with them. She had to wait in the middle of the road as a herd of two dozen swept past her, climbing an 18% grade. And in many ways, the cows describe what the experience is like here.
 |
| A young bull in Rugova Valley, August 2017 |
There are few fences in Kosovo, so the cows roam freely, often unattended and yet knowing where they want to go. There is even a herd at the Montenegro-Kosovo border on Kulla Pass that walks itself back and forth across the border station. The cows still have their horns (which one notices when hurtling toward them at high speed), are grass-fed and healthy, at times even jumping barrier fences along roads when they do exist. I've had to weave through cows herds on the roads during two road races, I've seen them wandering through the cities, and I hardly ever ride without sharing the road with them. Contrast that with Wisconsin, where we had plenty of cows, but all behind safe fences as we rode along straight, flat roads. The experience cycling here is very in-your-face, it's a state of constant alertness, always wondering what is around the next corner, feeling that the road merely passes through the countryside, not dominating it or defining it. I never considered cows to be wildlife before, but here they own the landscape, not the humans. Even the road conditions, which admittedly are not the best, seem ephemeral and can be washed away at any time. One might read about how roads in England were defined either by adhering to local customs and paths, or the Roman roads that made straight lines regardless of terrain. Kosovo still follows its old paths in many places, and on the bike one sees a world that is somehow frozen in time. I've probably never felt quite as alive cycling, even in Colorado or the French Alps. Things may be chaotic, riding through traffic in Pristina or Prizren may be like swimming in 12 dimensions, and racing can be downright frightening (but that's another story).
So navigating the cows, roads and traffic here requires people. The GPS maps on my Wahoo computer are wonderfully accurate even in deepest Alabama, but in Kosovo they are a rough sketch. The cows still own the roads, and I had to be taken under the wing of Tolga, Gjenghis (who became my teammate and training partner), Migjen, Agim, Albion, Artan, Bashkim, Valon, and others. Teaming up with Uta, fresh back from Nepal, is a way of trying to share some of that knowledge. I wish I were with them today, even in the blistering heat of northern Albania.
 |
| Tolga leading me through a cow herd toward Badovac Lake, October 2015. |
