This region offers the joys of Europe, without the crowds

Sydney Morning Herald

11-05-2025

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 and vine-shaded restaurant courtyards where lamb sizzles.
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 Josip Tito, communist president of the former Yugoslavia. I've opted for Lukomir in the highlands behind Sarajevo.
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.
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.
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, Croatia's capital. 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
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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.