I feel my legs twitching again, so I want to start the road cycling. I do the whole length of Hvar Island until I reach the ferryport. It is all up and down on a really scenic road. The closer I get to it, the cliff of Croatia mainland gets more and more impressive. Hvar itself has a few sights too. Like the car that got parked a bit too far back. No one got it out again and now shrubberies are growing through it. Or the forest fire, that ran so fast, it only burned the needles, but left the trees standing with their branches as black ruins. The village with the ferry port is no picturesque sight. I arrive before Nici and lay on a bench at the end of the queue. When the loading of the ferry starts, I move with the queue and hope Nici arrives soon enough. She doesn't, but it aint matter. The ferry doesn't fit the whole queue. We are in a position now, that we should fit the next one. We spend the time having lunch at the village. While there we watch the youngsters with their afternoon program. Hang around at the harbour, listen to hiphop and do fishing. A young black cat behind them plays with a fish they caught, that is to small for humans to eat. We fit the next ferry, one and a half hours later. It is the same boat as the traject takes only 30 minutes. On the croatian side, I take over the drivers seat until we reach the border to Bosnia. In Bosnia it is no good Idea for me to drive. They like to check the papers there. On our drive, they check the car behind us. To drive into Neretva valley is impressive. The valley is flat, a plain. But in the middle of the valley, the Neretva dug a canyon almost 100m deep.
We go to the campground "Auto River Camp Half-Island-Buna". Welcome to sleazy translations. The camp is really new and situated on a peninsula, around which the Buna flows. Not many people reside here anymore. Gaga and his Mother are friendly and welcoming landlords. We pitch our tent as far away from the river as possible, the climate is dryer here. And we make friends with one of the cats roaming the grounds. Gaga says the cats don't belong here, but since tourists feed them, they stay. Well yes... we feed it too. One of the cats is so cuddly; we take it into our tent for the night. There it curls itself on the pillow between us. The sleep is not very good, someone is always moving and the tent is to small for three doing that. In the morning the cat sleeps on the pillow next to Nici. What a lovely sight!
Today is cliff diving day. The reason we came back to Mostar. But first I have to fix Nici's bike's back tire again. When putting it back, one of the plastic tools gets stuck and breaks apart. I don't find the missing part anymore. But the tire holds, let's try it. We cycle to Mostar and park our bikes in the official parking in the yard of a restaurant. The cliff diving event is huge. They block the bridge and the "auditorium" down at the river is densely populated. It is still an hour to go, so we head for brunch first. We have an oversize pizza together. Somehow we should have known. If you order a dish for 19 KM (€9.50) in Bosnia, expect something big! Then we move to the auditorium. The arena is full, but we manage our way down to the river. Our place for the event is on a rock in the river. Luckily for us not many people are dressed in a way that they want to cross the knee deep water. We stay there for the whole event, with a perfect view on the jumpers. The men jump from a tower built on the bridge and a total of 28 meters. This tower fits the scenery perfectly with its painted surface of old rocks. The women jump from 20m, which is the height of the bridge. This is a big show! All around the auditorium large screens show the slow motion details of the jumps. The show starts with the introduction of all the jumpers, standing on the bridge and waving. Today the man jump three times, the women only two. They did one more yesterday. What I don't get is which jump they may do how many twists and salti. We have a good time watching them jump and cheer to them. The field is narrow and first places change from round to round. In the end the winner is the czech competitor, Michal Navratil. He won many competitions before. He completely failes his second jump, but the third one is so awesome, he jumped from 4th to first. What amazed us with the female jumpers is the age. The average is maybe 30 and the winner is 41 years old Lysanne Richard from Canada. After a short stroll through the streets of Mostar - it is incredibly crowded - we have a short drink and head back to Buna.
This is the first campground we have a kitchen at our service. Pasta with pesto rosso is our dinner and off we go to bed. Tonight we want to sleep well. The cat stays outside. This is a measure the cat does not understand. How should it. Desperately it looks for an entrance. It climbs around between the outside and the inner layer of the tent, climbing up and down on the mosquito net and staying on top of the construction for some time. When it tries to force its way in by clawing and biting the mosquito net, we have to hit it through the tent's layer. Then we can sleep. The tent has not suffered severe damage. Some holes in the mosquito net have to be stuffed. They are not the first ones.
If looks could kill, we'd be dead the next morning. Then the cat enters the tent, curls itself on the pillow and sleeps until we pack the tent to leave. Before racing to Istria to meet Mariane and Nico, we visit the Dervish monastery of Blagaj. In Blagaj, just behind the monastery, the river Buna springs from a cave. The whole river is always 8°C cold, from spring to the end, 15km long. The monastery is interesting, but hard to describe. Picturesque definitely. Nici has her own scarf with her, so she could enter the mosque without looking like a client in a mental hospital. Though the fear was not necessary. The scarves they have here to put on tourists would have been beautiful ones.
I spend my last coins at the tourist shop. A futile thing. There is a short stretch of motorway, where we'll have to split a note again and end up with a lot of coins. From Blagaj we head directly towards Croatia.