Jahorina... 2008

I couldn't believe when I pressed the "OK" button to buy the flight to Belgrade... I was returning, a year later, to Jahorina, in Bosnia, near Sarajevo, one of the ski resorts developed for '84 Winter Olympics, still a big pride for their people.

It happens that also the gear, machines, structure, ski lifts, mentality, are still from that same time. This is not to be badly interpreted. It's a resort where the runs only exist on the map. When the ski lifts take you to the top there are absolutely no signs, marks, lines, poles, flags. Information is zero! You ask the guy around (working on the top of the lifts, to help removing people of the ground to avoid them being hit by the coming chair - yeah, they never stop the chairs from going around. If you fall, bad luck, just move quickly... oh, and be careful with you head) where's the "red" slope and he will vaguely point down, saying something like, “around there, going down”.

This place is beautiful, mind blowing! Rules are scarce. Limited tracks are inexistent. During the night some few machines do their best to keep a reasonable amount of "skiable snow" ready for the skiers the next morning. There are no snow-making machines. Only what falls from the ski (can give rise to panic attacks, specially because until 4 days before my flight to Belgrade the global warming was playing its tricks and Jahorina was more brownish than white). But the best, really, is that there aren't limited runs or tracks. We have total freedom to go anywhere, no barriers, ropes, nets "protecting" the users from trees. We can surf to the middle of small hoods, dodging pine trees, feeling the powder, falling and getting fresh snow till the knee, and having a grin on the face from the supreme feeling of being the first going around there, since the mark my snowboard leaves is the only one around; exploring every irregularity of the slope for jumps, for sick turns, to raise the adrenaline levels. In some places where, in any other resort in the Alps or Pirinees, danger poles would be placed to warn about a dangerous little hill, or a strange hole on the terrain, forbidding the passage, in Jahorina it’s just one more jump, one more feature to try, people gather around to check it out and see what's the next guy going to do with it. How many times I heard, down at the ski lifts, "damn! fuck! you gotta check out that jump I just found out!!", or "I just went through some sick section in the middle of some trees up there!!". And all this, simply, just because, here we can. Since there aren't limited runs, there aren't limits.

Obviously, this also comes with a downside. There's no warnings regarding rocks, areas that lack snow (I got a scratch on by board of 50cm that cut till the wood because of a stone I didn't spot), or about dangerous ice plaques, the ski lifts are never stopped in case of danger... this mentality also allowed me to go up in the lifts a couple of times, during a blizzard (winds topping 40-50 Km/h, -15ºC and a wind chill of -25ºC) and go down in zero visibility conditions. The snow being thrown to my face, horizontally, blocked my vision to more than 5-10 meters ahead. It was surreal. And amazing. For several times I could be totally alone in fresh fallen powder. Something impossible in more organized resorts... or any other resort that I know about, that wouldn't even need half of the blizzard's strength to be closed.

Then, there's the Balkan people. Always warm and welcoming, with a good humour, caring about their "visitors", completely hallucinated and always in a constant party. The jokes are the same I'd tell in Portugal, the way to drink, the way to party, also the same. For several times, I compared them to us. In the more mundane things of life, this serbs, croats, bosnians, are more similar to us than spanish people.

Hopefully, the next year I'll be back... it will be the third time, and it will be worth it!