We crossed today first time ever to Bosnia & Herzegovina. We had heard rumours that the border and customs control can take multiple hours so we tried to schedule our border crossing to a day when Meri was not working. But to our surprise everyone in the Bijača border control was full of joy and we needed only 10 minutes to pass 😊.
Duration of stay
Traveling with dogs
Dogs traveling to Bosnia & Herzegovina need to have up to date Rabies vaccination which has been given in last 13 days to 12 months. We were lucky and our Rabies Vaccination for Lyyli was done only 3 months prior and nothing was needed.
Getting online outside of European Union
What we didn’t realize is that Bosnia & Herzegovina is not part of EU so our EU roaming packages did not work and we needed to work remotely next day. Our Finnish Sim cards provided only 0.25€ / Mb which becomes pretty expensive after having video conferencing for few hours 💸.
We saw billboards on the road when we were driving to Kravica Waterfalls about Novotel and cheap data.
You can buy eSIM from them for 5 Bosnian Mark (≈2.6€): https://novotel.ba/eSIM. If you’re not expert reader of Croatian or Bosnian language it’s easiest to do with Google Chrome and right click to use
“Translate to English” option.
eSIM QR-code arrives into your email in PDF file shortly after ordering. Set it up and then you can monitor your data usage by downloading their iOS app “Moj Novotel” from App Store. You’ll find the needed phone number in the PDF.When you run out of the initial 3gb they seemed to offer pretty solid deals like:
These probably have changed when you’re reading this but download their app and you can check from there. This local eSIM is much cheaper than using the international eSIM providers or using your own SIM card. If the SIM doesn’t connect automatically check that your APN setting is
novotel.Later on we learned that even though Starlink is not officially supported in Bosnia & Herzegovina it still works if you have active roam subscription in other country. SpaceX can’t sell them there because they are not officially approved yet but nothing blocks the dish from connecting into the satellites.
Kravica falls
When we crossed the border from Croatia the first place in our list was Kravica waterfalls. We had seen many great pictures about it and people swimming there while holding cocktails in the evening sun.
This probably can happen in Summer but in mid-April the waterfall is flooded and water is cold so most of their facilities are still closed. It was quite rundown place compared to Plitvice in Croatia but we imagine it’s totally worth it in hot summer days ☀️.
Next up
From Kravica we drove to Mostar and spent the night near Millenium Cross & Mostar View Point. Many cars were passing by in the evening but nobody bothered us.
This week we want to explore this nuclear bunker built by Tito during the cold war. It’s located near Konjic and nowadays converted to underground art gallery:
