Compared to Mostar, Čapljina feels desolate, like some sort of gated community where anyone without a key which opens a door there has no business. Evidently, Čapljina has a town square with a church, a statue and a tower, but following the trail, you see none of this. Our bed for the night was just that, a bed. The hotel itself didn’t have a restaurant so, though we were beat, we had no choice but to hop back on our bicycles and head back out in search of food. Miraculously, we found a small cluster of three restaurants just a short distance down the road. There, we sat at the foot of a mosque, drinking a few too many beers and eating dinner, while the Maghrib sunset prayer wailed through a speaker just above us.

While the stretch of trail from Mostar to Čapljina was mostly paved, the stretch to Ravno, which we planned to cover on our second day, was not so kind. Our group decided to split. Two of us headed for the incessantly steep but paved road while the other three stayed on the more heroic split of the trail within the dense forests further within the mountains on the former train line, where the path is made of loosely packed rocks, not to mention the sheer drops on either side.