Adventure
If you’re willing to get dirty, Croatia can thrill even the most travel-hardened adventurer
Words and photography Dale Lomas
The stark afternoon sun beats down on the rocky, yellow two-track ahead of us, while a gusty wind off the grey mountain ridge to our right pummels both my ears and my body. It’s strong enough to push the bike around, and cold enough to chill the sweat on my back. The trail is getting steeper, the rocks bigger and looser. I’m worried not just for myself, or the pristine bike I’ve borrowed, but also for my novice mate riding my own bike behind me. ‘Maybe this is too much,’ I mutter to myself.
I glance up from the dangers of the trail, to catch a glimpse of the snow-laden clouds that are stalled on the Bosnian horizon. Those black clouds have been threatening us for the past two hours, yet still haven’t crossed the border. The Dinaric Alps have hemmed that bad weather in, while we ride northwards on this 4000ft-high border trail.
Somewhere ahead of us is the next village. Maybe ten miles as the crow flies, and a few thousand feet of descending into the valley below us. Like the countless settlements we’ve already ridden through, it is likely to be a mix of quietly rugged post-Yugoslav houses mixed with bullet-ridden concrete wrecks, open to the elements on at least one side.
They often seem empty at first glance, but stop for a drink or a stretch and you’ll soon see signs of life appearing. For us, in one such ruined village, it was an elderly gentleman with a walking stick who, without a single word of English, managed to invite us to eat walnuts with him from a tree that he used to shake the nuts from as a child.
On any normal tour, I’d figure on ten miles of riding taking a little more than ten minutes, or twenty at worst. But not today.
Far from the beaten path
We’re a long way from the turquoise seascapes and brochure-perfect hotels of the Croatian Riviera right now. Those sexy serpentine tarmac roads from Rijeka all the way down to Montenegro, with impossibly beautiful views of the Adriatic Sea, are the normal meat-and-two-veg of my summer side-gig: leading motorcycle tours anywhere from the Alps to the Andes.
But on this ride my friend Jens and I wanted something different. A challenge. Roads less ridden; views not seen by thousands every day. No Alps. No Pyrenees. Something a wee bit more… wild. And we only had a few days to get it all in.
I’m no stranger to greenlaning in the UK, offroading through the Andes, or even being bashed by dunes in Morocco – though my enthusiasm for sand riding far outstrips my ability and fitness. But poor Jens has never ridden more off-road than the odd gravel-road detour. His goal is to become comfortable with riding a big adventure bike on dirt, rocks and gravel. It meshes nicely with my desire to add Croatia to my list of countries I’ve ridden ‘off-road’. For Jens’ maiden adventure we decided to follow the more adventure-bike-friendly Adventure Country Tracks (ACT) routes, rather than the trickier, more technical Trans Euro Trail (TET).
I’ve loaned Jens my own Aprilia Tuareg 660, fully crash-protected and adventure ready. I’ve already ridden it all over Europe. From the UK, to the Picos, via the Alps, even down to Montenegro, there’s a scratch to match every trail and adventure it’s been on. It’s never been any less than 100 per cent reliable, and grin-like-an-idiot fun, on tarmac and the TET. With proper tyres ready for some 50/50 roads and trails, I reckon it’s the best ‘big’ bike for him to get a handle on his off-road aspirations.
‘The views are staggering – we’re hours from civilisation’
Showroom fresh
My ride is a Kove 800X Pro, fresh from the showroom. Absolutely mint, with only the factory crash bars and some of my own luggage between the mint bodywork and a €2500 insurance excess. It’s on the stock Pirelli STRs, which are great street tyres in dry conditions, but far from my first choice for traversing mud-filled ruts and damp grassy slopes.
Day one goes spectacularly well as we traverse the Istria peninsula (the big, wild chunk of Croatia between Italian Trieste and the tourist resort of Rijeka). Easy trails (many lifted from ACT Day 1), simple rolling hills, and perfect weather all come together perfectly. Jens is still buzzing as we load the van and drive to southern Croatia in one of the biggest storms of the year. Sitting in that torrential rain, with gusting crosswinds so strong that motorcycles and high-sided trucks are forbidden from entering the motorway, I’m happy to be in a van.
From that day on, the wind never seems to ease, but blue skies with fast-moving clouds and occasional rain showers become the new norm. So we stash the van in Sinj, rent an apartment with gated access for less than a single night in a UK hotel, and set out to explore Day 4 and Day 5 of the ACT routes, along with anything else I find along the way.
A ferry from Split at 8am the following day turns into exciting event on its own. Arriving two hours later on the long, narrow island of Hvar, we revel in a full day of riding that blesses us with incredible views from seaside cliffs, easy ACT Day 5 trails through the back-country, and secluded millionaire-mansions on beach-side sandy roads. We eventually head home on the final ferry at sunset, convinced that the trip couldn’t get any better.
‘We revel in a full day of riding that blesses us with incredible views’
The wrong way
But for our final day, I’m dragging us the wrong way up the optional hard-mountain ACT Day 4 section. The views are staggering, the altitude invigorating. But we’re now hours from civilisation, and the trail is getting worse. It’s two full days since that epic rainfall, but we’re still finding entire sections of the trail deep under opaque muddy water.
In one section, riding ahead, as I use the intercom to talk Jens through a muddy rut onto a wet rock climb, I hear the bark of the Aprilia hitting 8000rpm, followed by a solid ‘oof’, then a ‘sorry, Dale’. Nothing broken, not even a bruise, but my Tuareg is teetering over a 6ft drop, lying on the crash bars at the edge of the tail, facing 90 degrees from the original direction of travel. Manhandling 200kg bikes back on to a muddy trail, over rocks, is the worst part of the middle-aged adventure business.
But we cope with this so well that Jens does it again just a few hundred yards down the trail. And then again, a few minutes after that.
Meanwhile, I’m keeping the street-tyred Kove upright, though for how much longer I don’t know. We take a break while my heart rate returns to something more appropriate for my fitness and age, and I hear Jens sit on a rock with a deep sigh.
‘Maybe, just maybe, this off-road is too much for me,’ he sighs. ‘Are we even getting off this mountain?’
This is easy
I sense my own doubt now being amplified by Jens. He’s had a bad run, but he’s done so well to get this far. We’re both tired, that’s all. And self-pity isn’t going to get two blokes off a mountain before the snow hits. Or the sun sets. Whichever comes first, I don’t like either.
‘Nah, this is easy,’ I tell him, as I fire up the Kove and point it down into the Croatian valley below. And you know what? He smiles, stands up, and gets back on the Aprilia.
An hour later we’re cruising past a turquoise lake, enjoying smooth tarmac, heading back to the apartment, satisfaction for adventure truly sated. A day later, sat in the warm van, we both laugh at the memories of feeling sad and tired, cold on a mountain top. They were a different Jens and Dale, in the past, and short-lived. Not worth talking about, except to acknowledge that the highs can’t come without the lows.
This Jens and Dale are warm, dry, and planning the bikes, tyres, trips and goals for 2026. The way it should be.
Bike verdict Having spent a week bashing it around Croatia, then another around the Eifel, the Kove has proved completely reliable and deeply impressive. Off-road, only its slightly snatchy throttle annoys. On-road, a lack of cruise control is merely disappointing. But the rest of the 800X Pro is better than Yamaha’s Ténéré 700 and Aprilia’s Tuareg 660 when it comes to engine performance and suspension quality. And even better is yet to come – Kove’s updated 2026 version (p53) will come with a two-way quickshifter and cruise control. My name’s already on the waiting list.
ACT or TET?
Both Adventure Country Tracks (ACT) and Trans Euro Trail (TET) collate off-tarmac routes, then do their best to imprint upon their users that these trails are both beautiful but easy to lose. TET is based in the UK; ACT in Germany. Another key difference is that while the TET offers its GPX route files for free, and uses volunteer linesmen to keep the routes up to date, ACT has a tiered ‘membership’ programme for downloading its GPX routes.
» Trans Euro Trail
Inspired by the Trans American Trail, TET founder John Ross started piecing together an off-road route from the UK across Europe just over ten years ago. The difficulty of these routes varies as much as the landscape, countries and legalities of each country it crosses. But it’s fair to say, from my perspective at least, that I find TET routes to be more suited to true green-lane machines. From 250s to 600s, most TET routes offer a challenge. You can take a stock BMW R1300GS on many routes without dropping it once, but a lot will depend on your own skills and your own capacity for suffering. Check out transeurotrail.org
» Adventure Country Tracks
By comparison, the ACT concentrates on creating routes for bigger bikes. Within the community that means the ACT routes are often seen as ‘easier’, though they’re often no less interesting or beautiful. ACT started more recently, and is supported by some of the biggest names in the German adventure bike industry, giving it a more polished feel, though with far fewer routes to download and more tarmac than the TET. With celebrity endorsements, a sea of influencers, and a big-budget YouTube video to launch each new route, it’s quite the opposite of the gritty TET community, though no less important to those of us looking for places to actually use our 200kg-plus ‘adventure’ bikes. See more at adventurecountrytracks.com
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