How we got our motorhome road insurance in bosnia

Bosnia insurance papers

Every time we tried to find out how to get our motorhome insurance for Bosnia Herzegovina the answers we always came back to was “Just get your van insurance on the border”.

So, off we went to Bosnia Herzegovina after stopping in one of our favourite lakeside places in Croatia just before Plitvice Lakes.  The crossing is called ‘Granicni Prijelaz Izacic’. 

To cross the border into Bosnia Herzegovina we had our international driving permit (D.P) to hand, our V5 document which covers our ownership of Freddy and our passports.

Just to be clear, you don’t need an international driving permit, a UK driving licence is fine. We  only have them as we are renting a tuk-tuk in Sri Lanka for a month and needed to have a D.P for that – so whilst we were in the post-office back home, got one to cover all of the Baltic countries (you do need a D.P for some of the Baltic regions)

Long story short and all that – we arrived at the border of Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina at noon on a Sunday. We got stamped out of Croatia fine (make sure you get that stamp as you are leaving the Schengen Area) and stamped into Bosnia Herzegovina, having only showed our passports.

They didn’t seem interested in the V5 and they were not interested in the driving licences or any of the contents of the van – although everyone in the opposite direction was being searched. I don’t know if that is because Croatia are now officially a Schengen member state and there is concern over the corruption levels of Bosnia or if it was just a quiet day and they had the time.

Regardless of that – we asked the Bosnian border control guy where we could get our van insurance from.

This got his attention a little more than we has when we were trying to pass through. 

With our mix of language understanding – we don’t speak Bosnian and his little English – I took the control as I was slightly concerned about him not letting us in! I suggested (in my pigeon English) that we get it at Bihac which was going to be our first stop. This was met with great enthusiasm and a ‘Yes, Bihac insurance’.

2 things of note here.

  1. We could not see anywhere at the border that we could buy insurance and the border control guy wasn’t able to suggest anything.
  2. We did think about whether we were insured or not – the border control guy didn’t seem to be concerned so we drove for 30 minutes on the Bosnian roads. The alternative was to turn back to Croatia and sort the insurance there – but we were not sure how we would do this even. 

30 minutes later, we parked up in Bihac, the drive being completely comfortable with no hiccups or scary moments.  

We decided to park up in a quiet place, put all the security on that we have (steering locks, foot pedals, internal camera, alarms etc!) and explore some of the town. We had to stay over night in order to wait for the insurance places to open on Monday morning.

Bihac in pictures

Monday morning came and we pretty much had two things on our agenda to sort out:

  • Motorhome road insurance
  • SIM cards for the phone with data!

After a couple of coffees and seeking out a ‘pekara’ (bakery) to buy some ‘burek’ for breakfast (I had to try these traditional local pastries immediately!), we went to a phone shop to get the sim card (you buy it at the tobacco/magazine stalls!). Having sorted out our immediate telephoney needs (I swapped my sim card out of my unlocked phone and put the Bosnian one in) we could now search on google maps for insurance companies around the town.

We found the first shop and went in. I highly recommend that you get yourself familiar with Google Translate as you attempt the mission of seeking out insurance if you don’t speak the language. Make sure you have downloaded the offline contact if you don’t yet have a sim card. If you are not planning to have a sim card in your phone for whatever reason, download the content when you are in Croatia and likely using your own mobile phone data! After some too-ing and fro-ing we were unable to get insurance at this company. They would not insure on a foreign vehicle.
Next shop. Same thing.
We started to weigh up the pro’s and con’s available to us having crossed into Bosnia and planning on spending at least 6 weeks there!  Decided to have coffee and regroup and get our google translate conversations all lined up and saved in the phone! 2 espresso coffees later and renewed vigour and energy (in the rain now!) we entered our third shop. And BINGO! 

The place that we got our insurance from was called:

Aura Osigurange, Bihac – which is just off the main highway in the town centre.

I have added the exact detail to the map on the left hand side.

The lady we spoke to was super helpful and said that it was possible for us to do but it would take until the end of the day for them to get the paperwork together. 

We left photographs of our V5, photographs of our international driving licences and our contact number and went to do more exploration, try local food and have a local ‘pivo’ (beer).

At 3pm local time, the phone pinged, a WhatsApp message to say that our insurance was all sorted, we had cover for 45 days (6 weeks) at the cost of 70 euros which needed to be paid in cash and they closed at 4pm. We didn’t have any euros but we were able to pay in BAM – the local currency of Bosnia Herzegovina and they were happy with that.

Off we went to pick up and pay for our insurance. We received two certificates – one which insured us for a month, and one which insured us for a further two weeks. 

Yay – we were now insured and could move out from Bihac to explore the national park of the Una River for lovely walks and waterfalls and make our way towards Banja Luka, where we had plans of rafting, quad biking and horse riding! 

 

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