Bound by mountains: Riding Beyond Borders
Every year, the Now on Earth Youth Adventure Grant supports young people taking on challenging experiences
For our July 2026 feature, we’re shining a light on Now on Earth, a charity that focuses on supporting young people’s sense of adventure, chosen by Desbruslais’ Kath Perry. Each journey helps them grow in confidence and skills, and is supported by Now on Earth’s Youth Adventure Grant. As part of Now on Earth’s mission, Chloe Boxall went solo biking and mountain climbing across four Balkan countries. We’ve asked Chloe to share her expedition experience, and how treks like these can help shape the lives of young people…
I started the grant because I know what a single expedition did for me, and I’ve watched it do the same for others: it builds resilience, confidence and self-belief that no classroom, workplace or wellbeing course can manufacture. For some of the young people we’ve supported, so far 19 and counting, it might be the first time that someone has backed them to attempt something genuinely hard.
So every other year, to raise the funds that make those grants possible, I set myself a self-funded adventure challenge. Make no mistake, I do this because I love adventure, and pushing myself to see what I might be capable of! But fundraising for the grant is the secret sauce; it makes for an adventure with purpose.
This summer, that meant riding Dervla, my gravel bike, solo across four Balkan countries, climbing three mountains on foot along the way, unsupported and without certainty of how my midlife body (or nerve!) would hold up.
There is no need for an alarm clock in the mountain villages around Sarajevo
My first nights fell under the shadow of tiny Ottoman-era mektabs, and I woke early to the call to prayer rolling through the valleys. This landscape is built on hard history; Fikret, a local mountain guide, met by a water fountain, told me that the road I was cycling had been forged during the war, a way in or out for communities that once braved challenging mountain trails just once or twice a year for supplies.
I quickly learned the Balkans exact a tax for their beauty. Day two brought a brutal 13km forest climb in the heat, and a mechanical crisis: the cheap rack I’d bought en-route to the airport (having failed to pack my own), wrecked the threads on Dervla’s frame and collapsed. An hour of roadside engineering followed, resurrecting the rack with a prayer, some spare screws and my entire supply of cable ties.
The following day the heatwave arrived properly, the mercury climbing to 36°C, and a 7km ascent became a crawl from one tiny patch of shade to the next while I sweated a litre a minute. This was followed by a steep, slidey gravel descent, which I walked much of, to spare Dervla’s brakes and my shaky hands.
For every hard mile though, there was a reward: a cafe with apple pie, a cloud of butterflies, the deadpan warmth of the Bosnian people, who might greet an over-enthusiastic “Dobar Dan!” with an initial look of utter disinterest, before revealing real kindness underneath.
To dodge the worst heat, I rolled out at dawn on day four, riding into the jaws of the magnificent Tara Canyon and crossing the first border into Montenegro; returning to more normal temperatures and gentle rolling terrain beside the electric-blue Tara river. That evening, spirits revived, I indulged in a wonderfully glacial dip.
Montenegro kept giving. Piva Nature Park was bursting with rolling, flower-studded hills and butterflies, the Tolkienesque peaks of Durmitor looming in the distance. I arrived in the Katun Highlands just ahead of a biblical hail and thunderstorm; the power went out, and I ate dinner by solar light alongside a handful of motorcyclists before retreating to a tiny, cosy wooden cabin.
The next morning we entered Durmitor National Park, and fuelled by Turkish coffee and disappointingly dry buns (resuscitated with a whole jar of local honey), I pedalled up Sedlo Pass, over 1900m, the highest Dervla and I had been together, followed by a brilliant, gravity-fuelled slalom down the other side.
Now a week in, I finally had a proper rest day near Žabljak: giving Dervla some attention, restocking supplies, eating everything in sight and resting a body that felt thoroughly hollowed out. I love the simplicity of life on the road, taking care of mundane tasks like washing your socks and bibs, when your main concerns each day are reaching your destination, and eating/drinking enough to get your there in one piece.
The next morning brought the first mountain on foot, Prutaš, and the weather was not cooperating. The peaks were shrouded in cloud, battered by a stiff wind, and I nursed a stuffy cold. Still, it was a good day. Snow clung stubbornly to odd patches near the summit, and I made the top early, rewarded with solitude, if only a wall of white cloud where the view should have been. The limestone descent finished off my well-worn trail runners entirely, and I hitchhiked into town to replace them, tripping over the flapping sole and falling straight into the shop, to the alarm of the owner, who kindly took the sodden, rather swampy remains off my hands. One mountain down, two to go.
Setting off again, a 20km climb bought me onto the Sinjajevina Plateau, a remotely beautiful, high-altitude, grassland crossed with gravel tracks. The track led through a channel of rock, before the Komovi Massif revealed itself in full, theatrical glory. It stopped me completely with a rush of emotion, one of those moments where you feel both entirely insignificant and somehow deeply connected to everything around you. The impressive leg finished with a glorious gravel run down into Kolašin, and the following day’s ride to Podgorica brought an equally spectacular descent, the temperature climbing fifteen degrees in the snaking ten kilometres down into the city. Balkan hospitality never let up: a grocer refused payment for an apple, a cafe owner waved me over for a coffee on the house. In a cafe culture dominated by men smoking and debating, I was it seemed, something of an amusing oddity.
Albania arrived in a haze of contrast. As I left Podgorica, a burning rubbish dump sent a toxic plume drifting over the city, a jarring note after so much natural beauty, but the countryside soon reasserted itself as I followed Lake Shkodër toward the border, where officials waved me through airily. Albania’s main road here thankfully came with a “wild card” lane, shared cheerfully by bikes, mopeds and anything else that needed one, and after ten days of relative isolation, Shkodër itself was an assault on the senses: a city swarming with bicycles and life. Albanian people mostly seemed enthusiastically friendly; at one point I was waved down purely to say hello and congratulate me on the football.
A ‘baby’ mountain called Taraboshi, tackled the next day, reminded me to never underestimate a mountain. A steep climb in punishing heat, scratchy vegetation, furious flies, and, at the summit, a barrier of “No unauthorised personnel” signs and a barking dog guarding a cluster of mobile masts. I retreated the way I’d come, scratched and outmanoeuvred, reflecting the ‘baby’ must be a spawn of Satan, but consoled by the beautiful view over the lake below. This later provided the perfect antidote, being clear and as warm as bathwater.
The road back into the mountains brought fresh tarmac, beautiful scenery, and great company: Jasmin, an Austrian solo rider who had sold her flat and quit her job to cycle Europe. We rode the final kilometres together one day, and chatted over coffee. Somehow connections made on the road seem to fast-track to friendship remarkable quickly, and I was sorry we couldn’t share more of our journey. At my accommodation in Koman, the evening ended with a multinational singalong, each country asked to contribute a song everyone knew; panic gave me “Wonderwall,” for lack of anything better. The next morning, Jasmin, a Canadian bikepacking couple Patrick and Aaron, and I boarded the Koman ferry, watching an elaborate game of vehicle Tetris play out on the deck below, before we wound up the gorgeous Drini River gorge, its steep green walls not unlike a fjord.
At this point a slight creeping malaise turned into full-blown sickness. By the time we docked at Fierza, with 60km and a hefty climb to the Kosovo border still ahead in pounding heat, I could barely stand. Jasmin found a concerned young ferry worker who anxiously asked whether I needed a doctor or a toilet; honestly, both. He arranged a local driver, and I made the 30km ascent by car, my head hanging out the window like a dog trying not to be sick. Dropped just before the Kosovo border, gravity took pity on me and after crossing I freewheeled most of the last 25km down into Gjakova.
Albania deserved far more than my brief, horizontal crossing of it; I’m already plotting a return to the Accursed Mountains, ideally with a sturdier stomach.
Some epic ejecting in Gjakova evicted whatever had taken hold, and a restorative cup of tea in the old Bazaar set me up for a gentler day through Kosovo’s beautiful, rural countryside. I was passed by many ancient, tiny tractors hauling everything from hay to a single cow riding in state in a rustic trailer. Fields of veg, small farms and small herds living an outdoor life dominated the scenery, backed by distant mountains. It seems a far more sustainable model than ours, though clearly subsistence farming. I don’t want to romanticise what must be tough, low-margin work, but it’s hard not to notice what our own farming has traded away to get efficient.
Prizren arrived in full festival swing around its Old Bazaar, and I gave myself a proper rest day there, indulging some touristing, before the final push; a long, steady climb into the improbably green and lush Sharr Mountains (no filter required!) where I caught my first glimpse of what I thought might be the third and final mountain, and the finish line of my challenge.
The peak of Konjushka at 2,571m, marks the border between Kosovo and North Macedonia. A long but glorious day’s hiking bought me to the summit, and the Macedonian border. It’s hard to describe that moment; proud of course, reflective, quite emotional, but mostly just wanting to dance on top of a mountain alone, with nobody around to see me do it.
Four countries by bike, three mountains on foot, roughly 600km cycled and 13,000m of ascent, solo, start to end. I hadn’t been at all sure how I’d feel riding alone; it seemed a daunting amount of time to spend in the mountains with only my own company, but I was never lonely or afraid, even on the days when I didn’t see another soul until evening. There were tough moments, of course. And every single time, before something like this, I doubt myself completely, and every single time, the doing of it teaches me not to.
The real highlights were the people, the layered history and culture seen from different angles, and the sheer, breathtaking scale of the Balkans’ natural beauty. Even on the hardest days, the pain faded fast against the warmth of strangers and the wonder of the landscape.
Joining us this year as Adventure Partners, I want to give particular thanks to Desbruslais Chartered Surveyors. Their support of the Youth Adventure Grant has been fundamental to this challenge and, more importantly, to the young people the Youth Adventure Grant exists for; every pound raised goes directly toward giving another young person the chance to experience something as vast and life-changing as the Balkans were for me. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for believing in that.
We’re still short of this year’s target, but it’s not too late to close the gap; the more we raise, the more young people we can support. As for what comes next, watch this space… I’ve a feeling it will be interesting.
