After a day of rest in Dubrovnik we caught the bus up to
Mostar in Bosnia Herzegovina (BiH). The
border between Croatia and BiH is a little complicated, after the war BiH were
granted a small stretch of coast, only a few kilometres long, in the middle of
the Croatian coast. So to get up to Mostar
we crossed the borders three times. I
was hoping that this would result in lots of stamps in my passport.... but no,
we got no stamps at all. In fact the
border crossing between the two countries was pretty lax, sometimes they only
looked at the cover of our passports and decided that we didn’t look dodgy
enough and carried on.
Mostar is famous for its bridge and old town, much of which
was destroyed during the war in the 1990’s.
The city was under siege for a few years during the war, with the
Serbians on one side, the Croats on the other and the Bosnians caught in the
middle. While there are still of lot of damaged buildings in Mostar the bridge
and the old town have been reconstructed with international assistance. We spent an afternoon exploring the old town,
eating yummy food, and crossing back and forth over the bridge (which is surprisingly
difficult to walk across).
The next day we joined a day tour run by our hostel, so us,
two lovely French girls and the owner of the hostel all piled into a tiny
little car to explore the surrounding area.
Our first stop was for brunch, freshly made Bosnian pie. Filling (meat, spinach and cheese, potato or
cheese) is rolled up in thin pastry to form a long sausage. The” sausage” of pastry and filling is then
coiled around into a big disc, cooked, then pie wedges are cut out and served. It was very tasty and a very cheap street snack
which had multiple times during our travels in Bosnia and Montenegro. Next we headed to the village of Blagaj, site
of a 15th century Dervish Monastery and the start of the Buna
River. The river gushes out of a large
cave in the limestone, 20 cumecs a substantial amount of water, it impressed
me. From there we drove through a few villages,
fed some donkeys, and on to our lunch time swim stop, Kravice Waterfalls. While
the water was a little cold it was a pretty scenic place, check out the
photos. Our last stop of the day was Pocitelj,
a small village nestled in a steep rocky amphitheatre. Extensively damaged
during the war the village has now been rebuilt. We arrived late in the day
after all the other tourists had gone and spent about an hour exploring steep
narrow streets and town walls. It was a
really neat little town and definitely the highlight of our day trip.
The next day we caught an early train to Sarajevo. The train
trip was very scenic, passing by several lakes and winding its way up into the
mountains. We try to take the train
wherever possible as I get bad motion sickness in buses (we had a few horror
bus trips in South America) and Chris just likes trains. Unfortunately the train options are fairly
limited in this part of Europe. Sarajevo
is an interesting city architecturally, it has been built in three main
stages. The central city is divided into
two main parts, the older Ottoman part with narrow lanes, bazaars, mosques and
lots of small cafes and restaurants , and the newer Austro-Hungarian part with
grand buildings and wide streets. Out in
the suburbs ugly communist era concrete blocks dominate the landscape. We spent our first afternoon eating more yummy
food from the ottoman part of town and doing another free walking tour.
Our second day in Sarajevo we joined a day tour covering
sights around the city. Sarajevo is most
famous for three main events: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand (which
kicked off the first world war), the 1984 winter Olympics (the best run winter
Olympics at that time, still a great source of pride to Bosnians) and the
1990’s war where the city was under siege for a few years. During the war the city was surrounded with
Serbian forces on all sides apart from the airport which was controlled by the
UN. Not getting enough relief supplies
from the UN, the Bosnians decided to dig a tunnel under the airport which
connected the city with free Bosnian lands to the west. The tunnel was kept a secret during the war
and used to transport weapons and food, even livestock. During the winters the tunnel could have
quite a bit of water in it which could make it pretty dodgy crossing as
electricity and phone lines were also in the tunnel. Only 25 m of the 800 m tunnel remains which
you can visit at the tunnel museum on the outskirts of the city. We also visited the old bob sled track from
the Olympics (used by the Serbian forces to fire from), old Olympic stadium,
and a traditional bosian otterman house (from the 18th century). Sarajevo is surrounded by mountains and gets
pretty cold in the winter, unfortunately the options for hiking and skiing are
pretty limited due to all the landmines left over after the war.
I found Bosnia & Herzgovina an interesting place, mainly
due to its mix of cultures and people (that had been getting along fine until
the recent war) as well as its beautiful scenery and towns. However the country has quite a few problems,
unemployment is high and apart from the international aid to fix up the unesco
sites not much else seems to be getting done. We hated seeing all the rubbish
in the lakes and rivers, in Mostar all the rubbish bins were overflowing and
council didn’t seem to get round to emptying them often. When the peace agreement was signed to end
the war it resulted in a pretty strange governing system. The presidency is shared between three
presidents, one Bosnian, one of Croat descent one of Serbian descent. The presidency is rotated every eight months....not
really enough time to get anything done.
The people we talked to complained that the government didn’t really
achieve much....apart from collecting their fat paychecks while the rest of the
country struggles. It seems that this
electoral system needs to change for the country to start moving forward.
From Sarajevo we took a windy bus journey through the
mountains to Montenegro. Montenegro is
one of the worlds newest countries only separating from Serbia in 2004. The country is pretty small but packs a lot
in (mountains, spectacular river gorges, lakes, and a pretty nice coast
line). We decided to base ourselves in
Budva , approximately half way down the coast, and do day trips from
there. After a few busy days in Bosnia
we decided to take it easy on our first day there...bit of swimming and
checking out the old town. We also
caught up with our friend Steve who we met on the Croatia sailing trip, he had
been travelling south from Croatia and decided to join us the next day as we
planned to hire a car.
From Budva we drove south along the coast, checking out
Sveti Stefan (a very flash resort just off the coast) and Stari Bar. Stari Bar is the ruins of the old town of
Bar, destroyed in an earthquake in the 1970s (although, if the information
boards are anything to go by, they seemed to be very good at destroying parts
of this town by being careless with explosives before the earthquake finished
it off). We spent a bit of time wandering around the ruins and then hopped back
in the car and got lost looking for a 2,000 year old olive tree which we
eventually found. From Stari Bar we
headed down the coast a bit further then tried to take a short cut inland to
Lake Skadar. Well the short cut ended up
being a long one as we got lost on very narrow windy roads not shown on our
map. But we eventually made it and were
rewarded with a great view of the lake and over the border to Albania. Lake
Skadar is the largest lake in Balkans, two thirds of it is in Montenegro the
rest in Albania. The lake is flanked by
mountains on the western side and it made for a scenic drive. We passed through several small towns, bought
wine off the side of the road and had lunch in a town overrun by feral
donkeys. A good day all in all.
The next day Chris and I headed north from Budva checking
out Cetinje (the old royal capital of Montenegro) and up into the Lovcen
National Park. We drove all the way to
the top of Mt Lovcen (around 1,600 m above sea level...our poor rental car was
getting a hammering) and checked out the communist style mausoleum to a famous
Montenegrin poet. We mainly went for the
views though and unfortunately for us the cloud was down low so we couldn’t see
much of the surrounding mountains and the Bay of Kotor. From the top of the mountain we drove all the
way back down to sea level via plenty of hairpin corners to Kotor. The weather seemed to be against us this day
with a heavy rain shower on our arrival.
This made checking out the old town a bit tricky for Chris in his super
slippery jandals (he almost fell over several times and had to hold my arm for
support). With more rain showers on the
way we decided to give up and head back to Budva. Chris did manage to buy some new jandals the
next day in Ulcinj on our way to Albania.
