Bouncing through Bosnia by Bus

So What's up with the Balkans?
We try to do our homework before we travel. In fact that's a big part of the fun. The Balkans was a bit of a challenge. We read quite a bit in Wikipedia, followed recent events in the world press via links through Google News, read a couple of books, and as usual, we consulted with Gene Mierzejewski, who can usually explain in plain English the most obscure historical and current situations. Our conclusion: Nobody really understands the Balkans, including the people who live there.

We are talking about the area between the Adriatic and the Black Seas in the group of countries that make up the Balkan Peninsula. This region been a pain in the ass forever.  The people are both fierce, and fiercely independent. For thousands of years they have been the bane of any covetous power who wanted to control them. They have been attacked and invaded (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) by a succession of outsiders, like the Romans, the Byzantines, the Goths, the Gauls, The Golden Horde, The Holy Roman Empire, the Venetians, the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Nazis. We apologize to all the aggressors, invaders, and genocidal maniacs whom we may have overlooked. When the people of the Balkans were not defending their homes and getting their asses kicked by foreign invaders, they kept in practice by kicking the shit out of the local Jews and out of each other. These periods of devastating internecine atrocities were known in the parlance of Balkan history as The Times of Peace.  

These are some rugged and hard people living in a rugged and hard land.   

We started in Croatia, certainly an important part of the political Balkan landscape, but we were in the West. This  area, known as the Dalmatian Coast, is the Croatia of the beautiful Adriatic walled cities,  EXCELLENT seafood, nude beaches, 14th Century Venetian architecture, and a stable tourist infrastructure. The Dalmatian coast was invaded only half a dozen times, (their Christian cities were conquered and sacked during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 by the western European Christians. They got turned around on their way to rescue the Holy Land from the evil godless Muslims, and instead attacked their fellow Christians, raping and looting and conquering Catholic trading rivals on the Dalmatian Coast and  Christian Constantinople instead. A terrific story, by the way).

We noticed a  dramatic change-- topographically, politically, and culturally-- when we caught a local bus from Dubrovnik and traveled just a few miles east to cross the Bosnian frontier.  When you leave the Dalmatian coast and travel inland just a few miles, you leave la dolce vita behind.

Mostar-- Our self-imposed schedule only allowed an overnight stop in Mostar, the first town of any size heading east into Bosnia. It is only about 150 miles, but the trip took over four hours in the bus from Dubrovnik Central bus station. We were the only tourists on board, and the only ones who spoke English. The bus crawled up some dramatic mountain highways to the Bosnian border, where we sat for an hour waiting for Customs clearance.  From there we climbed up some SERIOUS mountain terrain as we followed a steep river valley. At this point the bus became a LOCAL, stopping every couple of miles at roadside stops to pick up and discharge passengers. We arrived into Mostar shortly after noon in a driving rain. We checked into our hotel where we were greeted cheerfully by Sonia, the desk clerk, who welcomed us enthusiastically with the news that we were lucky enough to have arrived on the first day of one of the holiest of Muslim Holidays, the four-day Eid al Adaj (It comes at the end of the Mecca Hadj, and it celebrates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac on what he assumed to be God's orders).  

The hotel restaurant would be closed, Sonia said, as would most of the other restaurants in town.  "What about in Sarajevo (our next stop) tomorrow?" Roger asks. "Oh yes! They celebrate there, too, because it is Muslim!!"  Thinking ahead, Linda asks, "Do you think we can get a meal in Istanbul on Sunday?", which would be the final day of Eid al Adaj.  "We Muslims celebrate Eid al Adaj the world over,"  Sonia gushed  and of course she was wrong about nearly everything.  Restaurants were open and it was pretty much business as usual in Mostar, Sarajevo, and Istanbul. The only hotel that closed its restaurant as part of the observance was our own.

We only had the overnight, leaving on a morning bus for Sarajevo so we had to make the most of it.  Mostar is known in modern times as the site of some pretty brutal civil warfare in the 1990's war. It was one of the few places where the local Muslim population was not massacred by the Orthodox Serbs.  In Mostar the Croatian Catholics did it.  One of the famous sights is the Mostar Bridge, which in medieval times connected the Catholic to the Jewish and the Muslim sections of the city. In the battles during the civil war the bridge was destroyed, an apt enough metaphor. After the war the bridge was rebuilt using as much of the original material as they could reclaim, and it is a symbol of the healing process. Pretty heady stuff (remember: at this point we hadn't seen Sarajevo).

That night we wandered into a funky local cafe for dinner, where we met at the next table a great group of young fellow travelers, university graduate students who had just hitch-hiked from Sarajevo: Miriam from Italy, Anna from Barcelona, and Elliot from England. We swapped travel lies for a while and of course the subject came around to Linda's shiner. Miriam, it turns out, had just graduated from medical school and she was about to enter her internship in...wait for it...orthopedic surgery. So she decided to give Linda a medical exam there in the cafe (why not?) where she said what any aspiring doctor would have said: "As your physician I advise you to have a series of tests conducted at your earliest opportunity", which for us was upon our arrival the next afternoon in Sarajevo.

We did what sight-seeing we could, but it pissed down rain nearly the whole time we were there.

The bridge in Mostar.

Bosnian curtains.

Medical exam in a Mostar cafe.

Sarajevo- An Afternoon at the Emergency Room; Great Kindness from some New Bosnian Friends, and a Sobering View of the Carnage of Modern Warfare

We were directed by our hotel in Sarajevo (on the edge of the medieval Old Town), immediately to the emergency room where we arrived at about three in the afternoon. We were delivered by taxi to a large hospital complex--numerous buildings-- and no one who could speak English. We finally found a security guard who just returned from trying to live in Boston - "Do you know how much I had to pay for rent there?" he asked ($1400 for studio), but he ushered us to the right building, RIGHT THROUGH A CROWDED WAITING ROOM and directly into the doctor's examination room. I don't think we made any friends among the patients waiting for treatment, but we were sure grateful for Dragan Gatric, our security guard. He explained everything to the intake staff, and a doctor came out almost immediately for the triage. He was a fat fart from Sudan, who spoke English but had a condescending attitude and arrogance like doctors had in the US fifty years ago.  What a dick. He ordered a series of tests, but we had to pay first, which required us to change money. They only accepted Bosnian marks and we had none. Roger proceeded to a bank and then to a hospital teller to pay the bill, then return to Dr. Dick who then signed the examination order that we then had to take to another physician in another part of the building where then exam would be performed. This sequence had to be repeated THREE TIMES, one for each test.

"We always rely on the kindness of strangers..."

Meliha, Linda, and Ismar.

Thank God on Roger's first visit to the cash cage (where the teller spoke only German and Bosnian) he befriended an amazing eighth grader, Ismar Merdic, who was standing behind him in line with his mom to pay for Ismar's new cast on a broken arm. When he realized he couldn't communicate with the teller, Roger panicked and grabbed Ismar (by his good arm) and dragged him to the cash window to translate. Amazing Ismar and his amazing mom Meliha spent the next TWO hours shepherding Roger through the bureaucratic maze of Bosnian medicine (thanks, Obamacare!) and Linda from examination room to examination room. The news was all good; nothing was broken and the swelling will subside, which is great because Linda looks like she was beat up pretty good. And good for Roger, who has begun to feel like he was waking up every morning snuggled up to Leon Spinks. ("I don't look anything like him! I still have my teeth!!" says Linda.)

The Siege of Sarajevo

We don't pretend to understand the root causes of the conflict, but Sarajevo had it pretty tough. It is a lovely orange-roofed medieval town that sits nestled in a valley that has grown in modern times to the capital of Bosnia with a population of about half a million. Sometime after the death of Tito and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Serbs encircled the city and laid siege. They occupied the lovely hilltops that surround Sarajevo and lobbed mortars on the civilian population for four years, sett up sniper positions that kept the population pretty well pinned down (many of you will remember from the nightly news broadcasts from the mid 90s-- "Snipers Alley", an intersection in Old Sarajevo where civilians were targets in a live-action shooting gallery).  Estimates of the deaths on the city streets between 1992 and 1996 are 11,000, including 1800 children. Our hotel recommended we take one of several tours from local guides, and we opted for the day-long "War Tour".  

Roger and Mirza.

It was a sobering but educational walk through the siege, led by a young man named Mirza who drove us around for six hours. He became a civilian medic in 1992 when he was 15, and at 16 he had joined one of the local militia groups formed to defend the city. There was only one unit that accepted members under 18, so his brigade was pretty much comprised of kids. Mirza gave us a great tour. There is virtually no building over five stories that was standing at the time that was not pocked-marked with machine gun and mortar damage. We visited a tunnel where relief supplies were smuggled in under the U.N.-controlled airport, a conduit that pretty much kept the city alive. The international community seems to have taken a hands-off attitude, and the U.N. sent in "Peacekeepers" to try to maintain some semblance of equilibrium. Finally, after a severe mortar attack on the central city from the hilltops, President Clinton authorized airstrikes on Serb positions from an aircraft carrier he had standing by in the Adriatic. Then he grabbed the whole bunch of them by their ears and dragged them to Dayton, where they hammered out the peace (or is it a temporary stalemate?) that we have today.

But the good news!!! The food was terrific, the Old Town picturesque, the prices cheap and the people friendly (and grateful to Americans for our help). Well worth a visit.

Evidence of gunfire.

Burek is delicious!

Sarajevo as seen from the hills held by Serbs during the siege.

Tito is still everywhere. Kind of a cult figure.

This short section of the tunnel is open to visitors. Claustrophobia much?

We Arrive in Croatia; Our Luggage Makes Other Plans

Our flights to Croatia were uneventful: Detroit to Rome, Rome to Moscow, and Moscow to Split. This last leg had us crammed on Aeroflot in a planeload of drunken Russians, acting like 40-year-olds on Spring Break. Sadly, we arrived at Split airport with no bags. Just the clothes on our backs (funky is too kind; we had been on the move for just under 24 hours straight). If you know us at all, you know we worried about them. Were they in Rome or Moscow? Were they delayed or lost? What would it cost to replace everything? What had we actually packed? Would Customs find the contraband Roger had stuffed in his suitcase?

The hotel turned out to be great, and the owner, Frane, took charge of tracking down the luggage, giving us time to explore this great city. Split was clean, interesting, walkable, and filled with good restaurants and gelato stands. What's not to like?

 We hit the streets, with Roger immediately shopping for replacement clothing. Two shirts later, he was once again dapper. How good did he look? Like a local, apparently. 

Posing as a Local Seems to be Working.

He went to a local market very early on Sunday morning. The cashier returned his change.  “Thank you,” he said reflexively in an otherwise wordless transaction.  The guy behind him in line, a grizzled old Croat, heard his English looked him hard in the eye.  Hard and cold. “You’re not Croatian,” he said.  “No, I’m American,” Roger said.  They guy looked him up and down, from his sandals and white socks to the top of his head and back again.  “You LOOK Croatian,” he finally said.  “Thanks,” was all Roger could think of.  We spent the rest of the day pondering if the guy meant this as an insult or a compliment.

Was Lost, but Now it's Found
Frane, our host, with missing bags.

Split is one of the oldest walled cities on the east coast of the Adriatic, built as a retirement palace by the Roman emperor Diocletian.  We know this because we had just  read it in Wikipedia.  A beautiful city, but pretty poorly labeled.  We usually get a proper tour when we visit the historical sites, but we did this one on our own.  We bought the requisite entrance tickets but had no idea what most of it was.  The advantage here is that you can make shit up, confounding the other English-speaking tourists by our own narration while looking intently at a hotel brochure but might be a guide book. We speak quietly with each other, but with other, but with great authority: “Elvis was buried in this crypt before the Balkan War, and re-interred in Graceland in 1993.”

The city had an interesting market, a promenade along the waterfront, and a world-class, one-of-a-kind display of stuffed frogs in human positions. The mind boggles! Rather than spend the cash to see the exhibit, we took photos of the poster and store-front and used our imaginations to picture the displays. Cost-effective tourism!

 

"...507 Stuffed  Frogs Displayed in Human
Positions."  That's why we travel!

 Literally minutes before we left our hotel for the Split bus station for Dubrovnik, our bags appeared at the hotel. Frane was right; there was nothing to worry about. I guess we should have taken that advice. 

Dubrovnik: Cash Cow of the Adriatic

Dubrovnik is gorgeous.  It is an ancient walled city, much larger city than Split, and popular with the tourists for a very good reason: it is one of the most picturesque cities in the world. Several large cruise ships dock there daily, spilling thousands of tourists into town in addition to the thousands already staying there. And this is slightly off-season. We had arranged to rent an apartment right in the old walled city, a great location for sight-seeing and general exploring. The old city is spectacular, the architecture is beautiful, the marble streets gleam, and everything we need or want is at hand. Shortly after arriving in town we stopped at a grocery store and Linda recognized Lauren, who is from our hometown and graduated with our daughter Kate. She and her husband Chris are on a year-long global trek, having wonderful adventures. Had we walked into that store 10 seconds later, we never would have seen them. We love that quality about travel, the serendipity of so many experiences.

Linda Takes a Dive

Heroes of The Wall: Aron  and Cameron;

Victim: Linda (Center)

Bystander: Roger (Right)

Walking the fortified wall surrounding Dubrovnik was the first order of business, and the views from the top are ispectacular. The brilliant blue sky, red roofs, and terra-cotta buildings made every corner a photo op. The Adriatic was a pretty good backdrop for it all. This is where and when Linda did a face-plant, transforming half or her face to an ever-changing array of color and cutting our walk a little short. Cameron and Aron, paramedics from California, came to her rescue and became our closest friends in the country, at least for a while. Certainly our only hero friends! We found that gelato made Linda feel better, sort of icing her face from the inside, so we increased the frequency of our gelato stops. It seems to help.  

It is also delicious.

Dinner in Old Town with new
Best Fiends: Julian and Daria

The Adriatic coastline is dotted with beautiful lsands. Which one to choose? Time constraints led us to Lokrum, an easy ten-minute boat ride from Dubrovnik. It had peacocks, a fortress, rocky beaches, an old monastery, and filming sites from Game of Thrones. A well-spent morning for sure. Back in Dubrovnik, the tourists return to their cruise ships in the late afternoon and the city quiets down considerably. That evening, we just barely managed to ride the cable car to the top of the mountain in time to catch the sunset. Quite a show! At the cable car, we met an interesting couple, Julian from Stuttgart, and Daria from Bolzano, Italy, who became our brand new best friends. (Do we sound fickle?) He's an automotive engineer and she's finishing her PhD in architecture, and both of them were charming company. They hung out with us on our terrace for drinks and joined us for dinner at an old town restaurant, impressing us with their historical and architectural knowledge, typical intelligent European insights into American culture, history and politics, and just having fun.

Enjoying the walk on the city walls.

Dubrovnik's terra cotta rooftops.

The walled city hugs the Adriatic Sea.

Streets of the city are narrow and steep.

Montenegro: Sort of like Croatia but with drunken Russians

Zlatko, trying his best!

The country of Montenegro is a short drive from Dubrovnik, and we hoped to get a peek at it since we were nearby. There's no telling if and when we'll be back in this part of the world. Small tour companies throughout Dubrovnik offer day trips, so we booked one for the next day. There were 15 of us in a small bus with Zlatko, our tour leader who made every effort to show us a good time. Our group was a strangely unresponsive group of slack-jawed dullards, appropriate since we were, after all, on the short bus. It made the day day less than thrilling and Zlatko's efforts fall flat. We visited the walled towns of Kotor and Budva, known for orthodox churches and walled fortifications.  We missed most of the commentary on the way back to the city as we dozed, but by then we were mentally finished learning for the day. One can only absorb so much!

The food has been great. Italian, seafood, pizza, street food sandwiches, and ice cream have met our nutritional needs quite well. As always, we are deeply impressed by the language abilities of our waiters and other workers who deal with tourists. We've pretty much stopped apologizing for only speaking English, but we still feel pretty crappy about it. Not enough to learn another language, you understand, but pretty crappy.

Coming up Next:  Bosnia:  Was it a good trip?  We had a better time than Archduke Ferdinand!

Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Hercegovina (make up your minds and pick one!) and Turkey

We are off on the road once more--this time on a ten-day tour on our own  of Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia, then flying to Istanbul for a few days before joining a two-week guided tour of Turkey.

Starting in Split, Croatia; bus to Dubrovnik; day-trip to Montenegro; bus across the Bosnian border to Mostar; bus to Sarajevo.  Flight to Istanbul for a few days, then a two-week tour.

Our timing sucks! (Or does it blow?)  It started with our travel partners, Gary and Chris Abbate , having to drop out at the last minute due to some medical issues.  They were disappointed to miss the trip we had all spent so much time and effort planning, and we were extremely bummed  at losing our travel buds.

Then there's the refugee issue.  We've always watched Turkey carefully.  The southeast corner  (in the Kurdish region near the Syrian border) has always been dangerous.   We'd go to New Jersey first!  But we consider our tour company, Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) to be pretty conservative and careful.  Plus Roger has been there a couple of times in the seventies and we have friends who have been there recently and it is a WONDERFUL and EXOTIC country.  Then a couple of weeks before our travel things begin to unravel a bit.  First, the Turks allow the U.S. Air Force to bomb ISIS military targets in Syria from our airbase in southeast Turkey.  That pissed off quite a few Turks.  Not bad enough? Then every malcontent from Syria to Sub-Sahara Africa decided to tramp through Turkey on their way north to the Promised Land (Germany, apparently). So the danger may no longer be contained to that easily avoidable southeast corner of Turkey.  But certainly Istanbul is safe, we thought, until we read that Celebrity and Costa Cruise Lines cancelled Istanbul from their ports-of-call for the rest of the year because of "security concerns".

But we're not done yet.  Hungary excluded the refugees at their southern border, throwing them back to Serbia, which is fine with us because we're not going to Serbia.  Then Serbia directs them to Croatia and Bosnia, two countries where we ARE traveling and they are arriving daily in the tens of thousands.  So within days of our departure we've got ISIS, Angry Young Turks, Ethiopian refugees, and irate Balkan border guards on our asses. All of these things have happened within the last ten days. Will this change our plans or slow us down?  Never!  We moon them all. Well, maybe one of us does.

Good travel always has an element of the unexpected.  If we wanted safe, we'd go to Cleveland.

Watch for our next BLOG post of Split, Dubrovnik and Montenegro.