Bosnia and Hercegovina - Mostar and Sarajevo!

These two are a traveller's mecca, I am not sure why everyone doesn't travel here. Mostar was the first stop on the trip, and was so interesting... grafitti about the Red army lined walls, a short walk from buildings ridden with bullet holes, and our apartment was next door to a wall with more bullet holes than wall. When we arrived at the bus station at 10pm at night without any prebooked accomodation (by my recommendation) I was a little worried... sleeping in car parks isn't really my thing. We were taking a bit of a risk, as we weren't sure whether there would be sobe grans, as there are down the dalmation coast and montenegro. Luckily, one gran was still awake, and we secured a room for 10 Euros pp/n. Our sobe gran (the host of the accomodation, usually an extra room in a house that is rented out to travellers) was the kindest yet - she offered us a mint tea with biscuits before dinner, and when we came in at lunch time the next day, offered us some of her honey-roasted capsicums and fresh fish. Amazingly, fish is the cheapest meat here, at about 5 AUD per kilo. In Montenegro, there were mussels for 1.50 AUD per kilo... ridiculous!


Mostar has an amazing old town section. The Stari Most, the most famous tourist attraction, is a tremendous piece of Roman architecture, 25 or so metres above the river below. Young men used to jump from the bridge at their coming of age. It sounded like fun; I really wanted to do it; and was revved up to take the jump when a Scottish traveller advised me that one side was shallow and the other was deep. I thanked him for that, but then realised that I had forgotten which side was the shallow and which the deeper, so didn't jump that day. Lucky I didn't, as it turned out, as my girlfriend told me the next day when I was talking to her on the phone that shallow divers practice diving off the bridge as the water is only 15 feet deep on both sides - only 2 and a bit lengths of my body! Breathing a sigh of relief at my near-death of my own stupidity, we checked out the markets. The Islamic influence of the markets is palpable, with beautiful tea sets and daggers being sold, with a fug of sheesha steaming through the air (although we never found where we could get some!). The old-town, cobblestoned feel of the place, along with the semi-hippy markets were brilliant, and it's been one of my favourite places to travel in the whole 8 months of world-visiting thus far.

Sarajevo, a short train ride away, has similar Islamic influences in the marketplace, although it is much bigger than Mostar. They sell the same things, so you just have rows of tea sets and etched metal to peruse. It was almost as interesting as Mostar, and also had some interesting historical icons. The most famous historical icon in Sarajevo is the bridge where Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of the Austro-Hungarian empire was shot, which precipitated World War I. You get a strong sense of history standing on the bridge, thinking how this assassination was the beginning of hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide.