by I spoke to my parents this morning. It looks like they’ll be coming this way in mid-May. Eight and a half months away. Mum told me about her younger brother’s living hell. He’s been in and out of hospital, but mostly in, for the last four months. He recently had another operation and picked up an infection. His immune system is shot to pieces. It doesn’t seem long since he was at my brother’s wedding. It goes to show you never know what’s round the corner, which is perhaps just as well.
Now for the last lap of my Balkans trip. The journey from Mostar to Sarajevo took two hours by train (the scenery is supposedly spectacular, but unfortunately it was dark). The owner of the apartment met me at the station; that was an unexpected bonus. It wasn’t until the next morning that I thought I should really figure out where exactly I was. The apartment was located some way up a hill which rises from the city centre. I had blisters on my feet, and walking (even downhill) was slow going. I passed a graveyard where almost all the graves were from 1993 or 1994. A few minutes later I passed another, similar one. I wandered around the city, had some very cheap bureks (a kind of savoury strudels) for lunch, then bumped into somebody I’d met in Mostar. I joined him on another war tour, this time with a 34-year-old woman as the guide. She was a small child during the four-year siege, and at times during the tour she became quite emotional. We visited the market, still popular today, where a shell killed 68 people in 1995. We walked down the infamous Sniper Alley, surrounded by hills. Our final stop was a slightly bizarre monument: a large tin can, just like the cans of disgusting mystery meat that were supplied by the UN. Underneath the can was a semi-sarcastic thank you message. She explained to us the complexities of former Yugoslavia: an area the size of New Zealand is made up of nine or ten political entities or sub-entities, like Republika Srpska, the horseshoe-shaped Serbian part of Bosnia that takes in part of Sarajevo. I had dinner in a pleasant outdoor restaurant where the service was painfully slow. (By this stage I was getting fed up with the whole eating out thing.) I painstakingly made my way back up the hill.
I still had two more days in Sarajevo. The film festival was in full swing, and had attracted a lot of tourists to the city. I saw two films, that were both rather sad. The first – Ti Imaš Noć (You Have the Night) – was based in a coastal town in Montenegro, where a shipyard had closed down, leaving many people out of work. The second was called Transnistria, based in the thin strip of land (yet another political entity) in eastern Moldova that gives the film its title. This movie was shot on Super 16 film, which looks a bit like the Super 8 (cine) film my grandfather used to use.
On my second evening in Bosnia’s capital I visited Džirlo, a very charming tea house at the foot of the hill. My host had recommended it to me. The man who runs the place is quite a character. The next morning I had all kinds of hassle booking a bus to Belgrade for the following day. By this stage the credit had run out on my phone, so contacting my host was no longer so easy. I needed to contact him because the only time I could get a bus, without venturing into the part of the city in Republika Srpska, was at six in the morning. Would that be OK? Eventually things sorted themselves out, and I booked by ticket for the 6am service. That evening I had a Bosnian “combination” meal, which included ćevapčići, similar to the mici we get in Romania.
The following morning – Friday – I was up at 4:30. I didn’t want to take any chances. With no phone credit I couldn’t order a taxi, and had to go down the hill to hail one. I grabbed a coffee at the station before boarding the bus which left on the dot of six, and took us past the striking Twist Tower and the Olympic Park where Torvill and Dean won their gold medal in 1984. We then drove along a winding road through the forest. It was pretty the whole way, in particular when we entered Republika Srpska, which was obvious from all the Cyrillic signs. After another border crossing, we reached Belgrade in the scheduled 7½ hours. I checked into the guest house, and had a few hours to wander around the city again. I bought an Oxford-published Serbian–English dictionary.
On Saturday morning I visited the nearby market, and then it was time to go home. The minibus took an age – 4½ hours – including my fifth and final border crossing. On board was a Kiwi who had been travelling for months. He didn’t have too many good words to say about his homeland. I felt he was being quite harsh, except when he talked about New Zealand’s suicide rate which continues to be shockingly high.
Before I knew it, I was back, and that felt pretty good.
