Bosnia: Sarajevo (The Group Travels On)

After an excellent time in Mostar (where I extended my stay an extra two nights), a portion of our crew decided it would only make sense to journey to Sarajevo in Bosnia & Herzegovina together. We synchronized our plans, including all booking the same hostel, and were off to the capital city!

Naturally the six of us that were journeying together made it to the train station with only 10 minutes to spare. Joining me for this portion was Ryan, Max, Rohan and his sister Holly, and a new friend Ross.

Now Ross may appear intimidating, but that’s his job in a sense. No really. He’s a newly signed WWE fighter who was on holiday before heading back to the UK to begin filming the first season of the new show out there. He’s a tall, bearded Englishman from Nottingham (yes, that Nottingham). He’s also one of the easiest guys to get along with I’ve ever met traveling. I never got to witness Ross, er – Saxon Huxley being a mean fighting machine, but he certainly looks the part. Also Saxon is just his professional name. In the ring they call him Muscle Cat. I’ll let that sink in.

The train ride between Mostar and Sarajevo is gorgeous. Green hills and rivers moving between them. The train windows didn’t allow for any good pictures, so all of us just enjoyed the view as the sun set over the country.

Our hostel, The Doctor’s House was near one of the central hubs of Sarajevo. That was the good thing. The bad thing is that it was at the top of a brutal hill that caused most of us to sweat every single time we took on the climb. In the evening the guys went out for dinner and drinks after we had settled in at the hostel.

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On the first full day in Sarajevo, everyone planned to be up nice and early to have breakfast and join in on one of the walking tours in the city. But instead, no one got up nice and early and we all split to do our own thing. Max, the Frenchman, and I went to the well-reviewed “Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide.” I’ll put up a couple of the placards below so others can see a bit about the statistics of the Bosnian War and the demographics in the former Yugoslavia to help illustrate the point of why a once united people began to fight. Of all the Balkan states, Bosnia has the greatest population of Muslims, with the single exception of the recently formed and currently disputed Kosovo. During the breaking of the former Republic of Yugoslavia, many of the countries we know today wanted their own identity and governments since the republic was broken. Some, like Slovenia and later Macedonia were able to break off (mostly) peacefully. Bosnia, however, being wedged between Serbia and Croatia had a much harder time. The way the Bosnians tell it (and how the museums in the country portray it), Serbia wanted to maintain it’s power, land, and people and since there was a decent sized population of people who would identify as Serbs in both Bosnia and Croatia, they were the countries that Serbia was most willing to fight to maintain unity.

The facts of what happened next are this: a lot of Bosnian lives are lost. Notably, a lot of those who practiced Islam or came from Islamic backgrounds were murdered in addition to Bosnian citizens of other faiths/backgrounds. In Sarajevo alone, over 18,000 people were killed during the war. The museum depicts many of the horrific scenes from the Bosnian war with videos from under prepared hospitals, testimonies of people from Serbian camps, torture victims, the like. Sarajevo was under siege for almost four whole years and during that time, as it is nestled in a valley with mountains on all sides, it was surrounded by tanks and mortars that fired onto the city below. Many of the spots where explosives went off in the city are still there, painted in red in remembrance of the war. They call these spots the “Sarajevo Roses.”

After the museum, Rohan joined Max and I and we took our own walking tour around the city. Most notably, we went to the Latin Bridge that is known to be the marker where the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was shot to begin World War I (shot by a Serbian who lived in Bosnia).

That evening, some of the hostel volunteers took a group of us up to the white fortress for a sunset view over the city. It was an impressive urban climb up the many hills in the city. The spot itself is great also because to get to the platform with the best view, you have to go through one of the windows of the now ruined fortress. The view was lovely and the company was, as usual, fantastic.

That evening a large group from the hostel enjoyed the Sarajevo nightlife, including the bar Goldfish (a bar filled with antiques of all kinds), a Pirate Bar, and…yes I even found myself in the club that night.

I need to highlight a fellow from our group: there’s an Australian gent named Nick whom we met at the end of our stay in Mostar. He is known to a few of us as the guy who traveled for 99 days – he booked all of his flights back home and didn’t realize he was just missing out on being out exploring for 100 days. Nick had been convinced to join us in Sarajevo and showed up late on our second day in the city. Since Nick made a bit of a fuss to me online about not being included in my Mostar post, I’ve promised to include him here.  While we were all out and about, Nick joined us and I have to say this about him: you want to just punch the guy in the face for being such a pretty boy fun guy, but he is so good at including every single person in a conversation that I can’t even get on his case. He’s sincerely a nice dude that has a  knack for making everyone feel involved in what the group is doing. So there you go Nick, you’re in the blog and I’m even saying nice things about you! Mission Complete.

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The last day in Sarajevo began even slower than the last. The crew again split up, some sleeping in, some getting breakfast. I took the time to enjoy the old town by myself, grabbing some Bosnian coffee (its similar to Turkish coffee, but don’t tell the Bosnians that). I took care of research for the trip later on – like ensuring that I was still allowed in the Schengen region when I got to Greece and booking accommodations. I started this trip with the first six or so weeks planned so tightly. This was mostly due to organizing my time around many friends in western and northern Europe. Here I was almost three months in and my planning was a notable different as I sat in Sarajevo booking things only a day in advance. For flights and the like, it’s a bit of a pain to do things this way. But for the Balkans, booking a day in advance is perfect since you can only take buses and the occasional train anywhere anyway.

That evening I planned to see a piece of Sarajevo that I’ve wanted to see since I first researched the city. I convinced Ross aka Saxon Huxley aka Muscle Cat to hike across the city with me and to take the cable car up one of the mountains to get a sunset view over the city (but higher this time) and to see the abandoned bobsled track. Ross and I got to the cable car after surviving a mean ol’ dog and we enjoyed the view as we ascended into the hills.

The bobsled track was pretty epic. You can just walk down the whole thing and enjoy the forest overtaking the old structure and the graffiti all along the track that was originally built for the 1984 Olympics.

Spending the time with Ross ended up being a very positive memory for me. Here’s this guy whose job is the theatrically beat up people and we both were navigating a country we knew little about marveling at its beauty and its tragedy. Our conversation covered work, friends, and “back home,” but it also included dreams of the future, places we still want to see, and our combined admiration for the people in Bosnia and impact the country had on us.

That evening marked the end of the group. For six days some combination of these 12 strangers-turned-friends ventured and learned about a country that none of us had much understanding for to begin with. We shared tours and sunsets. Drinks and laughs. It was a beautiful combination of the right people in the right place to make such a time so memorable. We have all since exchanged information and even in our short time since Bosnia, we’ve reached out to one another and commented on how special our time together was.

So thank you Max, Ryan, Marc, Dawson, Victoria, Dori, Alice, Rohan, Holly, Ross, and Nick for the great times in Bosnia & Herzegovina. Thank you to everyone else who joined in our shenanigans. It was a special time and it solidified the Balkans as one of my favorite places I have ever traveled. It is a backpacker’s heaven. I hope it continues to benefit those who take the time to venture there.

But my time in the Balkans was just getting started. I was waking up with plans to cross the border (and then the border, and then the border again, etc.) back into a very well-known part of Croatia…