Up bright and early again this morning for the drive to Mostar… the road took us along the Neretva River to Mostar, in the southern Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It was a simply gorgeous drive… seriously this was the colours of the water and the sky – I haven’t touched these at all. The water we are told is also very cold year round, which is why we didn’t see anyone swimming in it even where there are obviously points where holiday makers could access the water.
Our drive also took us past the most unusual roadside services I have ever seen! This chef is cooking lamb on a rotisseries powered by water wheels! They must get super busy because he had about 9 full lambs on the turn at once while we were there. The meat is only lightly seasoned and cooked for hour – and then they serve it all super fancy-like by cutting open a fresh white bread roll and slapping some meat on it. No butter, no gravy, no sauce, no nothing… it looked like way too much bread for me, but I tried some of Angus’ and it was delicious! Made a mental note to do a lamb roast when I get home before the weather starts to heat up to much! 
This is the gorgeous Holly, from Wangaratta who is travelling with us – you can see the size of the bread rolls they plonk the lamb onto, which is why I passed. 
On the way int Mostar we saw many old buildings that were bombed and shot up during the war, Many of them have never been repaired – sometimes because the owners just never had the money and of course the longer you leave it, the harder and more expensive that proposition becomes, but also because many people fled the city and became refugees in other parts of Europe never to return – so it is difficult to prove who owns many of these buildings now. 
Mostar is a windy little medieval market town – unfortunately full of tourist dross now, though I imagine it would have been a thriving little centre of produce and fresh food etc back in the day. 
Ah, the famous Stari Most (Old Bridge); a reconstructed medieval arched bridge which straddles the middle of the town and connects the winding alleys of the market with a staircase which leads tot he Koski Mehmet-Pasha Mosque.
Inside the mosque:
It’s probably one of the smallest mosques I’ve seen, and while Mostar is home to about 100,000 people, most of them do not live in the Old Town area.
Angus loving the travelling life.
So there is a weird tradition where visitors can come here and jump off this bridge into the really cold water below – tit seems like a stupid thing to do and it really it! The bridge is 24m above the river and the river just here is 5m deep, the reason it’s really stupid is that it’s often about 38-40°C+ in Mostar, and the water is 5-6°C, which can cause people to go into shock, and there’s that whole, jumping off high places can lead to broken bones and death thing as well. 
Reassuringly they’ve only lost 4 people in the last 10 years… :{ and honestly there is absolutely no reason to do this except it kinda comes with bragging rights – no one, and I mean NO ONE will be surprised to hear that of the visitors log that shows some 3800 people that have jumped off the bridge, 80% of them are fucking Aussies. Brain dead the lot of us! Oh well, the other ‘fun’ to be had from standing around the bridge is watching and waiting to see locals jump. Many of these guys must have been doing this for years… they prime up the crowd, get people chanting, hand around a hat for people to throw their money into to encourage the guys to jump. They then climb outside the fence line and make a show that they are going to jump, and then get people cheering some more before one of them eventually dowses himself in cold water… so as to soften the shock a bit. If you don’t see them throwing water over themselves, they’re not jumping any time soon apparently. Seems to be one local goes in every half hour or so… and there’s no need to be standing up on the hot bridge to see them – I found a nice spot in a cafe with some ciders and saw two guys jumping. Mad as cut snakes.
After Mostar we went to Kitivice Waterfalls, which I thought was going to be a National Park or something – but fuck was I wrong! The whole place is like a waterpark without any water slides. Loads and Loads of people all swimming at this massive man made waterhole at the bottom of these gorgeous waterfalls. The water temperature of the falls was quite cold apparently, but the pool below was relatively warm once you got in. 
I just can’t imagine a place of natural Australian beauty being treated like this – complete with huge decked beer gardens, food stands and kids playground right beside it. It’s impossible to get a nice photo of just the falls. 
After this stop, we drove onto Trebinje where we will stop for two nights and everyone is very excited about this because it means we can maybe get some bloody laundry done! Lol. 🙂
Mostar – No jumping!
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Next thing we know, Chris is being taken over to the cop cars, we are all asking Simon, how much of a bribe are we going to have to come up with. I’m writing this while looking at the cops outside the bus all standing around looking for problems. And unfortunately they find one!
FFS guys, can’t we just pay a bribe and be on our way like the other two buses. Simon literally just said to us all, ‘The other two buses, they were lucky, they just pay a bribe and keep going.’ But no, they had to find something. Eventually he comes back and we are back on our way to the Serbian/Bosnian border.
Holy shit! The hilarity doesn’t end there! We are barely 15 minutes down the road in another small town and a cop comes out to the bus while we are stopped at a light and tried to pull the bus over again – Chris argues with him, shows him his fine and the receipt – the cop looks pissed off and dismissively waves us on our way! I’m chatting with BigSal while this is unfolding and she hits me right in the flashbacks to ’95 with this one: “All you need is a Susan the Fruit to talk about how interactions with local law enforcement are good because it’s immersive and you can learn so much about the culture you wouldn’t have seen otherwise!” Laughed out loud at that one.
The country side is pretty enough though. Lots of old buildings, some not so old, all equally full of bullet holes and damage though. 
Eventually we get to the centre of Sarajevo and this bullet riddled, damaged building is where we pull up the bus for a meeting point. :/ 
Like many other cities, Sarajevo is a divided town, the Old Town which is full of ancient and medieval buildings, churches, cathedrals, synagogues etc and the other side of the river is the New Town, full of corrupt building projects that locals can’t afford to live in – this seems to be a theme – Belgrade has plenty of these project areas too. 
This beautiful building is a reconstruction of the original library that was on this site in the Old Town – it was badly damaged during the war and while they have been able to rebuild the library as it once was, many of the ancient and medieval texts it housed were lost forever. 
The Old Town is full of little winding alleyways on cobblestone streets, it’s like a mixture of Turkish bazaar, and Moroccan kasbah having neither flavour of it’s own nor enough characteristics of either??? (That made sense in my head even if it doesn’t to any other reader!). 
Bosnian’s are mad for their coffee apparently and white they are adamant they make it a special way that is nothing like the Turkish way of making coffee …. to the untrained eye (ie: mine), it looks exactly like the Turkish way of making coffee! 
This is the Sebilj Fountain – it was built in the Ottoman style in 1753. It’s one of those legendary fountains that people believe if you drink from this fountain you will return to Sarajevo someday – I guess we are all going to be one time visitors because none of us are drinking anything that isn’t coming out of sealed plastic bottles atm!
This was the oldest inn in Sarajevo, it used to be a stop for visitors travelling with their horses, and now the courtyard where visitors would be received is now a thriving restaurant and the stables which lined the courtyard are now shops.
You can see the huge wooden beams that made up the stable roofs.
I’m also in an intense love/hate relationship with cobblestones this trip thanks to the fibromyalgia I was diagnosed with in 2019… my feet are fucking killing me ALL THE TIME, let alone with the uneven surfaces. The hours on the bus are also not helping and each time we get off the bus, I feel like I’m getting off a long haul flight with slightly swollen feet… normal cobbles are bad enough, but these ones in this town are really just rocks planted in concrete worn smooth, so they’re proving extra fun.
In the middle of the old town is a Mosque, a Synagogue and a Catholic Church, we see here again the one-up-man-ship of each party trying to be superior to the other – part of it is about religion and yet weirdly not about religion at all. Some 70% of Serbians are not practicing any religion, but their religion defines their heritage and ethnicities in a way we just don’t’ really get back home. The Croats are Catholic and Orthodox, the Bosnians are Muslim and the Serbians lost as many as 80,000 of their Jewish during the Srebrinca Genocide (this is really contentious, a huge proportion of Bosnians would never use the term ‘genocide’ to describe what happened to the Jewish people in Serbia- but I don’t know what else it’s called when they’re rounded up into exterminated in mass graves). 😐
Ramadan feasting clock – this clock down’s show actual time as we know it – it is set to show when sundown occurs so people fasting know exactly when it’s okay to eat. 
This is a replica of the famous vehicle that the Archduke Ferdinand was in with his wife, Sofia when he was assassinated , triggering the WWI. Sounds like the entire plot was a bit of a clusterfuck and it was luck that the ragtag team of assassins managed to get anything right. A previous assassination attempt had failed and the various members of the untrained team were sitting around a coffee shop figuring out how they were going to kill him before they got in trouble with their handlers, when the Archduke’s driver took wrong turn and stopped them right in front of the coffee shop in question. One of the assassins opportunistically shot the Archduke, while another tried to immediately kill himself rather than being captured and chomped on an expired cyanide pill that just made him immediately ill, but didn’t kill him… he then ran away spewing his guts up and jumped off the nearby bridge which is barely 4m off the ground and doesn’t have much water in it, so he ended up being apprehended with two broken legs and sick from his failed suicide attempt. And yep, these stupid teenage pricks started a World War. 
The covered markets in the Old Town
Compete with Bosnian Delight stores – not Turkish Delight, mind you, Bosnian… though stuffed if I can spot the difference. 
After this
The Catholic Church in the centre of town, which is as big as they could make it in the space that it previously occupied. During the Balkans War (and Iknow this isn’t coming across very well in my pictures) the enemy armies that were attacking Sarajevo would take high positions on the hills around the town… you can see their elevated advantage from nearly every direction around the city. People coming in and out of the churches and shops were at a huge disadvantage trying to move about town to find supplies of water and food.
Out front of this church is a pitted piece of concrete which shows the place where some children were killed by snipers. They continue to pain the pitted concrete to remind people of the horrors that happened here.Our guide, said his mother never let him leave the house as a small child in a red t-shirt because it was too easy a target for the snipers… fuck that! I wouldn’t’ have let my kid leave the house at all!
After our quick (and I mean quick!) walking tour of Sarajevo we had some free time to go shopping, have a poke about and find some dinner. Simon recommended a small restaurant back near the library and instructed us all to try the Cevapi, pronounced ‘cheh-vah-pee’, (basically ‘minced meat fingers), that are served with a doughy pita bread, raw onions and yoghurt drinks. I’m always up for the local food, and they serve them in hands – literally five meat fingers or ten. I opted for a small serve and it was quite tasty – the recipe calls for 80% beef, 20% veal and some salt, so it’s just meat sausage without any skins. 
After this it was off to our hotel, on the way we saw many many more buildings that were showing signs of the snipers’ handiwork during the war. I don’t know enough about this war – I vaguely remember Milosovich being mentioned a lot in the news, but spending time with Simon hasn’t really cleared it up. With three wearing factions, sometimes each in ally-ship with each other and then spinning on a dime to suddenly be fighting with their former allies, it’s all very complicated. I’m not sure anyone won…
This is what Philippopolis should look like (below)… but it’s currently full of modern concert equipment, chairs, tents and shit – so I didn’t bother taking photos. I can’t decide if it’s depressing or fabulous that they are using this ancient monument to have concerts still. I wonder what the impact is on modern speakers and the vibrations from the amplifications. 
No? Let’s just harass the local police for directions… I honestly can’t roll my eyes any harder at this stage. Seriously, us girls could have taken over the driving and the navigation and we would have saved hours. 
Eventually we end up in Sofia and check into our hotel, which was rather swanky, before setting out on a short bus tour in Sofia. This fabulous Bulgarian Orthodox Church is the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral… it’s really gorgeous inside, but very dark and no photography is allowed. It’s probably a site that needs a lot of restoration. 
It’s build in a Neo-Byzantine style and serves as the main cathedral church of the Patriarch of Bulgaria. It is one of the 50 largest Christian church buildings in the world (by like square volumes of air or something0. It can hold about 5000 people inside and is the largest cathedral in all of the Balkans. It’s relatively ‘new’, with construction having starte din 1882 and the church being consecrated in 1924. 
Beautiful gold mosaics above every doorway.
… and fine carving int eh stonework is really cool. 
This is not a photo taken inside the church you are not allowed to take photos in. >.>
One thing I do love about Europe is the wonderful way they cover buildings under scaffolding so they don’t’ completely destroy the cityscape. You see buildings all over and (while this one is quite garish) you occasionally have to do a double take to realise that it’s a big cover over the facade of the building which is under restoration. 
The lion is a famous symbol of Bulgaria which is weird seeing they never had lions here, and the various artist’s representations of them make it pretty clear the artist has never seen one… this large bronze is a bout 3m long and he guards a tomb of an Unknown Soldier. 
There was a service being held when we were here – a memorial of sorts for someone whose funeral has already happened – so we were trying to stay in the wings and be unobtrusive. 
After this, the youngin’s felt somewhat churched out and wanted a quick bite before we had to head back to the hotel and meet our new guide for the ongoing trip through the Balkans… I can’t believe we were in Sofia and they all wanted to go for McDonalds. But there we were!
Looks just like every McDonalds ever – from about 20 years ago.
Ordering was a little tricky though… I haven’t had McDonalds in years. It used to be a frequent travel stop – because we knew it would have clean (and usually free!) bathrooms, now it seems the crew wanted to hang out here for the free wifi. Which makes sense, most of them don’t have roaming data.
The ill fated crew from the positively disastrous Travel Talk tour through Transylvania and Romania in July 2022… Shauna (IRE), Josh (USA), Holly (AUS), Sarah (USA), Stacey (AUS), Ginger (CHN), Robyn (AUS), Robyn (AUS), & Angus (AUS) 
It’s quite an enormous complex being the size of a small town – there is evidence of up to 20 churches here, and 400 independent dwellings. There is also archeological remains of blacksmith and various medieval craftsmen’s workshops – unfortunately, there is no museum accompanying the site to show any artefacts, but the site itself is phenomenal. It would have been very impressive and daunting to invading forces. 
You can see ‘Execution Rock’ on the map above – when I first saw it I expected a small paved area with an execution site (like in the Tower of London) but no, apparently the preferred method of capital punishment here was just to heave the condemned off the citadel to face the 600 foot drop.
The views up here are fabulous… when one isn’t being pushed to one’s death, I guess. 
The countryside we are driving through today is really beautiful as we go over the mountains. 
Shipka Pass is the scenic mountain pass through the Balkans in Bulgaria. It marks the border between two provinces – Starsa Zagora and Gabrova, and you travel through gorgeous national park as you do so. The monument we could see high on the hill is the Liberty Memorial and is regarded as the symbol of Modern Bulgaria and the liberation of Bulgaria. The monument is actually in the national park and is located at the peak of Shipka Mountain. It is designed to look a bit like a medieval fortress and can be seen for miles in any direction. It was built in using donations from people all over Bulgaria and was built in 1934. The monument has powerful bronze lion on it which guard the entrance to the monument, and the other three sides are named for Shipka, Sheynovo and Stars Zamora… the three bat fields that were fought in to defence the pass. Under the ground is a huge marble sarcophagus containing the remains of Shipka’s defenders. Or so we are told – we did not actually venture up to the monument, in no small part due to the 800 steps to get up there!
There’s a very large facility here that caters to weddings, concerts, school trips, family groups – you name it. Feels like we are in the middle of nowhere and have suddenly stumbled onto a small rose themed entertainment venue. 
Oh and they also grow fields full of lavender and make lavender products also… so the air around here is so perfumed just from the gardens. A bit like walking through a Turkish spice bazaar but instead of getting a nose full of spices, the air is thick with floral scents. 
The Rose Distillery is housed in this quaint stone building which has been heavily frescoed to show all the traditional Bulgarian peoples ways of collecting, crushing and distilling the rose petals. All very modern, but all very elaborately executed.
And of course there is the gift shop on the way out where you can get rose liquor, rose honey, rose jam, rose cordial, rose essential oil, rose hand cream, rose body scrub, rose lip balm, rose hair treatment and so on and so forth.
