We get up this morning and I can’t wait to get the fuck out of Budva. Had an awful night’s sleep between the music and the rattling air con. Go down to have some breakfast and Angus is feeling a bit under the weather – I assumed it was just the ‘sniffles’ that was going through the bus; one of our travel companions, Josh had been sniffling for a couple of days and had tested for Covid twice, but was thankfully negative.
Angus tells me that he’s not feeling great and I ask him what he wants to do and he decides to go off and ask Holly for a RAT test. Every tour bus seems to have at least one Holly – she’s an ICU nurse from Victoria and she’s been a wealth of information for the various aches and pains that people crop up with when they’re travelling. Our Holly is amazing, she’s been dealing with Covid patients in the ICU since the pandemic began and she’s just the most caring and wonderful young woman I think I’ve ever met.
Anyway, Holly gives Angus a test and well fuck wouldn’t you know it, it’s positive. So Josh goes back and tests again – he’s now positive too. Turns out a third young man, Darren is also positive, and then we get to watch the paranoia ensue…
Company policy is that they can’t continue on the tour. And I understand that entirely the company and the guides have a responsibility to the entire group and can’t knowingly have sick people travelling with the healthy ones… but there are at least another 6-8 people with he same sniffles and cough on the bus, but if they don’t test and don’t tell the leader, then they get to stay. Damn, but I wish we hadn’t tested him until Tirana or Skopje, because now we are off the bus and if fucking Russian bogan-land, Budva!
(*Oh why was he wearing this t-shirt today!)
Poor Simon then has to call his director and find out what to do with us – there’s no way I’m leaving Angus sick in fucking Budva on his own, so I’m off the bus too even though I have no symptoms and am feeling fine. They said they will find us rapid accommodation in a nicer hotel than the one we stayed in last night! Thank fuck for that! So Simon sets off on foot making phone calls and racing into reception areas.
It takes him about an hour before he finds a place that can give us two rooms and we say some quick goodbyes, but are sadly and unceremoniously dropped off at the new hotel to wait and see what is going to happen from there and the tour leaves without us.
So we find ourselves, me and these three Covid positive young men, sitting around a hotel reception area from 0900 until a possible check in time of 1200. :/ Mostly they’re just sitting there sweating and enjoying the decent wifi, while I’m already plotting how to to get the fuck out of Budva! My reasons for wanting to flee were multiple, but the biggest ones were – we are stuck in a small party town that (from quick googling) has limited covid facilities in their local hospital, has a population with some of the lowest vax rates in Europe and if Angus got sicker or I was already sick with it just not symptomatic yet – the last thing we need is to be stuck in a town where the primary language is Russian, the second, Croatian and all the English speakers we’d met spoke worse English than my French or German! Yikes.
While waiting for the hotel rooms, we discover that insurance claims will need PCR tests before they’ll cover any covid related healthcare of travel changes… so the boys all trot off to go get a test which thankfully was just over the forecourt at the front of this enormous resort hotel we’d been taken to. Eventually the rooms are ready and everyone is kinda exhausted, the boys are in various states of illness, a bit feverish, very fatigued and coughing a little here and there. The resort is so huge, we have to be taken to our ‘villa’ (and I use the term loosely) by golf buggy. So we load all onto this thing and get there only to find out we are on the third floor and there’s no lifts!
Shit, fuckity, shit, shit!
My feet and knees have been giving me loads of extreme pain for days (the fibromyalgia was super stirred up, I think a combination of cobblestones and sitting on the buses for hours) so the idea of having to traverse six flights of stairs to ‘pop out for food, water or supplies’ was just a dirty big ‘NOPE!’… so my determination to get us the hell out of Budva asap was now seriously accelerated.
The guys all get into the rooms around midday and all immediately crash and sleep for about six hours – time I put to good use planning our escape. It’s a Friday and the weekend is looking bleak. But I figure I have an internet connection and a credit card and I can make this work… until it turns out the internet in the rooms is for shite and I can’t get things to load after I left the reception area!
While they were sleeping – we had received a message from TT saying they had managed to secure the rooms until Monday for them, and would work out what happens after that. I had asked the guys if they were planning to stay until Monday or did they want to transfer the fuck out of there with us? They were both pretty noncommittal and seemed happy to take the free accommodation on offer, but there was no way I was hanging around to see how things panned out.
So onwards with the planning and… Poo, bum, piss, fart, bugger and fuck – right when I really needed it the most, there’s no fucking internet. I have two SIM cards – one from the UK, which mostly works in EU countries, so not Montenegro, and one from AUS which is supposed to have coverage in Montenegro, but the reception in this resort was barely 1 bar of 3G and the hotel wifi was so slow and was dropping out so much as to be nonexistent. I ended up waking Mr K at 0400 in Brisbane to help make some bookings for me.
Plan B involved:
– Booking a driver to get us from Budva to Cilipa (near the Dubrovnik airport) after check out tomorrow morning.
– Finding an airport hotel to stay for Saturday night.
– Take the most affordable flights I could find to Athens.
– Convince Travel Talk that seeing we had paid for accom up until the end of the tour, and were not using the hotel in the party hard town of Budva, could they please cover the hotel in Athens.
Simple right? We managed to book a driver to take us to Cilipa which cost AUD$220, then booked an Airbnb place which was €130 for the night near the Dubrovnik airport, and then flights from Dubrovnik to Athens on Sunday morning with Aegean at completely arse-rape, last minute prices of €349 each! Ouch! But Plan finally in place I managed to calm my tits and get ready to go to sleep.
At some point while I was dealing with all these logistics, poor Angus had gotten up and his appetite had overcome his symptoms and he decided to head out (six flights of stairs!) to find some food. He found local Italian restaurant that did take always about 400m from the room and when he walked in, the waiter insisted he take his mask off! No shit, they do not want anyone reminded that there might be a deadly virus circulating still.
And it was on this note and we eventually crashed for the night… thankfully from this enormous resort, the party noises seemed much further away, and bless it’s cotton socks, the air con was working better than most but we had been in masks all day and because of the proximity, (we had pushed the beds apart as much as possible in the small space), we were sleeping in them too.
Tomorrow – we will see how tomorrow pans out… because it has to be better than today’s clusterfuck.
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. 🙂
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) 
