We gave Split a few hours chance to shape itself up, but with no luck. It was still raining by two thirty in the afternoon, and we picked up our bags and caught the three thirty bus to Mostar, Bosnia. The bus, I’ve decided, does have its advantages, especially when you’re in an area you’re unfamiliar with. The bus took us up into the Balkans, winding its way up through heavily wooded mountains and past outcroppings of black granite. In places the road was under repair–probably had been for decades–and amounted to little more than a dirt road full of potholes, slowing the bus down to barely over walking speed.
We passed the border, adding another passport stamp to the collection, and began to descend into the wide river valley that held the old town of Mostar. We stepped off the bus into the usual (for Eastern Europe, at least) crowd of apartment renters, local property owners looking to supplement their incomes by taking on boarders. Alex drove a hard bargain–eighteen euro for the three of us–and soon found an older woman who was willing to deal. She led us up into a nearby apartment block built in an Arabic style of architecture, with a high series of terraced flats and vine-covered arches. The lower level was covered in graffitti, but the apartment itself turned out to be quite nice. Anxious to see the town before dark, we dropped our bags and headed toward the river.
Mostar was heavily bombed during the breakup of Yugoslavia, and almost everything in the city center has been rebuilt since the war. The biggest rebuilding project is the famous bridge the town is named for (the “Stari Most,” or old bridge), and they’ve done an admirable job–today’s bridge is a stone arch high above the river between two towers almost identical to the prewar version. Surrounding it is an expansive bazaar, selling jewelry, knockoff sunglasses, food, and clothes in the colorful Arabic style. We walked around until after dark, taking pictures and just seeing the sights. Next to the bridge is a photographic exhibition of the bridge’s rebuilding process, including footage of the fall of the bridge during the bombing of Mostar. It’s a thought provoking sight, especially for someone like myself from a country that hasn’t seen widescale war on its home soil for a century and a half.
We headed back to the apartment, hoping to get up early and take some more pictures before our 7:30 train ride to Sarajevo the next day, and ended up talking on the balcony until after midnight. Sleep, as usual, proved too persuasive an argument, and we barely made it to the train station in time. Mostar, it seems, will need to be added to the rapidly growing list of places I’m going to have to come back to.
The train ride to Sarajevo was only supposed to be a few hours, and took us back up into the mountains, through long tunnels carved into the rock, and past little Bosnian towns with their squat stone cottages and fading red tile roofs, and the narrow stacks of hay piled high around guide poles planted in the ground. As we were passing along the shores of a long artificial lake that filleda deep mountain valley, we entered a tunnel and, suddenly, were shaken by an ear-splitting whistle from the train and the grinding of the brakes.
There was a moment of silence, and then loud Bosnian cursing filled the corridor outside. Kiril managed to catch enough of the drift of the shouting to translate that a couple of gypsies had pulled the emergency brakes in the tunnel and jumped the train. We sat a bit longer, waiting to get underway, but nothing happened. Finally we leaned out into the corridor to see the two railroad officials that were on the train trying to jam the brake handle back into place, but with no luck. A crowd of locals were gathered around, giving advice and trying their hands at it. The standard method of Bosnian train repair, as far as I can tell, is a mixture of kicking, pounding and cursing in roughly equal dosages.
As the train seemed to be lacking in any kind of proper tools, I pulled out my pocketknife with the screwdriver attachment and managed to get the cover off the brake. The knife was too small for the screws on the brake itself, so we tried a bigger knife, a series of coins, and a pair of fingernail clippers without success. Finally I used the pliers on my kinfe to fashion one out of a pen lid, and we managed to get the brake apart. The other passengers, all apparently from Bosnia or one of its neighboring countries, were interested in the three of us–Irish, English-Bulgarian, and American–and one, grinning, said “More interesting than bus, no?”
Meanwhile, a few other people were trying to disconnect the brake manually by fiddling around under the carriage, again employing liberal amounts of kicking and cursing. Either they dislodged something doing so, or something happened to the brake when the train stopped, because when we finally got the brake back into place, the car still refused to move.
The railroad officials gave up and moved everyone out of the broken train car, and within half an hour had it disconnected, and we were finally on our way. We got to Sarajevo around noon, to gray skies and Soviet architecture–the two seem to go quite well, and often, together. I was, of course, trying to get south toward Athens, but the Eastern European transport lines tend to use the hub mode of transport, which meant the only train south had to go north first to Belgrade. We decided to try to get a bus to Skopje, in Macedonia, which was due south and only an eight or ten hour train journey from Athens.
The bus station, however, was unhelpful. A local man who spoke English translated the schedules for us, and we discovered that there were only two buses a week, on Tuesday and Friday, this being Saturday. He shrugged. “Too bad,” he said. “You miss bus by only one day!” That, in my mind, about somes up Eastern European transportation.
We opted for the long way around, northeast to Belgrade, south to Macedonia, and, for me, on to Athens. The train for that wasn’t until almost ten that night, so we spent the day exploring Sarajevo, sitting down for a few hours at a cafe next to the famous bridge where, on June 18, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinan was shot dead, sparking the first World War.
These days shopping was the activity of choice, and as it was Saturday night, the city was gearing up for what looked to be an active night of nightclubs and disco bars. As we walked, the tonal wail of the Muslim call to prayer wafted from the mosques that scattered the area, and I was reminded once again that this wasn’t Kansas anymore. In this part of the world, Islam and Eastern Orthodox Christianity exist side by side, and the skyline is a strange mix of steeples, Soviet apartment high rises, and the minarets of mosques.
We boarded our train as night fell. There was no point trying to sleep. As far as I can tell, the train lines were laid before the breakup of Yugoslavia, and probably while the entire area was under Soviet rule. We expected one border crossing into Serbia, but instead were greeted by Croatian border officials at our first stop. Apparently the line cuts through a small corner of Croatia, which meant four long stops over the course of our journey: leaving Bosnia and entering Croatia, and then leaving Croatia an hour later and entering Serbia.
We managed to get at least a little sleep around these stops, and stumbled bleary-eyed out into the early morning in Belgrade at a quarter to seven the next morning. I checked the timetables, and it was finally time to part ways with Kiril and Alex. They planned to stay in Belgrade, and I would catch the train at 7:50 am to Skopje. We had a coffee at the station cafe–eastern Europe is, at least, cheap–and then said our goodbyes.
The train journey took the better part of a day, moving from the dark mountains of northern Serbia into the more arid hills and rolling farmlands of southern Serbia and Macedonia. I got into Skopje around five and walked through the city, noticing, among other things, the smallest street in the world (one meter wide by seven long) and the street where, according to the sign, sixty percent of Macedonians bought their wedding rings. All of this was in the old bazaar district of the city, mostly closed this late on a Sunday, but still an interesting maze of streets in a mix of European and Arabic architecture, and regularly punctuated by mosques. Macedonian girls in low slung jeans and tight tank tops walked side by side with Muslim girls in long dresses and head scarves and this, it seems, is simply the way it is.
I stopped at a tiny restaurant on a hill in the middle of one of the poorer districts of the city, where no one spoke English, and ordered kebabs. Iended up with three sausages and bread and a Pepsi, all of which was still quite good–and cheap, at barely a euro fifty for the lot. Then a long walk back through the city to the train station. The parts of the city I walked through were poor, but didn’t seem uncomfortably so. The buildings were cheap cinderblock and concrete constructions, but decorated with colorful cloth and wooden balconies. Children played soccer in the streets, and I could see women on the open second floor terraces talking and drinking tea from gilded–if tarnished–Turkish teapots. To see these very Middle Eastern sorts of scenes while hearing the Slavic sound of the Macedonian language and reading Cyrillic on every sign reminded me again of just how much of a melting pot this place really is.
The next train to Thessaloniki and then to Athens wasn’t until seven the next morning, and I didn’t feel like blowing ten Euro on a hostel, so I headed back to the train station for likely quite a long night in a hard waiting room chair, or in a corner with my sleeping bag. In the process I found–blessing of blessings–a place right in the station called “Insomnia Internet Club.” As I had hoped to get some work done online anyway, I decided I could sleep on the train.
Tomorrow, Athens. I hope to couchsurf for two days there, and then head on to a few of the Greek islands, and afterwards, Istanbul. My trip is almost halfway over already, and my biggest regret so far is that I don’t have more time. Though everyone tells me that it’s good to do a trip like this now, because I won’t be able to later in life, I’m getting an increasingly nagging feeling that this first long journey will be far from the last.
