Travelog from the western Balkans · 2007-08-22
In my imagination, Italy has always been a dirty, chaotic, uncivilised place. This prejudice narrowly survived a visit to Vicenza three years ago, but I’m once again having second thoughts. Verona on a warm August evening is simply impossible to dislike. This town of Romeo-and-Juliet fame is, inescapably, a vision of perfection. Every building has four hundred years of history attached, and the streets are filled with rich, beautifully-dressed, good-looking people. But there’s more! They now have a North-European bike-rental scheme in place, I notice. And gas-powered buses. And even black people!
I stay at a beautiful youth hostel in a converted monastery on a hill overlooking the town, and contemplate the crumbling of my aversion to Italy.
Trieste is the gateway to the Balkans, and to celebrate my arrival I order my first sophisticated slice of cake of the trip, at a cafe near the town’s imperial main square. Fortified, I take a bus in the direction of Rijeka in Croatia.
Rijeka, formerly called Fiume, was the town “annexed” in 1919 by the flamboyant Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio and 2000 followers, who gave it a proto-Fascist constitution and ran it as an independent state for a year. This was why I wanted to see it, but unfortunately there isn’t much left to see after the architectural onslaught of a half-century of Yugoslav communism. I find my way along a hideous seafront concrete overpass to the hostel, where I share a room for the night with a couple of friendly Belgians called Julien and Tom.
It’s not easy to get to Banja Luka. The capital of the sinister Serbian part of Bosnia-Hertzegovina is on no tourist’s itinerary, which of course is the reason I want to go there. To Croatians, neighbouring Bosnia doesn’t seem to exist, and no one knows how to get there. So I take a bus to an anonymous town called Karlovac, not far from the Bosnian border, and by an intensely satisfying stroke of luck find a Bosnia-bound bus waiting to depart. At Bihac (watch out for landmines), I change onto a third bus. By now, standards of travelling comfort have fallen somewhat. The chain-smoking driver is so busy chatting on his mobile and joking with the conductor guy that he appears to be paying only passing attention to the road ahead. For a while we follow a river through a scenic gorge, sharing the narrow corridor with a railway which intersects the road – without barriers – at regular intervals. There is a beat-up train on the line, laden with logs and a single incongruous carriage of passengers, and the bus driver and his sidekick amuse themselves by racing it. Finally we cross an intersection ahead of the train, and their fun is limited to trying to run cyclists and chickens off the road.
Chickens? Yep. Bosnia is in the middle of Europe but you wouldn’t know it. The wilderness landscapes are stunning, and the little towns we pass seem oddly foreign – blighted by ad hoardings, Wild-West-style, none of which are for familiar brands. There are minarets everywhere. 1 in 10 of the cars on the road are foreign, but it doesn’t look like tourists. Who are these people?, I wonder. Who are the bus drivers? Are they real, European Muslims? And what might they have been doing 12 or 13 years ago?
Banja Luka, when we arrive there, is anything but Muslim. It doesn’t even want to be Bosnian, judging by all the defiant Serbian flags draping its handful of grand buildings. I pay 38 euro for a room at the pompously communist Hotel Bosna, complete with brown wall motifs, bulbous furniture and a bathroom unrenovated since 1973.
In the morning I see my first “EU Police” car, on Banja Luka’s main drag in front of the hotel. No one pays it any attention but I imagine the old guys playing chess in the park might volunteer unsavoury opinions if I were able to ask them in Serbo-Croat. One of the men is aggressively barking advice at the players. What was he doing in 1995?, I wonder. Commanding troops shelling civilians in Sarajevo, perhaps? Or maybe he was just playing chess in the park.
First impressions of Sarajevo, where I arrive after a pleasant five-hour train journey through mountainous wilderness, are positive. It’s small and picturesque, not at all the austere east-European capital you might imagine from reading history textbooks. But eclipsing that is the surprise (tinged by excitement, I confess) of seeing the war damage. It’s everywhere. Even the train station roof is riddled with bullet holes. I catch a rattly tram into town and instantly recognise the famous Holiday Inn, in somewhat better shape than at the time of John Simpson’s stay in 1993. The old town is a second revelation. It’s a den of winding cobbled streets, mosques and rug merchants. This could be Istanbul, but the people look thoroughly European.
Bewitched already by Sarajevo, I slog up a steep hill to my hostel. It’s run by Haris, a 20-year-old Bosnian whose reputation for hospitality already precedes him. The place, consisting of the top floor of his parents’ house, is decorated by a pointedly outsized Bosnian flag. A terrace overlooks the whole city, a spectacular panorama of minarets and mountains. It’s dusk and the muezzins start their call to prayer, yet another novel experience for me. Around a table sit a bunch of Brits and Aussies, and they’ve already begun to drink. In a Muslim household, I guess you could call that hospitality.
Sarajevo is sometimes said to frame twentieth-century history. There was the assassination which triggered the first world war and the siege which ended Europe’s last one; the happier times in between were symbolised by the 1984 Winter Olympics.
So if ever there is a place to go to the history museum, this is it. In the morning I go there with a Northern guy called Paul, who is an archaeologist by training and has spent the last seven years travelling “on and off”. There is a morbidly interesting display of war relics and photos but the political tone is cathartic rather than informative; I suppose they feel it’s all still too recent. What were the aims of the besiegers? How exactly did the siege end? I’m not entirely sure. But war museums don’t come more authentic than this: there are shell shrapnel holes in the floor. We return to the old town via “sniper alley”, the riverside street where civilians were picked off as they tried to collect water – and where, coincidentally, Franz Ferdinand was himself picked off 80 years previously. Food for thought, as they say.
In the evening I return to the 21st century with a kebab (the real thing!) in the company of fellow tourists. There are two Northern football experts called Ben and Al (though Ben is also clearly a closet intellectual); Adam, a young scion of the Oxford bourgeoisie; a couple of Irish birds; a bloke from Bracknell; and Danny, an Idahoan with impossibly white teeth. Later we are joined at the hostel by the kind of travelling odd-couple that I just love: Michael, a public-school type from Greenwich who has been to “53” countries, and Greg, a pony-tailed, personable Aussie. Greg remarks that Sarajevo’s muezzins are particularly melodic. Having just done the entire Mediterranean with Michael, he seems in a good position to know.
I’m not finished with Sarajevo’s history yet. At lunchtime, while most of Haris’s hostel is still recovering from last night’s drinking, I join Brent, a Torontonian, on a trip to the “tunnel museum”. As we understand in advance, the principal exhibit is the remains of a tunnel underneath Sarajevo airport which helped relieve the 1990s siege. But neither of us is clear on the details of what we are looking at. Why did they need a secret tunnel if the airport was controlled by the UN? Why didn’t the Serbs just shell the entrance? Only a New York Times article on the wall provides some answers (the tunnel was necessary because the UN had controversially agreed not to allow military supplies to reach the besieged; and the Serbs did shell the entrance). Still, technical failings can be put aside, given that the “museum” is in fact just a shelled-out house and its curator is the owner who lived through the whole experience. Raw stuff.
It’s on a beautiful sunny afternoon that I take a tram to the station and then a train through more stunning Bosnian wilderness to the mountain town of Mostar. On arrival I find myself amid a gaggle of backpackers on the platform being greeted by another friendly Bosnian. This was pre-arranged by Haris on his own initiative, and in other circumstances I can imagine feeling like the traded object of a hostel cartel – but not here. The guy, whose impeccably clean downstairs room I share with a couple of Danish girls, spent 14 years of exile driving a taxi in Sweden. He is funny and charming, though pessimistic about Bosnia’s future: “They didn’t win their war, this won’t be over until they get their way.” I optimistically counter with the example of my own country, where different nations have lived together peacefully for hundreds of years. And I tell him how much I admire the example of Bosnia today. Because I do.
Politics aside, Mostar is a seriously attractive place. This I discover on an early-morning walk around the old town. I am surprised to have the place entirely to myself; backwoods Bosnia is obviously not in a rush. Even the famous old bridge, painstakingly rebuilt to its 1566 specifications having been pointlessly destroyed during the war, is deserted. Later in the morning I get to see some guy jump off it into the river 21 metres below. It’s getting hot and the blue mountain water looks nice for a dip, but the explosive crash of his impact doesn’t tempt.
It’s time to leave Bosnia, and I get a bus to Dubrovnik. At the Croatian border a guard takes our passports away for inspection. Handing them back to us, he asks my nationality. I hesitate. “Great Britain.” A blank look. “United Kingdom.” His confusion deepens. I give up. “Um, England.” “Ahh, Ing-gland!”, he exclaims, as though I had been making fun of him, and gives me back my British passport.
Dubrovnik is by all accounts a beautiful place, but I don’t really see it. There are too many slow-moving, dumb-looking, lard-assed tourists blocking the view, and I quickly flee in the direction of Kotor in Montenegro. Kotor, billed as southern Europe’s most spectacular fjord, is also full of tourists, but they are all svelte and Slavic and are therefore not nearly so annoying to behold. And in any case, I have a more serious problem. There is no accommodation. At 11pm, after a 3km slog along the coast, I find a luxury place with a room free at 156 euro. But the receptionist kindly lets me in on a secret. Right opposite the bus station, where I arrived, is a school for the deaf, recently done up lavishly with American money, which doubles during the the summer as very decent hotel. And so I retire for the night to a world of fluffy towels, boxed soap and remote-control air-con. All for 20 euro, which is very much my kind of price.
Montenegro is, as its name suggests, a land of darkly-wooded mountains which rise majestically out of the Adriatic. Just how far they rise is something I learn on the bus journey inland. The bus, which is dusty, full of locals and apparently powered by a two-stroke engine, quickly begins an epic ascent. At what seems like 2000 metres, we round a precarious bend and catch a glimpse of the seaside resort of Budva, way, way below. The temperature drops and we continue to climb. Budva becomes a dot, as if seen from an aeroplane, and still the bus chugs on upwards. Even the locals are riveted to the view by now. Eventually we enter the clouds and the panorama is replaced by a semi-barren landscape of dotted trees.
My destination is Cetinje, the former capital of Montenegro, and it’s right up here in these mountains, among lush meadows and shady pine groves. There’s not much to see, except some grand buildings which were formerly embassies (and may become them again now that Montenegro is once again independent), but it’s such a pleasant little place that I’m glad I came. I trudge dutifully round the national museum, in which only 1 in 72 exhibits is labelled in English, and have a long lunch at a cafe under the trees.
At Podgorica, the new and very boring capital down on the plain, I ask for a ticket to Rozaje, a randomly chosen town in the east of the country. The guy behind the counter double-checks that I really do want to go to Rozaje, and then gives me a ticket to Ulcinj. This may provide an idea of my skills at Serbo-Croatian pronunciation. “No, no”, I say, writing out the name. “Ahh, RoZAJE!” he exclaims, and suddenly I feel like one of those tourists in Dubrovnik.
The trip to Rozaje lasts 4 hours and is distinguished mainly by the loud non-stop music from the driver’s radio, which I take to be “turbo-folk”, a legendary Serbian (or perhaps Turkish) speciality consisting of banjo-assisted yodelling hitched to a techno beat. Whatever it is, four hours feels like a long time.
Rozaje turns out to have been a decent choice for a stopover. It’s in a beautiful wooded mountain valley, and surprisingly cool (perhaps they ski here in winter). I also had another turn of luck on arrival: there appeared to be no accommodation going, but a friendly taxi-driver got on his mobile and sent me to his mate on the main street, where I was billeted to a nice room above a restaurant and charged all of 15 euro. I celebrated my little success with a lamb chop in the restaurant, surrounded by Montenegran football fans watching Liverpool versus someone-or-other.
Today will be a long day: I have decided to visit Kosovo, albeit very quickly. I catch the 7.30 bus to Peja, crossing yet another spectacular mountain pass and getting my passport excitingly stamped by the UN. Peja isn’t much to look at: it seems to be just a lot of half-finished breeze-block buildings, and definitely poorer than Montenegro. Without time to hang about I get straight onto a bus bound for Mitrovice, the place of the 2004 riots where I guess I’m not supposed to venture. The bus station there is in ruins, with no timetable or even office, but a shop owner tells me where to wait for the coach north and soon I’m on my way back to the civilised world, or at least Serbia. I notice a good few KFOR patrols and even some sinister sectarian graffiti but the most interesting moment of my morning detour comes at the border, where I narrowly avoid being sent back to Montenegro because I don’t have the Serbian entry stamp in my passport. From the bus I watch the guard holding the passport and shouting into his mobile, but they obviously can’t be bothered with the fuss and I get waved on my way, sans entry stamp. Phew.
My intended lunchtime destination was the Ottoman town of Novi Pazar in southern Serbia, but the Kosovo drive-by only leaves an hour or so to appreciate its charms before I have to board yet another bus onward to Belgrade. I make the most of it by heading straight to the town’s architectural draw, the Hotel Vrbak: a bizarre 1970s communist-Turkish-kitsch pile which actually straddles a river. I find the deserted dining room and order a mineral water, which the surprised waiter quickly brings on a silver tray with two thoughtfully-added sugar cubes. He refuses to charge for it, obviously considering me eccentric (the feeling’s mutual).
Belgrade is seriously hot. My first impression is of a sweaty version of Moscow. Clouds of pollution rise from vintage buses, the trams go clackety-clack, cracked pavements are strewn with litter and mysterious slicks of liquid. It’s a long way from Zürich, in any case.
I spend the morning wandering around town in a hot torpor, resolved to do at least a little “culture”. There are the steps where Zoran Djindjić, the prime minister Serbia so needed, was assassinated in 2003 – but there’s no memorial (I later discover it was a different building). Here’s the national museum, but it’s closed for renovation. In the end I give up and make instead for a pavement cafe next to a quiet park, where I sit in peace for hours doing nothing. Actually, I read a book on the Balkans, bought this very morning. And let’s face it: within an hour I already know more about Serbia than if I had spent the whole day in the national museum.
The temperature doesn’t budge so I decide to go to the zoo – in my experience always a reliable plan in otherwise dull (or hot) places. Belgrade zoo, which is right in the middle of town, turns out to be a rather depressing place, a prison for animals. But at least all the inmates are outside, mostly immobile and spreadeagled in the shade. I enviously watch an energetic seal in its watery enclosure for a while, before repairing to the birds zone to spend the rest of the afternoon with my book amid a lot of squawking and tweeting.
There’s a beer festival on, and in the evening I make acquaintance with a Sergei, a young Dutch guy of Bosnian descendance living in Brussels. He’s not as pessimistic about Bosnia as the Mostar hostel owner, but just as acerbic. Once again I don’t dare ask which side of the line his own family comes from.
The train ride to Zagreb takes six hours. That’s a long time to spend in one of those ill-conceived East-European train compartments. I mean, whose sadistic idea was that, to force us into groups of six, compelled to share each other’s intimacy for hours on end? You can’t so much as stretch your legs without invading the three centimetres of personal space belonging to the complete stranger opposite. Travel guidebooks sometimes suggest that these compartments are a great place to make friends. Hell, why not marriage?
The Croatian capital is a surprise, when I get there. As with Italy and Poland, I harbour negative prejudices about fiercely Catholic Croatia. So I’m a little distressed to find that Zagreb is hopelessly seductive: all trees and parks and space and quiet, with a labyrinthine, hilly old town and even (horror) some rather picturesque little churches. Still, their dodgy ex-strongman Franjo Tudjman apparently remains popular, so you won’t catch me moving here or anything.
It’s time to return to Italy, where I intended to spend a couple of days basking in the ambience of wealth and culture before getting my train home.
But I’m in a for a nasty surprise. On arrival at Udine, a rich little town in the Alpine foothills north of Venice, the cash machine refuses to give me money. I fume and curse and try others – there’s tons of money in the account, dammit! – but it’s no use: I have gone over the weekly limit for foreign withdrawals (hint: tell your bank to increase the limit). It’s 3pm on a Saturday and I’m carrying 25 euro. Images of a relaxing afternoon in an Italian cafe evaporate and suddenly my options are very limited. I buy a ticket to Milan on my card, and go there straight away. The sleeper to France is full; same tomorrow, but there are a couple of eye-wateringly expensive first-class seats left on the 06.43 TGV in the morning. I cough up and, as penance, spend the night in Milan station, among tramps and Aussie backpackers (is there a difference?).
But hey, I didn’t come to see Italy anyway. With 25 euro you could easily survive two days in Sarajevo, and you’d have so much more to talk about afterwards.
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