After our trip to Sarajevo, we took the route to Mostar, where we enjoyed to meet new travelers and a new village, full of history.
In Sarajevo, our host recommended us to take the train to Mostar. He was right. We enjoyed such a delightful view: the train was crossing a lake, running on a viaduct, hiding through the trees. There are only two trains a day : early on the morning or later afternoon. Since we were not morning people, we took the one on the afternoon, and enjoyed the sunset.
Once we got in Mostar, we met people coming from the capital too or from south, Kotor. It looked like all the backpackers had the same road in mind. Some group of backpacker were then created and people started to travel together, it was great!
Our host, Miran, was very different than the first one. First of all, he is a dad, who take care of his backpackers like he would take care of his own children. Once he saw us arriving together, his wife notice we were not only friends and gave us the double bed room, which was a very nice gesture from them.
Breakfast was included, so each morning, we got Bosnian coffee, served in the traditional way: with tiny cups and a middle size jar in the middle, all decorated in an Arabic style.
The area was great to hike, to shop and to visit few museums. Miran organizes his own tours: a road trip around Mostar, to see the famous points of interest such as Kravica waterfall, the river Blagaj, and the medieval village Počitelj. All of those stops were amazing. We could swim, hike and eat fresh pomegranate.
The tour didn’t stop here. The last point of view was in Mostar itself. Miran drove us to his secret spot where he told us more about his story during the war. Bosnians were actually very good engineer because most of them decide to flee the country. Now, citizen count on each other to find work, helping the neighbor to fix something, sharing the table…There is a lot of warmness and solidarity atmosphere. A way of living that we forgot in Western Europe.
We couldn’t miss the most famous war spot: the sniper tower. It was before a huge shopping mall. On the front line, it is now a damaged tower, with no protection. Climb up to the roof, on the building side. There is a great view on the city. When you look at your feet and around you, you see the fragments from the shooting, you see where the soldiers were standing at, looking at the next target. In the dust, we even found a pacifier that reminded us of our upcoming baby. Likely the war is now over in Europe. I was especially sad that our European education system doesn’t tell us anything about it.
Downtown Mostar, the sun was so bright, even though we were late September/beginning October. We enjoyed the market, happening everywhere, and the walk to the famous bridge. We admired swimmers collecting money from the tourist. Then, they jump. You can see the river is very touristy, there is a lot of trash.
We would have loved to stay a couple days more, we actually came back here for few hours on hour way back from Montenegro. We had an amazing time with Miran. As the transportation to the next country aren’t so good, he also offered us a taxi service to Kotor. Next blog post will tell you more about this next stop of our beautiful Balkan trip.
BInGer 