The Dalmatian Islands

On leaving Dubrovnik, we spent eight days lounging about on the Dalmatian Islands, off the mainland coast of Croatia near Split. The ferries were easy to arrange and reasonably priced - although annoyingly, we had to go all the way back to Split to hop from island to island.

Bol - You can see the beach extending into the ocean.

We halved our week between two islands: Brac, the nearest to the mainland, where we settled into the touristy-cute town of Bol, and Vis, farther into the Adriatic, undeveloped until Croatia's departure from the Yugoslavian Federation twenty years ago.

As with most visitors to Bol, we spent a lot of our visit on the gorgeous Zlatni Rat beach, known in English as the 'Golden Horn.' The beach spikes out into the sea towards neighbouring Hvar Island, thus forming the horn, both sides dotted with big beach umbrellas and covered with tanned bodies. (Except for me... Dan told me that while he was swimming, I was easy to pick out back on the shore. It didn't help that most of the tourists seemed to be either Italians or Croatians on holiday in the September 'slow' season.)

So for three days, we lay snuggled into the grey pebbles of the beach and swam in the unbelievably clear Adriatic. Our little apartment had a kitchen, so we could cook for the first time in several months, but we did go out for a meal of salted, fried sardines. Which are served with all the bones - thankfully no head. Crunch, crunch, nom nom nom.


After a brief return to Split, we grabbed the two hour ferry to Vis Island, the farthest and least developed of the mid-Dalmatian Islands. We stayed in Komiza, across the island - a pretty little town, set in a wide-mouthed bay, where every house has tourist apartments and restaurants line the harbour, but where even the moderate crowds of Bol had dissipated  to leave us with space to breathe.

Our landlady, on finding that our Croat was very limited, decided it was best to speak to us in Italian... also very limited. Lots and lots of nodding and gesturing.

We spent four days on the rocky beach outside our window, where the fishies developed a strange affection for Dan, following him in clouds as he swam; we rented a two-person sea kayak for a day on the water, and we spent a day hiking out to the end of the bay (past a garbage dump... yum). But mostly, we lounged in happy laziness and swam.

S.

Dubrovnik

We arrived in Dubrovnik on a Monday evening coach and after some minor directional problems, hauled ourselves and our backpacks up a few billion steps to our hostel, near the top of the hill. We sat for an hour in the terrace garden - grape vines hanging overhead, lime and pomegranate trees around us, and then explored the old city.






Dubrovnik’s old town literally sparkles like the ‘Jewel of the Adriatic’ it's claimed to be. It’s made of marble - entirely made of marble. The streets, the walls, the towers, gleam white under the moon and the streetlights. The streets are the cleanest I think I have ever seen - it looks like the whole city is swept and polished every night. The whole place felt like a fairy tale as we wandered the little alleyways and strolled the main boulevard, perusing menus we knew were too expensive for our budget.

(Tragically, it’s spoiled by the tourists. And I know that I am being entirely hypocritical because I AM a tourist, but it’s a well-known fact that tourists dislike other tourists. Especially ones who stand dead-centre on a busy street, gawking and taking photos and blocking those of us who are strolling along. I know it's pretty. Stand on the side of the street please. Rant over.)

As Dubrovnik is a must-see on the itineraries of everyone from cruise-shippers to backpackers to holiday-makers, it’s busy busy busy, all the time. I’m glad we saw it, but two nights was certainly enough.

So, having seen the city on the first night, and having no desire to visit museums, what do we do in Dubrovnik?

Along the side of the tall, looming wall, away from the little harbour, there’s a swimming spot with a couple sets of stone steps, rocks to leap off of and space to sit in the sun. So we picked up a two-litre bottle of beer (yes that is a thing) as we walked through the city that afternoon , and with a couple swigs inside us, we jumped from the jagged rocks into the salty Adriatic. We splashed around, hauled ourselves back up the slippery, algae-covered steps, retired to our beer bottle and repeated the whole thing when the sun became too intense.

Not a bad life, drinking beer and swimming under a magnificent city wall. There were other people there, but it wasn't nearly as crowded as the inside of the walls.

Eventually, many litres later, we decided it was time to be good tourists, so we abandoned the swimming hole, grabbed some pizza to sober up, and bought tickets to walk the walls. It’s better than it might sound - it makes for several kilometres of walking, the walls are kept in fantastic condition, and the views over the city both inside and outside the wall, and of the sea as the sun was setting, were beautiful.

And if you just looked at the sea, you couldn't even see the crowds.

S.

War Tour: Sarajevo

High upon a mountain overlooking Sarajevo, our tour guide stepped gingerly off of the wide pathway and began to climb up a slope, eight cameras dangling from his arm and slung across his torso. Our group, ten travelers in all, waited at the bottom, awestruck by this risky move. We watched his careful foot placement, on tree roots and exposed rock - less likely to be hiding a landmine. Although he had climbed this hill many times, there was always still a very serious chance that a false step would set off one of the millions of mines scattered all over this mountain.

When he reached the ruins of a Serbian bunker at the top, Jasmin snapped a picture with each of our cameras. He'd found two mines a few weeks back, unearthed them carefully, and he wanted to show us what they look like. In a month or two, a mine expert he knows will come and diffuse them.

Jasmin fought in the siege of Sarajevo, which began nearly twenty years ago when the Serbian army surrounded the capital of the fledgling Bosnia and Herzegovina nation. For nearly four years, the front line wavered within a few hundred yards of its original position on the hilltop, encircling the city. The Sarajevans were unable to break the Serbian noose, while the Serbs unable to break the wills of the Sarajevans who fought on empty stomachs and smuggled weapons to evade the promise of genocide.

We walked around the mountain were Jasmin fought, a mere four kilometres from his home, where he lived with his wife and five-month-old son and where today, he runs a hostel. We saw the former observatory, now a pair of destroyed buildings covered in shell-marks and broken glass, where his thigh was ripped open by shrapnel. We found shell clips, rusting in the dirt below old bunkers, and the shelled-out cable car station, where a whole mortar shell is still embedded high up in the wall.

He showed us the hollow where he spent many nights in a tent, and then walks us uphill, a hundred yards on a thin dirt path, across no-man's land to the Serbian line.

"Don't step off the path," says his son, now a grown man, before we begin, "it was cleared by a professional. There are thousands of mines around us - do not step off the path."

And yet, as we walked, all around us lay gorgeous forest, green and untouched, spilling down the mountainside to the valley where Sarajevo stretches out, red roofs lining the shallow, bubbling river. We saw the grafittied remains of the bobsled track that was used for the 1984 Olympic Games, its concrete expanse winding down the mountain (still used today for extreme rollerblading competitions, although chunks of it were torn off to become barricades).

It is so hard to believe that something so beautiful still contains so much danger. Landmines in Bosnia are harder to find, and thus more expensive to remove, than in most other areas in the world. The thick forest, now dense with twenty years of undisturbed growth, obscures the explosives. And as in the business of mine removal, complications mean an increased chance of death, these mines will probably be here for a while yet.

Walking around the streets of Sarajevo, there are pockmarks in the pavement, sunshine-shaped indents left by falling shells and flying shrapnel. There isn't enough money in Bosnia right now to fix every damaged building, so the reminders are everywhere.

At the outskirts of the city is the Tunnel Museum, the preserved end of the tunnel into Sarajevo through which food, arms, electricity and soldiers crept for years for the salvation of the city. Here, there is a shell embedded into the cement less than two metres from the entrance.

How does a person survive such a destructive siege? When we asked Jasmin how he'd found the strength to climb the hill day after day, the answer was easy: he looked at his son. When your family, your home, and your life are threatened, sometimes there's no other answer.

S.

Bulgaria

On the journey from Istanbul to Croatia, we spent six nights in Bulgaria. Two in the capital city of Sofia, and four in Veliko Tarnovo, the former capital, perched among the mountains in the northwest.

Sofia still looks like a post-Communist city. Over-sized concrete buildings are easy to spot just outside the centre, and over-sized concrete monuments scattered through the city's vast parks proclaim everlasting friendship with Russia.


But, the centre of the city is a tangle of construction sites that will help modernize the city - overseen by the symbol of a revitalized capital, an enormous golden statue of ‘Sofia’ herself. The women who stride in stilettos over the uneven mess of a sidewalk are confident that they, and Sofia, are cultured and European.

We did a free walking tour to get to know the city - saw the historic Bulgarian Orthodox churches, the smattering of Roman ruins (more of which are surfacing as plans for a metro are carried out), the government buildings that date to the era between Ottoman rule and Communist. And then, best of all, we spent a few hours drinking beers in the park with our twenty-two year old tour guide, comparing the worlds in which we grew up.

It's basically a playground.

Our second day in Sofia we walked out to the Military Museum. The inside section is mostly uniforms from the war fought against the Ottomans for Bulgarian independence, poorly marked and dull. But outside, before you even pay to get in, you can roam a lawn cluttered with tanks and big guns and fighter planes, all rusting away quietly (some painted red so it's harder to tell) at this little out-of-the-way museum. Once you've paid your one Euro, the inside lawn contains everything from WW1 trucks to a missile launcher and advanced radar.

Awesome!

That evening we discovered one of Bulgaria's hidden charms: food. This is a very fertile country. The richness of its farmlands is evident in the plump, juicy tomatoes and the creamy deliciousness of the local yogurt and cheese. The markets are full to bursting with vibrantly coloured produce. That the land and the expertise of the farmers was wasted throughout the Communist era, and that the people in Sofia so often did without fresh food, is incomprehensible.

And, as Bulgarian produce is glorious and varied, so follow suit the restaurants. Their menus are books. There are pages of salads - they take their salads very seriously here, even though the diet is largely meat based. Pizza has been adopted and re-imagined (pickles is a very normal topping) and the traditional meat-and-potatoes style meals are amaaaaaazing.

I'm beginning to drool just writing about it all.

Leaving Sofia, we grabbed a three hour bus into the mountains to Veliko Tarnovo, a small student town perched on the edge of a gorge. We’d planned two nights and ended up staying for four, enjoying the people and the food and the stunning scenery.

One afternoon, after the heat had dissipated, we climbed up the closest ridge in the hopes of hiking to a nearby monastery, which, like many in the area in the mid-nineteenth century, was a haven for rebel soldiers fighting the Ottomans. But, as we reached the top of the ridge and started down the path, we heard gunshots. A shooting range was throwing clay pigeons down the path right in front of us... hike cancelled!

So instead, we sat on a bench at the top and looked over the gorge, cutting away dramatically beneath us, falling to the wide, rushing river that winds like a snake through the town, houses cascading down the three hills. Veliko Tarnovo is beautiful.

We spent a day shopping for warm-weather clothes and shoes (unsuccessfully) and then a day out with a hostel-organized day trip of the region. We saw another monastery (no shooting range this time!), a historically preserved town (think Fanshawe Pioneer or Upper Canada Village) full of traditional crafts, and we drove all over the rolling, forested mountains and the wide valleys, inhabited by tiny, insular villages and by small, impermanent gypsy camps.

Finally, we visited a Russian-built monument that served as a conference centre - a massive, concrete-domed bowl at the side of which was attached a thin, five-story tower, adorned with a huge red star.

These days, it’s called the UFO, because that’s what it looks like. It was abandoned after the Communist party fell and its lavish insides were plundered - marble flooring ripped up, the copper roof stripped, the spray-on red velvet ceilings torn out. It’s technically still locked, but armed with headlamps, we climbed through a window and explored its dark and dusty corners.

Upstairs, in the round conference room, all that remains of the former glory are the coloured-glass murals on the walls, depicting Party members and heroes, content workers and Socialist glory.

We went down to the basement, where mushrooms grow in the damp piles of rubble and someone has spray-painted creepy messages ('Zombies round here') - more thrill than history. No hidden creepers down there, I was watching.

The place has remained as it is, because it would seem that the government doesn't really know what to do with it. So it sits abandoned, red star broken but gleaming, sometimes visited by curious tourists but mostly by wild horses seeking shelter from the mountain winds.

I was entirely unprepared to leave the Veliko Tarnovo, for no good reason at all. I hadn't done enough laundry or researched our rapidly approaching weeks in Croatia, and I was still doddling along with my blog.

But really, I was reluctant to leave Veliko Tarnovo because it meant leaving Bulgaria, and this beautiful backwater with its fascinating past and its delicious food has stolen my heart.

We boarded a mid-morning bus to Sofia and wound our way up over the tall ridges, peering over secretive valleys that have hidden rebel soldiers and gypsies alike over the centuries. I'll miss this fertile land with its fantastic food and hidden-gem monuments and monasteries.

After a few hours in Sofia (just enough to trade our lev for dinar), we were on our way towards Serbia.

We'd decided to skip Belgrade and just cut straight across the south of Serbia from Sofia to Sarajevo, with a night's rest in the Serbian city of Nis. We were reluctant at first because there isn't much information on Serbia's bus system online, but with a conformation from our chosen hostel that a bus does run from Nis to Sarajevo (one at 6 am and one after 9 pm if you are googling this) we decided it would be easier than Belgrade.

Our only impressions of Serbia come from the uncomfortable buses, the funny and helpful owner of the Happy Hostel in Nis, and a massive dinner of rich, smokey meat and thick bread. So although I've heard many stories about the mistreatment of Americans (and Canadians) in Serbia - mostly in Belgrade - we experienced only kind hospitality.

The trip from Nis to Sarajevo was long - ten hours - but beautiful, all mountains and emerald rivers, endless gorgeous scenery.

S.