Sieging Sarajevo

Whoa, slow down.  Looks like Bosnia wasn’t the next stop.  Apparently “Montenegro” or whatever declared independence in 2006 and claims to be an independent country.  Last I heard, “independent countries” have their own currency but whatever.  Anyway, this great Black Mountain stood between me and my goal of Sarajevo.  I awoke bright and early the next morning ready, once again, to get myself out of Kosovo at all costs.  The Finn walked me to the bus depot where I flat out refused to pay 15 euros to get to Podgorica.  Instead, in my mind, it made sense to buy a ticket to the border between the two countries and walk across.  My geographer’s intuition hadn’t tuned me into the fact that the border crossing was way up in the mountains, and that it was a steep and tiresome walk up and out.  I was able to convince the driver why I needed to  be dropped off at Kalicane (‘Calitsany’—not ‘Cally Cane’ or ‘Calichan’ as my first two guesses were, prompting further confusion as to why I would be going there) and he did so, without charging me.  Leaving me behind, we both started our ascent up the hill at roughly the same time, though I have since come to concede defeat. 

About three hours in, faced with a dying iPod and only mildly sweeping view of the Kosovar domain, I tried cutting switchbacks and ended up cutting my jeans on barbed wire instead.  The site of me emerging from the woods onto the road high up in the mountains was enough to make the first car stop to pick me up, driven by a Macedonian-born Bulgarian man with an excellent grasp of English.  We past the first border crossing leaving Kosovo and 20 minutes later made it to the snowy Montenegrin side.  He mused that I probably would have died.  I told him that he could drop me off at the nearest railway line, where I was unpleasantly surprised to find no train running.  I opted for a 5 euro bus (1 euro of this was a receiptless “baggage fee” which reeked of corruption) which took me to Mojkovac, a town that did have a railway, but for which the ticket was 8 euros.  I set up shop in the train station bufé, hoping to establish myself as a local ‘person of intrigue’ by spreading my map on the table and plotting my route by candlelight and pushing salt shakers around the table as one often does while contemplating an assault on the Balkans.  Failing to attract any attention, curious glances or even a holler, I decided this town wasn’t ready for me, packed up my things and boarded the first train going to Podgorica.  Having neglected to buy a ticket, I inadvertently supported the bribe economy by paying 3 euros to the conductor who tapped his nose, smirked and left me alone.  This would have upset me but I was tired and sometimes it feels good to be bad.  

Podgorica was anything but a sight to behold.  It was late, the train station and bus terminal were crawling with taxi drivers, and I was on the hunt for wifi and a place to sleep.  I found none, after a grueling walk around the city with all my belongings late at night.  I decided that perhaps my best choice was to take the 11pm bus to Sarajevo and put this whole experience behind me.  While I can’t argue that Montenegro was particularly bad, there was no reason why a bowl of goulash and a beer should cost 6 euros—this isn’t France (mainly because they were serving goulash).  A group of old  men asked me where I was from and what I thought of Montenegro (and the other Ex-oslavia countries I had been to) and all I could remark was that I was surprised that it was ever one country.  Of course, I can believe that it was one country because they are all exactly the same—with the exception of Kosovo and Slovenia—but lately the Montenegrins have been particularly feisty about having a ‘distinct’ language and culture, and securing their name in the linguistic group that is Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian-Montenegrin.  Note to potential users: it’s all the same.  After the right combination of stew, beer and bread, I was sufficiently self-medicated collapse in a comatose state aboard the late night express to Sarajevo.

Rarely do my preconceived notions of a place live so perfectly up to my expectations as Sarajevo did.  Or at least, initially.  Usually I have to scratch beneath the Potemkinesque glossing of today’s Eastern Europe to find the not-so-subtle reminders of the 40-or-so odd years spent on their peoples’ socialist wonderland projects.  When you do, it’s worth it.  But when you don’t even need to scratch—rather, it scratches you—it’s a bit of a rude surprise.  If someone had told me that Sarajevo was a war-torn wasteland of bullet-ridden pre-fabbed apartment buildings, empty potholed streets, and a pervasive mist comprised of dense fog and smoke from tanks, I would have believed it.   The interesting thing is that someone did tell me that.  Peter Mansbridge, or one of his subordinates, made me terrified to even think about Bosnia since the 1990s, and when CBC moved The National from 9 to 10pm—which in 1995 was well past my bedtime—most of my knowledge of ‘current’ events became frozen in time, specifically 1995.  Until I found out about this so-called “Dayton Accord” I had been under the impression that Bosnia was still a disputed warzone and everyone had just stopped caring about the pockets of fighting still going on.

Unfortunately, I didn’t learn about the Dayton Accord until well after I had arrived in Sarajevo, and the southern bus terminal was exactly the welcoming that I was expecting.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, the bus terminal is located about 10km south of the city, and while a small hub has established itself around there, I was pretty certain that it was the centre.  It had everything I expected the centre of a war-torn country to look like.  The crumbling Yugo-socialist realist bus depot, the bleakness, the rain, and the elderly androgynous gatekeeper of the bus terminal public toilets all pointed to the fact that the bus I boarded in Podgorica had actually arrived in my own imagination.  Of course, the vultures in their taxis were slowly encircling the recently arrived bus with its cargo of fresh meat, but I opted to forgo what probably would have been a 2 euro ride, and walked into the centre at 5am.  I assumed it couldn’t be far.  I assumed, after all, that I was in the centre.  But never before have I been so unpleasantly surprised to find such a charming and bustling alpine metropolis after a 2 hour walk in the rain.  While this was the third or fourth time in the past two days I had cursed myself for abandoning my gumboots on the side of the road in Kosovo, I had to calm myself with my firm belief in path dependence, and that it was the best decision at the time.  And following along this path, I was too proud to cave and get a taxi ride, assuming that the centre was just around the next corner.  This kept me going for two hours. 

My first impressions were that I had no idea Sarajevo in its present state existed.  It is still taking a while to really settle in that in 1984, Sarajevo was hosting the Winter Olympics and eight years later it was under siege.  Naturally I assumed that in 2018 Vancouver would be partially encircled by Serbian tanks.  My second impression was that the coffee and pizza situation in Sarajevo were tragic.  Uncooked dough and instant Nescafé laid out a lukewarm welcome wagon for me, while my wet feet began to warm up, even if there was no hope of becoming dry.  Utilising the free wifi outside of my prospective hostel, I booked online to avoid the off-the-street 2 euro surcharge, and asked about my reservation.  It was actually an apartment I was given, and I at first could not locate the kitchen.  It turns out it didn’t have a kitchen, but that didn’t stop me from barging into the apartment a floor below and start making some soup before realising that I wasn’t necessarily supposed to be there.  

Outside the sleet pounded down, making me regret leaving the warmer climes for the frigid north, and at this point, really missing my gumboots.  Sally arrived the next day, and our Canadian friend a day later*.  We decided then (actually long before, which is what prompted Nancy’s escape from Yellowknife for a six-day whirlwind Bosnian Spring Break) that the one thing one must do in Bosnia is walk the 25km coastline.  Of course, the other thing one can do is choose to continue sleeping in Mostar when I got up at 6am to catch the train to the coast.  This was the choice Sally made, and she missed out on the wonderful opportunity of walking along a highway with no shoulder and not getting her passport stamped at all.  Despite weaving in and out of Croatia and Bosnia all day, they flat out refused to stamp my passport.   This was a crushing blow, because around this time it became clear that I was really only in this game for the stamps.  

Some have argued, primarily via disdainful honks, that our chosen encampment on the side of the Dalmatian highway at dusk was not the best-positioned place from which to launch a hitchhiking endeavour back to Bosnia.  However, after screaming, “Good luck getting into the EU, Croatia!” in frustration, a work truck took pity on us and picked us up.  We huddled in open-aired back full of cement sacks and various implements for labouring, screaming “Best Bosnian Spring Break ever!” as it whisked us back into Neum, and into the arms of a family that let rooms for 10 euros per person and operated a pizzeria on the ground floor while a storm raged outside.  Clearly this is all we needed to justifiably say we “did” Bosnia, and after doing Bosnia, we went back to Sarajevo and prepared for our imminent departure from Bosnia.  After rejecting the chauffeur services of a man who stopped in front of us and pulled a suction-cupped ‘taxi’ sign out of his trunk, we shared a tearless goodbye outside the Sarajevo Holiday Inn and parted our separate ways—I north by train the mother of Slavic nations, Sally by bus to the south and ultimately Turkey, and Nancy by six different planes back to the Canadas.    

*I say ‘Canadian friend’ in this case because she speaks French and English, her dad worked for CBC, and she lived in Yellowknife.  These powers combined make her the most Canadian thing that can conceivably exist.