A holiday in Cambodia, no, the other one, Bosnia (part 1) [travel blog post]

[lproven]

I've been living in Central Europe for nearly a year and a half now. It was time I explored a little more of it than my immediately-neighbouring cities. So, with mild trepidation, I laid down just under 10,000 Czech crowns for a week and a half's trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the spring.

It was with a local firm, Kudrna. (That's a lot more pronounceable to Czechs.) They apparently do mainly outdoors, activity-type holidays, not something I've done a lot of myself. They are also mainly used to coping with Czech customers -- little of their website, literature or materials is in English. I and my three friends -- one American, one Pole and one Lithuanian -- are apparently the largest group of foreigners they've ever had on one trip.

The price worked out at about £250 -- pretty good for an all-in ten-day trip including travel and hotels. For some of the locals along for the ride, though, this was a big expense, and the company knew it. There was a lot of packed food and little notes in the guides saying things akin to "yes, it's OK to bring your own food into the hotel restaurant, you don't have to buy anything."

The main downside of such an inexpensive trip was the mode of transport: a bus. That is, to get there and back as well as getting around while there. We left at 9PM from Brno and started our tour with Banja Luka in Bosnia about 12 hours later -- and that overnight 650km (400 mile) journey included numerous border crossings and several transits of passport control. Restful it was not. I barely slept -- my 1.88 metre frame doesn't fit well into coach seats at the best of times, and being expected to sleep in one for the first night of my holiday was not a good start.

I was groggy and sleep-deprived in this first town, and our very sweet, pretty and helpful guide was also a rookie and immediately lost the senior guide and the rest of the party, so we spent the first 20 grey, drizzly minutes of our visit to Banja Luka wandering the back streets. But we didn't miss a lot: it's not a beautiful place. Apparently it was badly damaged in the war, and while it was being rebuilt a decade later, an earthquake wrecked it further still. The town hall is quite impressive, the castle less so, the church pretty good -- and the first somewhat unexpected mosque rather decorative.

The post-war cultural lines are not clearly delineated here. Bosnia and Herzegovina is one country, a federal republic and a large chunk of what used to be central Yugoslavia. (I live in the Czech Republic's South Moravia region: Jihomoravske Kraj. That word, jiho -- “yee-ho” -- is "south" in Czech, and it's easy to see its relative in the name of the former Yugo-slav-ia: South-Slav-ia, the land of the southern Slavs.

But the southern Slavs have been repeatedly invaded too, and they spent centuries as part of the Ottoman Empire, under the rule of the Muslim Turks. Turkish (an Altaic language, unrelated to the Semitic family) was written in the Arabic alphabet back then, and Turkish existence was, I suspect, more strongly Arab-influenced than Ataturk's modern republic. What was the central part of Yugoslavia is very roughly 50:50 split between Greek-Orthodox Christians and post-Ottoman-conversion Muslims. There are mosques everywhere, and the marginally flatter north of Bosnia is still central Europe, so winters are long, cold and snowy. So the mosques, somewhat jarringly, have snow barriers on the roofs.

Inland of Bosnia is the more Christian-dominated Serbia, speaking exactly the same language but written in Cyrillic, not Latin. But as with the religious affiliations, the lines aren't clear -- there was plenty of Cyrillic text in Bosnia, even up in the north, testing my very meagre ability to read it with fancy fonts. Wrapping around Bosnia's coast and north is Croatia. To the south, in the hotter, subtropical and slightly flatter south is the other half of the country, Herzegovina. They all speak what used to be called Serbocroat, but is now for political reasons called three (not very) different languages -- Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian. It's much like Czech but a mite more generous with the vowels and stingier with diacritics. (Neither of which is a bad thing from my perspective.) For instance, Czech and Slovak heavily use the hacek -- an inverted circumflex -- both to indicate lisping ( “š” is the English “sh”, “č” is “ch”) but also palatilisation ( ta → tya, na → nya). The Bosnians indicate palatilisation with a j: what a Czech would write as Baňa and a Spaniard as Baña (and a Brit might bodge as Banya), here is Banja. Works for me, and it's easier to type, too.

Back to Banja Luka. Summary for the world traveller: don't. It's scruffy, heavily-graffitied, mostly charmless and unattractive. Two of my travelling companions, Brian and Dominika, are relatively newly-converted pescatarians, but we found a snack: bought borek in a small local bakery. These are a very Turkish sort of snack: greasy flaky pastry wrapping cheese, or potatoes, or meat. Tasty, though.

Graffiti in English. Almost makes one feel at home.

And apparently Praga -- Prague -- is a dream destination, or something. How touching.

And back on the bus to our next destination: a hike down a steep hill to an actual mountain spring -- wonderfully clear water, pouring out of a hole in the ground and forming a beautiful river through meadows and farmland. Bosnia was proving not to be what I had imagined at all: in this case, idyllic countryside, with some lovely riverside houses which looked very appealing. I mean, they probably had beds in, and that would mean sleep.

There were little wooden bridges, waterfalls, tiny rustic watermills -- some actually working, with millers selling no-doubt-by-Bosnian-standards-very-pricey flour. The contract from Banja Luka was startling and would have been even more so if I was fully awake. As it was, it felt dreamlike.

Traditional Bosnian watermill. OK, this one wasn't working, but the one next door was. You probably can't see the interesting side-spinning horizontal wheel.

And back on the bus again to our second town -- and lunch -- in Jajce. This was a more appealing, and more touristy, little town. Centred on a fast-flowing river, it has a quite impressive set of waterfalls close to the town centre, and winding narrow cobbled streets.

One of Jajce's waterfalls -- remarkably, pretty much in the town centre.

We admired the ruins of the local pasha's house and went to a semi-ruined underground church, emerging to driving rain. We scuttled into the building opposite, which high on its walls said:

ROOMS

ZIMMER

… so it seemed likely to offer some sort of negotiable hospitality.

The Jajce Catacombs Social Club. Or something like that.

Of course, we spoke no Serbocroat, or rather Bosnian. And the extravagantly-moustachioed host spoke next to no English, but he did have a smattering of German, which is roughly how much Brian and I have between us, too. Food was there none, but coffee was on offer.

And what coffee! Bosniak coffee (adjective lesson: "Bosnian" means pertaining to the whole country, but "Bosniak" means pertaining to the Muslim people and their culture) is basically Turkish coffee: hot as hell, black as sin, strong as the love of a good woman, and similarly gritty with a strong cardamom flavour. (That might just be me.) It's served in tiny inverted-cone-shaped copper pots, straight off the stove-top, with a tiny handleless porcelain cup containing 2 sugar cubes -- the pot contains 2 cupfuls -- and a block of Turkish delight. Or possibly Bosniak delight.

Bosniak coffee. Like Turkish coffee, but even better. Especially when sleep-deprived.

It was delicious, reviving, and just the spot for four weary travellers. We had a second round. It came to about 1 Euro per person, or 30p a pot. Suddenly, things snap into a new perspective, and we realised that the Czech Republic is actually a relatively prosperous, wealthy country, with decent pay and relatively high prices. Bosnia is not. It's visibly grindingly poor in a lot of places. There are bombed-out or burned-out buildings everywhere, in every town and dotting the countryside, along with abandoned roads, railway lines and other former infrastructure.

And it shows in various ways. We chose a prosperous-looking tourist-type restaurant for lunch. The menu was sparse, service glacial and inefficient -- my entire order was forgotten and hastily cooked while the others ate -- and the bill surprisingly low.

[More soon]