We traveled along the coast looking down on the beautiful blue waters and little villages below and it was gorgeous. In a higher part of the hills were some thin pencil-like conifers, I think they may well be called pencil pines.
Much of the rocky countryside reminds us of Greece. We passed many mussel, and fish farms in the small bays.
We looked down over Dubrovnik but didn't stop there. We both visited there in the early 70s. It's a stunning place.
The bus driver stopped at a restaurant so people could have lunch and it specialized in spit-roast lamb. None of the 'lambs' looked like lambs at all. They seem to call all sheep meat lamb. There were about 3 spits set up like this one with 3 or 4 animals per spit, including their heads, sitting over hot charcoal.
In Sarajevo we stayed at a hostel near the old city. It was a pretty noisy place with thin walls and full of 19 -21 year old English uni students on very tight budgets. The hostel provided tea, coffee, and packets of pasta, and instant soup so they were eating that for every meal.
We remember seeing many reports about the war of 1992-95, so the city seemed strangely familiar. We saw the yellow coloured Holiday Inn building where the journalists were staying and reporting on the snipers.
We walked down Sniper Alley and saw the bombed buildings and apartment blocks peppered with bullet holes. Some buildings have had the holes filled with cement and have been left unpainted while others have been completely renovated and you would never know that they had suffered a lot of shelling.
On the footpaths are huge holes made from the shellings and some of them have been filled with symbolic red cement and are called 'Sarajevo roses'- the red is slowly fading. You have to be careful where you walk as there are still unfilled pits where shells have exploded in the footpaths.
We visited the National Museum where there was a static display of what was happening in everyday life for the Sarajevans. It showed children studying at rooms turned into schools, children carrying water from the river up to the 14th floor of their apartment block, the cigarette factory produced cigarettes daily, while the newspaper presses continued to roll and print the news. The markets were empty and there was nothing to buy (sometimes donated food was for sale). People made cookers out of all kinds of metal cans and drums and cut the trees from the parks for fuel. Apartments were filled with sandbags to protect them from further sniper fire and the green spaces between the apartment blocks were turned into vegetable gardens. The balconies were safer to grow the family vegetables because as soon as the shallots popped out of the soil a decision had to be made on whether to leave them longer or risk some other hungry family stealing them.
The old town is now a bustling place with cafes outside and loads of restaurants. We ate at a local place and met a young girl (18 or 19) who was born in Sarajevo but her family fled to the US during the war. She was home for the summer holidays with her grandmother but hoped to return to Sarajevo in the future. She helped us translate the menu and order our food and we were surprised when she paid for it.
We walked about the city and visited the old Turkish Quarter. This building of Austro-Hungarian style with Moorish touches used to house Bosnian books and manuscripts but was shelled in 1992 and many books may be irreplaceable.
In the old city, Morica Han, was a tavern where the caravans stopped on the ancient trading route between the east and the west.
We passed the spot where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Bosnian Serb and so began WW1.
It has been a really interesting visit that we enjoyed a lot.
