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Jadransko More (The Adriatic Sea)

Feliz San Fermin (they ran the bulls in Pamplona [Spain] for the 400th year this afternoon). Well, as you celebrated the Fourth by watching fireworks, drinking beer, and generally loafing about in the heat, we here in Bosna i Hercegovina (BiH) snuck out of our offices, and on Friday morning, went to the beach for the long weekend. Going to the beach here is, as you can imagine, a bit different from hopping in the minivan, and carting the kids to Ocean City.

Getting around in Sarajevo is not tough for us expats since it's a small city and walking is easy, taxis are cheap, and there is a pretty good tram system. When it comes to trips outside the city, however, we are stuck; not permitted to use project vehicles for personal use (imagine if we could!). The trick is to find an expat on another project whose contract is looser with the vehicles, or to befriend a Bosnian with a car, the time off, and the inclination to include a Yankee in their mix. My choice is certainly the latter from whom I learn so much just by being with them (Hell, if I wanted to ride to the beach with a bunch of Americans, I'd have stayed home!)

As I have mentioned before, the Bosnians on this project are a spectacular group, generally. My own deputy is a young woman named Elma Balic (say: BAH-lich). She is 21, tall, fullfigured but trim, has striking green eyes, auburn dyed hair, speaks flawless English, and is a young European woman by all accounts. She is model beautiful, with a sculpted jawline and a confident way about her that suggests she is older than her years. She is a whiz in the training center, and I would barely exist here without her. Elma recognizes me as her supervisor, and respects me as such, however, she has certainly made me her project for the summer - whether it is teaching me Bosnian (so I can't yet ask where a bathroom is but hey, I've mastered, "hey dude, how's it hanging") or helping me decide where to go to get a bikini wax or my suit pants hemmed. She is taking care of me in all the ways I need and I hope someday to repay her generosity of spirit!

So on Wednesday when Sanjin and Aida, Sandra and Ajdin, Mirna, Goran and Elma begin to talk to a few of us about the weekend - we hint that we'd love to see the coast but are not sure how to go about getting there. Needed we have said more?

The trip from Sarajevo to the Dalmatian Coast is, at its shortest, about four hours. The journey, however, is actually one of centuries, civilizations, wars, peacetimes, and both stark and lush beauty. I am travelling out with Sanjin (aged 26, who is our info systems specialist, and like many involved in MIS, quirky, hysterically funny, and excrutiatingly kind) and Aida (aged 37, our project accountant, a bright, soft-spoken, sweet woman with short bleach blonde hair, and the saddest blue eyes I've ever seen). We are riding in Sanjin's (say: SUN-yeen) tiny black Opel Corsa (Ford made in Spain) and it is like a little microwave oven on wheels. We listen to Bosnian folks songs, and we chat, and one of us is glued to the windows wishing she had the nerve to ask Sanjin to stop every five minutes so she can take a picture (this is genetic, right Dad?). You can see almost imagine the Turks of centuries past marching over these mountains, terrorizing the villages, and staking their claims - as easily as imagining the thousands of years of goat herders and step farmers who have trodden these ancient woods.

Sarajevo, besides sitting in the Miljacko (say: mil-YACH-ko) River valley, is at home tucked into some pretty serious mountains. When I used the word Alpine in an earlier missive, I meant it. Our trip due west by south west was on a single lane, hairpinned, tunnel-ridden, roller-coaster of a "highway". And through some spectacular mountain sides. From about an hour outside of Sarajevo through Mostar to the coast, we followed the good-sized river Neretva which, at some points, broadens to lake-sized proportions. The Neretva slices through the Bosnian mountains in deep gorges and is, due to a significant amount of limestone in these mountains, the most unearthlike neon green-blue you can imagine.

From my chemicals-for-better-living American point of reference I have trouble initially believing it is not polluted (it is not). With the exception of one good sized dam, there seems to be no control along it. Because it is so hard to get to in so many places (the river banks jutting up at 90 degree angles) it is magnificently natural. In fact one of the most striking things about our journey is the fact that there are almost no signs of human life except immediately around the few small towns (and Mostar - a large city) through which the Neretva flows. The mountains are old mountains - in fact I am struck by how they occasionally remind me of the more natural ranges in central Pennsylvania (the East coast ranges also being geographically old).

The mountain tops are rocky and vegetation-free, farther down from the peaks the foliage is scrubby: scrubby pines, scrubby bushes, and dry grasses. There are many tunnels, none of them are lighted, most of them are short, but the longer ones have these funny tiny double reflectors down the center (Sanjin pointed to them in one tunnel and asked me, "do you what those are?" and before I could respond, giggles teasingly, "They're VERY little cats!" And that's just what they looked like! All the tunnels have larger reflectors along the inside walls, and curiously the reflectors in the direction you are travelling are red and the ones on the walls of the opposing direction are white. I mused over this for a minute until I realized that they are like this to mirror the lights you would see in a dark tunnel (the red taillights on YOUR side of the road and the white headlights of the oncoming traffic)!

As we approach Mostar ("most" means bridge in Bosnian), the narrow mountains soften and open out onto wider plains. We are still travelling along the river at an elevated level and are able to look down to our right to follow the town's skyline (I use the term loosely). Mostar, like Sarajevo, suffered considerable damage during the war. Mostar's misfortune was its location with respect to all the warring factions - squarely situated in the middle of Croatian, Serb, and Bosnian armies - whatever one group left standing on a given day, another destroyed the next. From the looks of it now with my imagination in high gear, and what I've heard, Mostar was a jewel of a city. One of the more distressing things we saw was what had been a small village located in the hills about twenty minutes out of Mostar. Built almost entirely of stone, including a striking 15th century stone fortress and tower sitting out on the outermost precipice edge, it was a city of Serbs that the Croats destroyed early in the conflict. A ghost town - hundred of stone shells that had once been homes tucked lovingly into the hillsides.

Sanjin drove like Mario Andretti for most of the trip, that is, until we cleared Mostar, and began to approach the border (BiH/Croatia). I swear we had been regularly taking curves on two wheels which was especially exciting in the little Corsa. After Mostar it was 50 km/hour which seemed a snail-like pace after the first two hours. Knowing that Sanjin and Aida were as eager as I to reach paradise (the coast), I asked if he was ok. "Yeah, fine", he responded, "you see the police are real assholes along here." Apparently many are Croats who would prefer to have had this stretch of land belong to Croatia, and take their grudge out on the BiH license plates - cars with Croatian plates whizzed by us for 45 minutes. Half and hour later the road funneled us into a queue for the customs checkpoint at the border. For me this is no big deal, for the Bosnians it is not only a hassle but a little depressing. For all of their young lives there has been no border - it was all one country! They belonged to this whole country, and it belonged to all of them - as a whole. Imagine having to get a passport and be grilled by INS and customs police each time you went to Rehobeth Beach, or Cape Cod, or the Outer Banks of North Carolina! They must feel indignant - but the desire to get to the beach is much greater than the indignancy or absurdity that the display of passports might cause, and we are quickly on our way.

The approach to the Adriatic Sea (Jadransko More) is not like many countries' coastlines - there is no vast flattening of the land, no great salt marshes, and certainly no strip malls and cheap hotels lining the main drag! You continue swerving through mountainous territory and suddenly you look out the car window to the left and there it is! Picture Pacific Highway One along the California coast. Just like that. Just like every car ad you've ever seen. True to all the other roads we've been on - it's a twisty, curved ribbon of highway (again, single lane). We are heading North so hugged to the right are the walls of the precipices above us, and to the left, ha, well let's just say that my sister would NOT be sitting on the left side of the car. Vertigo, anyone?

One of the most remarkable pieces of this scenario are the dramatic mountainous islands which appear to rise out of the sea a couple of miles off the coast. These aren't the little islands that dot the Northern Dalmatian coast, they are the long serpentine monsters of Hvar and Korcula. The are long, large, and almost unpopulated except along some of the shorelines, the mountains are so high and so dramatic, and so uninhabitable. As if these giants were not enough to prove to you that just because there is an expanse of salt water in front of you the geography has changed any, the beaches we swam at all weekend went from depths of two feet to a hundred in the space of ten feet. The water is salty and quite buoyant. I can easily float with my ankles crossed and my hands tucked under my head (of course a little extra body fat makes that even easier!) The beaches were pebbly, no sand, and , as Mirna pointed out, wonderful because there would be no sand in your hair, your ears, your swimsuit, or your bag when you got home. As long as you managed to avoid cutting your feet on the errant piece of glass or the spiny koosh-ball looking sea urchins that hid menacingly in the shallows, yeah, I guess pebbles have their advantages.

The water of the Jadran is a Mediterranean teal, greener close to shore, and deep turquoise/teal farther out. We are staying in a little fishing village called Igrane (say: EEG-ron-ay). I am amazed that after centuries of tourists it is still, quite simply, a little fishing village. There is one hotel in the village. We are not in it. We have all rented ground floor rooms for $10/night in the little homes that line the beach. The landlords all live behind or on the upper floors of these places, the ground floors were only for rent. The front door of our rooms is 15 feet from the water line. I can now die a happy woman. These places have large shared bathrooms, and kitchens. Those building along the waterline which are not residences with rooms for rent are little cafes and restaurants - not one of which has more than six tables. The little fishing boats go out at dawn and come back at dusk, and you just know that it's been like this since Greek imperial times. It all feels just like the lands and seas of that Ulysses must have experienced. They bring in hake, and other sea fish, but mostly they bring in squid. At every cafe you can order plates of squid and you will swear that each plateful is better than the last. Grilled whole in olive oil, parsley, lemon and garlic, they are about 3-4 inches long and to. die. for.

Can you suddenly understand why I have trouble with the fact that most of the expats on the Bosnian projects are getting 25% "hazard" pay on top of their Chase Manhattan (previously inflated) salaries? Yeah right. The hazards of cutting your foot on a sea urchin.

Ok, back to Igrane. I spend two and a half days in both Igrane and Makarska which is 10 miles up the coast (a larger town, a yacht mooring) swimming, reading, eating, and drinking warm soda on the beach (Igloo Coolers could make a FORTUNE on the Croatian coast - I didn't see a one. The coast was full of Czechs, Poles, Croats, and an occasional German. No Brits, no Frogs, and except for the two other Americans in our group, no Yanks. I rode home on Sunday afternoon with Elma, Goran and two of their friends, Djenena ("Jenny") and Nane (say: NAH-nay). All 20-21 years old, they spent the trip teasing each other unmercifully, and listening to "hopped up" versions of the old disco, mo-town, and club music I listened to in college. Jenny's car is a Russian-made, Aleka, a four-door sedan, considerably bigger than the Opel I came out in. It seemed to take the bouncing of the bee-bopping kids in stride. Nane, whose English is limited, had bought a box of his favorite cookies, called, "Domacicija". In an effort to engage in the mostly (for me) English conversation in the car, at one point, he whispered something to Jenny in Bosnian, asking her how to say something in English. He rolled it over his tongue for a moment, then turned to me in the back seat and grinned, handed me the box of cookies and said loudly, "Would you like a "housewife"?? Everyone howled. (Some things just shouldn’t be translated) It was an easy ride back and I was really sort of sad to be back in big, ol' dusty Sarajevo!

Reality Bites: The Serb Republic is currently being run by a rational woman named Biljana Plavsic ("BILi-yana Plav-sich). She has been having trouble with a well-known psycho, power-hungry, nationalistic, former war-criminal named, Radovan Karadzic (maybe you've heard of him?) who has been riling up his police forces. Karadzic has been racketeering and generally spending his postwar days maintaining as much corruption as possible all the while doing his best to reneg on the Dayton Accords. Plavsic, in attempt to get some control back, shut down the Serb Parliament on Friday (a Parliament containing a number of Karadzic's "bought-off" henchmen). Karadzic illegally "re-opened" Parliament with his own men to pass a number of laws to have Plavsic dismissed, and the Dayton Accords ignored. She's based in Banjaluka in the North and has the support of most of the general population including the army. He's based in Pale (20 miles from here) and has support of the gangsters he's made rich and the local police forces he's corrupted in a number of Serb towns. It's sort of a Mexican standoff at the moment, making all of us here in Sarajevo a bit wary. The quote in the paper this morning by an unidentified European diplomat put it best, "If we are willing to see the one person in power in Republika Srpska who is willing to carry out the peace agreement be crushed by an indicted war criminal, where are we?"

And so it goes... all the while the US press tells us all about Paula Jones. Is it any wonder the average American is a little out of touch? Yes sir, it's never a slow news day in the Balkans, that's for sure.

Copyright © 1997 – Rachel Peterson

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