Travel Stories >> Bosnia >> Moving in the Balkans

Moving in the Balkans

Travelling in the Balkans, for anyone who has done it with some regularity, I'm discovering, is a trial and a pleasure all jumbled into the same experience. For those of you who have travelled along Interstate 95 anywhere between Maine and Florida, the "rest-area" concept is one which is taken for a great deal of granted. In BiH, there are no commercialized chains of rest-area (Mobil-McDonalds be damned), instead they have "roast lamb" stops. Along all the little one lane connector roads (between the major cities) there are restaurants that offer only ONE dish, roast lamb. The truckers stop, the buses stop, the UN vehicles stop, and on our way home from Dubrovnik, we also stop.

From a distance you can spot these eateries because out front they sport two or three large metal wheels (diameter 5-6 feet) with plastic cups attached along the circumference. A water tap pours down into these cups, propelling the wheel to spin. This spinning wheel turns the four or five spits on which are skewered whole lambs - roasting over the coals. You pull off the road and park next to the lines of trucks and buses, and sit down at one of the tables. There is no menu, the only thing you must decide with what you will be drinking with your meal. The waitress brings you large communal plates of cabbage, tomato and cuke salads, and freshly baked bread. Then she delivers to your place at the table a large plate with a steaming hunk of roast lamb on it. The crackling is so fresh and garlicy that you need not chew - it will melt in your mouth. I apologize to all you vegetarians out there, but this is one of the best dining experiences that an omnivore can have. Tomo, who drove a truck though the war (so he’s been around), tells us that this place has the best lamb in the country, and he places an order to go so he can take dinner home to his parents in Tuzla. He tells me that these places go through 25 lambs a day on a weekday, maybe 35 on a weekend day.

Dining on the road in BiH isn't the only fun, in fact, I would wager to guess that although a breakdown is not a pleasant experience, it does occasionally happen, and we manage in the USA with AAA, cell phones and tow trucks, to make such an event pass with some incovenience and expense, but pass, just the same.

When Tomo's car caught a large stone on our trip to Dubrovnik, and the damage to the underside of the Alfa Romeo made acceleration futile, we were forced, at 6:30am to find a way to cope. In the little town of Konijc (say: "Kon-eetz), we sat in the only open cafe drinking mud, I mean coffee, listening to loud Bosnian disco music, and waiting for a reasonable hour to start knocking on doors in town to find assistance. After our nerves were strung out on the caffeine and the techno beat, 7am rolled around, and the door knocking started. Tomo and Roger walked from autoproadna sign to autoproadna sign, trying to find someone who would open his garage doors early to fix our exhaust system. The first place had no oxygen (needed for the welding equipment), the second had no power (no way to run any of the machines to lift the vehicle on the hydraulics, the third was not open for business. This continued for a while, each place offering up the suggestion of the following location, until Tomo found a old man with a roaring Rottweiler behind the door who cheerfully opened his garage, got the car on the lift, welded the pipes back together - better than new, delivered up another round of mud, I mean coffee, and charged us 20 DMs (about $11)... all of this for the motliest crew he'd likely seen in months.

But wait, the most fun one can have on the roads in BiH is by taking the bus. I had to be in Split on the Croatian coast for a meeting Monday at noon. After spending 7 hours on the road from Sarajevo in the back seat of Hasim's car (he and his fiancee were on their way to the Northern coast for a pre-wedding honeymoon), I was ready for Split, and lunch. I found my meeting in Split, we dined on pasta, we talked, we worked, and my meeting date left for the airport to fly to Zagreb. I bought a bus ticket for the 9pm back to Sarajevo (ETA in Sarajevo 5:00am) and it was only 4pm. Playtime! Split is a big city (for Croatia) with an impressive array of industries chugging along around the outskirts of town.

The waterfront is a large avenue lined with palm trees and open air cafes. Off to the end of the avenue the ferries for the islands of Hvar and Brac sat waiting for their next sprint across the sea to those nearby paradises. Split's "old town" is down just off waterfront and is almost completely encarcerated by the walls of an ancient "Deocletian" palace. The maze of tiny walkways, interspersed with courtyards full of half ruined romanesque pillars which reach upward of 20 feet high, is a delight to explore. The stones of the passageways have been worn slippery smooth by centuries of footsteps, and watching the occasional tourist land on his keister is part of the fun. The three storey buildings which wall these labyrinthian trails protect the traveller from the hot sun, and yet sport windowboxes full of summer flowers (I can only imagine the smell of jasmine during warm June nights around here).

Much like the old town in Corfu (Greece), the boutiques are full of gold, the tiny art galleries are lined with local watercolors and oils, the restaurants have enough room for only four or five tables and serve their patrons in crystal and silver. The ice cream and popcorn venders have perpetual lines, and the sound of cameras clicking in all directions remind you that this place is not hurting for tourist cash. I was storing my bag at the reception of the Bellevue Hotel, and got rather chummy with the old gentleman behind the counter as I returned on a number of occasions to change clothes, grab my camera, drop off purchases, and finally to collect my bags to leave. Upon my every visit, he regaled me in flawless English (in between chatting with Italian and German tourists in their languages) with ethnic Croat jokes - universally aimed at Bosnians. It wasn't worth telling him that the Bosnians held a particularly special place in my heart, it was just easier to chuckle appropriately. The afternoon air in town was electric with the excitement of preparations for the arrival that evening of Placido Domingo who I listened to as the bus pulled out of the station at 9:15pm. Oh yeah, the bus ride.

"It leaves at 9pm, from peron (lane) 3, you have seat 18," the ticketseller behind the window told me. Not one of those three pieces of information proved to be true. At 8:45 a bus pulled into peron 2 and people scrambled to get on it. I waited another five minutes before wandering over to find out if this WAS perhaps the bus to Sarajevo. I was told, in fact, it was. I approached the busdriver and handed him my ticket. He looked at it, looked at me with despair, and climbed aboard, fought his way through the ten people who were already standing in the center aisle, argued briefly with the woman with child in lap who was apparently sitting in seat 18 (uh, that would be "my" seat), returned, shrugged (this is universal Balkan for, "I don't know what to do now"), and then, with a look of sudden lucidity, pointed to me then pointed to the drop-down seat currently squashed up against the front windshield. I shrugged, then nodded (universal English for, "Ok, that seat is better than standing for 8+ hours most of which fall after midnight").

There are two drivers on these buses, one to drive and one to deal with paperwork and then take over the driving after many hours pass. These drivers had been stuck with no fewer than 18 oversold "seats". The standing passengers, their bodies in what would become semi-permanent "X"s - arms and legs spread-eagle, certainly contributed their part to the overall "ambience". The windows didn't open, the air system didn't work, most of the passengers were smokers, and most had spent the day on the beach and would not be showering until their arrival in Sarajevo, and I was actually thankful that I had half a seat.

Oh yes, it was half-a-seat. You see, the auxiliary bus driver, a fit but big man, who'd pointed to that drop-down seat had meant that I could "share" that seat with HIM. Happy, happy, joy, joy. We were in Omis when I finally identified the smell - he'd eaten a lot of garlic with his dinner that afternoon. We dropped a few people along the coast at various locations, and the crossbreeze which resulted from the opened doors to deposit these souls prevented my complete wish for a gunshot to the head. On the bright side, our driver was careful and had a good brake-foot, I never feared being thrown through that plate of glass, and I had a wonderful view of the Balkan stars - even a few shooting ones! (Can you guess what I wished for?) We stopped for a couple of uneventful police checks during the trip, and we wandered around outside the bus in Metkovic (the bordertown between Croatia and Bosnia) at 1:30 in the morning while our drivers collected all our passports in an old plastic bag and held a 45 minute conference with the border police.

One of the more amusing moments of the journey was just after the border crossing when the aux. driver stood in the aisles as the bus whizzed past the destroyed farmlands of the Mostar canton, calling out all the names on the passports he'd collected earlier. It was reminiscent of a school trip - like he was handing out the lunches to the third-graders. Since mine was the only US passport, he refrained from attempting to pronounce and then hollar out my name, and instead simply smiled and shrugged as he handed mine back, last. Shortly before Mostar (4 hours to go), as my knees began to bruise from the radio buttons and the dashboard they'd been crunched into, and I was well into "headbob" 101 (recall your college Economics class?), my seatmate began to caress my arm. It was at this point that I decided that maybe standing wasn't such a bad option. He protested quietly, but I jumped up pretty quickly - making my point.

As the bus crawled across the bridge at Jablanjica, the drivers switched, and my big touchy buddy put his glasses on and took the wheel like a madman. I think he cut our travel time by almost an hour although we all got a little less sleep than we might have otherwise. The first driver, now my second seatmate, was a young wiry man who offered me the outside half of the seat, which I took, my back to him, allowing me to place my head on the dashboard and actually drift off for whole minutes at a time. During the stretch into Sarajevo we became a city bus. Passengers called out street names, and we stopped at every other corner to let them off, and open the belly of the vehicle so they could extract their belongings. I can't even remember the taxi ride home from the station in Sarajevo - I only know that I slept right through the homing pigeons under my eaves and got to the office well after ten.

As I sit here at my computer at 9:30 on a Wednesday evening, my office windows open, I am listening to the carnival air of the evening promenade up and down the oldtown streets beneath me. Like Spain, Italy, Albania, and Greece, the Bosnians take their evening stroll very seriously, and every night the main strip becomes a throng of people of all ages, greeting neighbors, chasing their kids, eating ice-cream cones, walking dogs, listening to the music that floats out of every tavern and cafe on the strip.

It has been a heady, romantic, exciting summer - this one here in Sarajevo.

Copyright © 1997 – Rachel Peterson

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