Wednesday, May 10, 2023 - Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Sooz and I left Bihac around 9:15 am heading towards Sarajevo.  The weather was in the low 50's and overcast so we put on our electric heated gear, which felt nice.  Roads were mostly decent and the landscape reminded us of North Carolina, except for the street signs, language, currency and vehicles.  Most of the roads were secondary, local roads with speed limits between 30-50 mph.  So, it was slow going until we hit a very modern interstate-like highway with a speed limit of 130 kph, or 81 mph, and we were getting passed while going 81 mph.

We stopped for lunch at a very nice restaurant in Jajce on the Vrbas River.  You can see a picture below of what we had for lunch.  

Traffic in Sarajevo was pretty bad; it took us about 1 hour to go a couple of miles during rush hour.  The City has 275,000 people with the metro area over 500,000 - so, it's a big city.  It was the host of the 1984 Winter Olympics. 

Our Airbnb is in a good location near museums, restaurants and lots of coffee shops. The building doesn't look like much from the outside, but the apartment itself is very big, lots of windows with natural light, two porches and is well-equipped including, good wifi.  Plus, we're only paying $40/night.

As you can see below, there are still bullet holes in our apartment's patios from the seize of Sarajevo. "... after the start of the Yugoslav Wars, the city suffered the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, for a total of 1,425 days, from April 1992 to February 1996. This was during the Bosnian War and the breakup of Yugoslavia, under nationalist ethnic passions that tore families apart and resulted in genocide and massacres." Wikipedia   Before our last trip here in 2018 we read the book Where Fools Rush In by Bill Carter that gave a ground-level, first-person history of what the war was like in Sarajevo.

This morning we slept late, maybe still feeling the 6-hour time change, drank coffee and headed out around noon.  Our apartment is within easy walking distance of the Miljacka River and several museums and good sight seeing places.  Today we checked out the ICAR Canned Beef Monument first thing.  I did not know its history until this morning.  I wanted to see it because I'm a big fan of SPAM and thought it might be similar.  It is not similar.  It is a monument (see pictures below) installed as a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the supplies that were sent by the US and other Western countries.  Large shipments of food were sent to Sarajevo including cases of leftover canned beef from the Vietnam War, 20-years past their expiration date and basically inedible.  The fighters in Sarajevo wanted weapons and instead got expired beef.  The drug cartels from South America supplied Sarajevo with more weapons than the West, and so locals thought they should install a monument to the drug cartels, but instead place the large can of canned beef within eyesight of the UN building.

We then visited the former Holiday Inn, now the Hotel Holiday, that played a big role in the war as a communication and distribution center. We entered the hotel and walked around, feeling like we were being followed and surveilled.  

Next, we had lunch inside a very smoky (people are still allowed to smoke in restaurants) and fast-paced Italian self-serve restaurant and then went to a large and very modern local supermarket.  

We are staying here a week.  It's really nice not feeling rushed or that we have to keep moving to see what we want to see.

Our loaded motorcycle ready to leave Bihac.  You can see why I wanted to beef up the side case mounting - our black dry bags are big and heavy.

My Bosnian coffee from lunch, aka Turkish coffee.  It is very strong.

Our lunch of Srpska salad, bean soup and bread.  

Bullet holes on our porch.

The infamous canned beef monument with the UN building in the background.

The Google-translated inscription on the base of the Canned Beef monument.

This kind of sums up Sarajevo - a WWII jeep next to a well-used playground.

Susie telling me to hurry up in front of the Hotel Holiday.

Me attempting a smile in the museum's botanical garden.

Entrance to the Museum of Natural History of Bosnia and Herzegovina