May 17, 2023 - Blagaj, BIH

 When we made our room reservation here we ordered breakfast included.  As you can see below, they serve a great breakfast, to order.

We walked from our hotel to the Dervish House, aka, Blagaj Tekija. It is a Sufi monastery built in the 1500s on the cliffs by a freshwater karst spring, with a mausoleum and an old Turkish bath.  Europe has been receiving a lot of rain and you can see from the pictures below this area has been flooded and the river is high and very fast flowing.  

It rained on and off today, but not heavy.  We met two brothers from Austria visiting on their motorcycles.  It was fun talking in English about motorcycle touring and where they have been visiting.

One of the ways this trip has been different than other trips we have taken is that we have no real schedule or route; we basically can go wherever, whenever as long as we don't exceed 90 out of 180 days in the Schengen Area.  We are now trying to decide where we want to go when we leave here in 2 days.  We are probably going to go south into Macedonia on the Adriatic coast, we heard that is a nice place.  We shall see.

This VIDEO shows the fast flowing river near the Dervish House, the primary source of which is a freshwater spring similar to those found in northcentral Florida.

Sooz took this picture of me this morning at breakfast.  I shaved this morning but by the time I finished the breakfast I had a good beard started - it must be due to the good food and fresh air and water.

The Dervish House on the freshwater spring site.  Photo by Sooz.

Another photo of the Dervish House.  You can see a cave in the lower right area of the photo, this is where the freshwater spring is.

Our new Austrian motorcycle friends, who are brothers.  

A duck sitting on a table waiting for service and wondering what all the commotion is about.

Me trying to look calm and collected while crossing a bridge over a madly rushing river.

Sooz doing the same on a rickety boarded section of the bridge.

May 16, 2023 - Blagaj, BIH

 Blagaj is only 136 miles from Sarajevo but it took over 3 hours and lots of focused energy.  We packed up our stuff and left our Airbnb a little after 11am with partly cloudy skies and lower 60s temp, very nice.  About an hour in to the drive it started raining and then when we were in the middle of the Dinaric Alps it started raining hard and became very windy.  It was the worst kind of wind for riding a motorcycle; strong gusts with no consistent direction or velocity.  It knocked us around pretty good.  We found a little covered gas station with protection from the wind and rain and had a warm coffee to warm up and settle the nerves.  We waited for the rain to break and then took off.  The wind never stopped but the drive became much more comfortable with no rain.

The Dinaric Alps (/dɪˈnærɪk/), also Dinarides, are a mountain range in Southern and Southcentral Europe, separating the continental Balkan Peninsula from the Adriatic Sea. They stretch from Italy in the northwest through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo to Albania in the southeast.

To get to Blagaj, we came through Mostar.  We visited Mostar in 2018 and liked it but we didn't need to stop again.  Mostar is where the famous arched bridge is located that represents the destruction and healing of the war.

We walked to dinner after unloading in the Hotel Blagaj.  It's a nice, fairly new, clean hotel for about $50.00 US per night, including breakfast.  Sooz met, and connected with, Ines at the front desk while I parked the bike.  Sooz and Ines kind of hit it off so I took their picture.

Tomorrow should be fun.  There are several monasteries nearby built in the 1500s and local springs that feed the Buna River.

One of the many tunnels we passed through in the Dinaric Alps on highway E73.

Highway E73 following the Neretva River heading towards Mostar.

Nice map of the Dinaric Alps.  Blagaj is a little southeast of Mostar.

Sooz out for a stroll after dinner in Blagaj.

Sooz and Ines chatting.  Ines speaks excellent English.

Looking out of our 4th floor room in Hotel Blagaj.  If you squint you can see our covered motorcycle in the parking lot in the center of the picture.

May 15, 2023 - Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

 Today was overcast, rainy and in the upper 50s.  Not great weather but we did get out to visit the Sarajevo City Hall.  It is an amazing example of architecture.  Like most buildings in Sarajevo, City Hall was damaged during the war of the 1990s.  Major reconstruction took place, finally completed in 2013 at a total cost of $12 million. It is a work of art.

After walking in the rain a little bit, we found a very nice restaurant for lunch in the Old Town and enjoyed a couple of local Bosnian dishes.

Tomorrow, we leave Sarajevo for Blagaj, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH).  It's only about 90 miles away and Google Maps says it will take about 2.5 hours, so the roads must be local and winding with low speed.  The weather is expected to be more of what we had today, so we will take our time and enjoy the (wet) scenery.  The area around Blagaj has some wild looking monasteries built in the 1500s.  Should be fun to check out.

The main area inside the Sarajevo City Hall

Looking up at the stained glass ceiling

Stairways leading to the second floor

Susie checking out the very polished floor

Bosnia and Herzegovina started building a government after the fall of Yugoslavia and then all hell broke loose in 1992 with the start of the war

Meeting chambers of City Hall

My lunch of meatballs in tomato sauce with excellent bread.

Sunday, May 14, 2023 - Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

 Yesterday we went to the old town and checked out the Olympics Museum.  Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics and the museum highlights that event.  The museum re-opened in 2020 after a major restoration after the original museum was bombed and burned during the war in the 1990s.  It is a very modern exhibition displaying the many posters and medals used during the Games.

After the museum, we walked to the commercial center of old town and had a very nice lunch.  The restaurant was at an open area and our table was outside where we had great people watching seats.  People ranged from young families to older couples, modern dress and women in full burkas with just a narrow slit for the eyes.  Susie and I enjoy watching the young children because they are just like kids anywhere - they are running around, laughing, playing with parents attempting to keep them in control.

In our travels so far this trip we have not seen or heard any North Americans.  We stand out even when we think we are not standing out.  It's pretty obvious we aren't locals, especially when we open our mouths to speak.

We have enjoyed grocery shopping in some amazing and large stores.  They love their Nutella!

They also had a huge selection of milk.  We bought a liter.  It is stored unrefrigerated but we can't tell any difference.

Our ticket to enter the Olympics Museum

The museum exterior

Guess who?

Typical street view only open to pedestrians.

Susie bartering for some bakeries

Street view from our lunch table

May 12, 2023 - Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

 Today we got out of the apartment after a pretty glunky, rainy and cool day yesterday.  We took a taxi to the nicest and biggest hardware Home Depot-like store we have ever seen.  The name of the store is Penny plus.  The size and selection was unreal.  It's easy to fall into the stereotypes of thinking this is a backward country and won't have nice stores, but once again, our ethnocentricities proved us wrong!  I needed a few trinkets to better secure the motorcycle side cases, plus it was a good excuse to check out a hardware store - and we're glad we did.  Right next door was a massive grocery store also that Susie enjoyed walking around in.

We grabbed a coffee in the touristy market area called Baščaršija.  We visited here during our trip in 2018 and it seemed more crowded with more vendors.  We walked around, dodging rain, and had lunch.  

We then walked to the War Childhood Museum.  It was pretty sobering and impressive.  It was designed with over 40 objects and related written descriptions by people who were children during the war.  The written pieces were very personal describing what it was like being a kid during the war and the meaning of the item they chose to display in the museum.  The next stop was the Siege of Sarajevo Museum.  It contained displays of very specific items like desks, weapons, clothes and posters related to the war.  I started getting overloaded plus the written descriptions were in English, which was nice, but they were too long and difficult to fully grasp.

Later, we grabbed another coffee in a very high-scale outdoor mall and people-watched.  After the coffee, and probably due to the caffeine, we decided to walk the nearly 1.5 miles back to our apartment. Before heading up to our flat, we stopped at the corner bakery and picked up a few dessert items.  I installed the hardware I bought earlier to secure the side cases and then collapsed in our apartment.

One thing we have observed on this trip, compared with our trip here in 2018, is that the language seems to be more of a barrier. I think this might partly be due to where we are staying.  In 2018 we stayed in a hotel which tends to attract people who speak English plus the staff in the hotels generally speak English.  During this trip, we are staying in an Airbnb located in a working class neighborhood.  All of the people we run into around here, including in the stores, don't speak English, which makes sense.  This tends to make everything take longer and be more frustrating at times.  I am constantly reminding myself that I am a visitor in their country and I should not expect anyone to speak English, if anything, I should speak Bosnian, which I'm afraid is not going to happen.

Susie checking out the Penny plus hardware store.

Entrance to the Sarajevo market, Baščaršija

One of the many shops in the market

I bought a variety package of these Bosnian sweets. The chocolate ones are my favorite.

Trying to get fancy and take a self-portrait in a mirror while Susie checks out the beautiful fabrics and clothes

Our ticket to enter the War Childhood Museum.

It's kind of hard to tell, but this map shows the location of the Serbs in the hills surrounding the mostly Muslim residents of Sarajevo during the war

This is a typical display in the War Childhood Museum with a personal item displayed in front of a personal story written by the person, then child, who contributed the item.

One of the personal stories.  Some of them were heart-wrenching.

A display of food distributed during the war by Western countries, including the infamous Canned Beef.

A very upscale part of town near where Susie and I grabbed a coffee.

Susie tying her shoe on the banks of the fast flowing Miljacka River at high stage due to the rains.

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