I was walking across a bridge in the old town when I heard someone calling my name. It was Jenny, the British medical student I met in Mae Sot in May 2005. She had just graduated from medical school and was travelling in the Balkans for a few weeks. We had only a short time to catch up before her train to Croatia. It's a small world.
I took an overnight bus from Sarajevo to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. It was wonderfully air-conditioned. The bus slowly crept along small roads until it reached the Croatian border. From there to Ljubljana, we sped on a multi-laned highway. The passport control officers were pretty lax about stamping passports.
Melanie was from Perth, Australia. She was a surgical nurse working in Belfast, Ireland, but she had spent the last few months teaching NATO soldiers how to dive in Croatia. Javier, a Spaniard, whom I met on the bus from Belgrade, was a clinical psychologist helping battered women. We had drinks and dinner from a hill above the old city.
I coincidentally visited this site on the 92nd anniversary of the start of World War 1.
Serbian forces occupied the surrounding hills and used this to their advantage with 50 tanks and snipers. Sniper alley was an area around the Holiday Inn Hotel (the yellow building), occupied by foreign journalists, that was within range of snipers that camped out in the Jewish cemetery.
The story of Sarajevo in the 1990's, is a sad story of a city surrounded by Serbian troops and tanks. I took a day tour which was fascinating and informative, especially with heart-wrenching personal accounts by Sonny, the guide, who was 13 years old at the time.
The tour started at the Tunnel Museum, which was at the site of a tunnel that ran for 800 meters under the airfield, to Bosnian territory. For three years, this was the lifeline for the citizens of Sarajevo. UN planes that were allowed to land at the airport only brought 300 grams of food per person per day in Sarajevo, and half their payload had to be given to Serbian forces.
Scarred cement from mortar explosions. These "roses" remain as memorials for those who died at these sites. They are scattered throughout the city with a plaque on a wall with the date and number of people who died there.
A seven-hour sticky bus ride from Belgrade brought me to Sarajevo. I saw the beautiful red-tiled rooftops of the city from a mountain ridge, but then the bus dove down the other side of the mountain and stopped at a bus station in a village. It turns out that the buses to and from Serbia stop at a Serbian bus station outside of town. It reminded me a bit of the division in Jerusalem between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Crossing the Drina river brought me to Bosnia-Hercegovina. I ended up holding up the bus for an hour as the immigration officials were confused with the legitimacy of my supplemental pages taped into my passport.
I arrived in Belgrade (Beograd) stiff from the dry crust of brine on my skin from the days long sweat at 2230h. It was not what I expected. It is modern, clean, and safe. There is a good night life here everynight of the week.
The train stopped for about two hours at a small town. I don't know what was wrong, but everyone lounged around on the tracks. I decided to change seats and moved to a different train car. It didn't have air conditioning, but it had windows that opened, which was much nicer.
After five nights in Budapest, I headed south for Belgrade, the former capital of the former republic of Yugoslavia. The weather has been in the 90's all week, and the broken air-conditioning unit in my car didn't help.
Thermal springs are everywhere in Budapest. This one in Varosliget (city park) is one of the more famous ones. They offer medicinal massages, thermal baths, and swimming.
Constructed to honor the millennial anniversary of the Magyar (Hungarian) conquest of the Carpathian Basin in 1896, it sits between to museums and the entrance to the city park.
No longer a palace, this place has a few museums. At the time, they were preparing for El Jefe's visit.
