Well, here is one country with a too long name for a vlog. I was in Dubrovnik, Croatia. I chose this because of the easy access to Bosnia and Herzegovina from there. It’s basically just on the other side of the hill and the border crossing is less than a hour away.
DAY 1 – THURSDAY
“Ah, my old enemy, stairs!” I felt like Kung-Fu Panda when I climbed the hillside in Dubrovnik to get to the car rental company. I got my VW Taigo and by 8:30 I was on the road to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH). There are several routes one can take from Dubrovnik. I chose the scenic route along the coastline due north through the border crossing station called Neum II. There was no line and the border guard just registered my passport and didn’t even check the paperwork for the car. The first impression from BIH was nice. The road seemed new and the tunnels were well built. Until Waze showed me off the main route to the left. It was such a bad road that I even stopped to check the map. But other cars also drove that road so I kept on going. In 10 or so kilometres I ended up on another more road-looking road and followed it to Počitelj. This was just a small village on the roadside where all the big bus tours stopped. After 1,5 hours of driving it was a good place to stretch my legs. There were some souvenir shops and restaurants for the tourists but I didn’t feel like I needed anything. The weather forecast had me believe that it would be really rainy all morning but I had yet to see a drop. But the sky was grey and ominous, which made the light poor for filming. So I decided to skip the Kravice Waterfalls for now and keep on driving to Mostar. As I didn’t know exactly where I wanted to go except the Old Town then that is where I headed. I missed the first turnoff because it didn’t really look like a road and all the following suggestions by Waze were similar or worse. So I ended up driving around the Old Town and finally parked in a City Parking lot near the river. It cost 5 EUR for 5 hours. BIH has its own currency but euros are widely accepted. So I never saw the local money. I took a walking bridge across the river and found myself on a pedestrian street heading towards the Old Town. There were many people around and even more tourists when I finally reached the older part of the town. The most photographed site is probably the Stari Most or Old Bridge. According to Wikipedia, it’s a rebuilt 16th-century Ottoman bridge in the city of Mostar, the historic and currently unofficial capital of Herzegovina. It crosses the river Neretva and connects the two parts of the city, which is named after the bridge keepers (mostari) who guarded the Stari Most during the Ottoman era. During the Croat–Bosniak War, the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina used the bridge as a military supply line, and the bridge was shelled by the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) and collapsed on 9 November 1993. Subsequently, the bridge was reconstructed, and it re-opened on 23 July 2004.
I had just made it through the Old Town when it finally started to rain. As it was lunchtime then I stepped into a nearby pizza place and had a huge pepperoni pizza just for myself. While sitting there I realized that I had the car booked until 8 AM on Saturday morning. If I returned in the evening before then I would need to park the car somewhere in Dubrovnik and there are not too many parking options around. The closest to the car rental agency would charge at least 40 EUR for overnight parking. I decided to book an apartment here in Mostar instead and drive to Dubrovnik early in the morning. It turned out to be a cheaper option and allowed me to return to Mostar on Friday. So the plan was made and the pizza was eaten. The rain had stopped again so I made it back to the car without getting wet. As everything was still grey, I decided to head towards Sarajevo and get there as early as possible to see the city. On the way, I noticed some places I wanted to stop on the way back when the weather was nicer. Like Jablanica and Konjic. Now it was raining properly already on the way. But the rain had stopped again when I reached Sarajevo. The first parking lot I headed to didn’t exist anymore. So I luckily found a spot in the next one and left the car there for my stay in town. The hotel Sana was only like 6 minutes walk from there and I made it by 3:30 PM. The room was nice but small and I didn’t plan to stay there more than needed anyways. The location was good though. Everything recommended to see in Sarajevo was just around the corner. After a short rest, I went for a stroll. Walked through the main pedestrian streets and back alleys up and down several times, looking for food and sights. Due to its long history of religious and cultural diversity, Sarajevo is sometimes called the “Jerusalem of the Balkans”. It is one of a few major European cities to have a mosque, Catholic church, Eastern Orthodox church, and synagogue within the same neighbourhood. There are about 555 thousand people living in the Sarajevo metro area. About half the BIH population are Muslim.
In the end, it started to rain again, so I bought some snacks and drinks from a store and headed back to the hotel, where I fell asleep soon. It was raining all night.
DAY 2 – FRIDAY
The breakfast was from 8AM. My backpack was ready and as soon as I had my latte with three espressos I was leaving the hotel. It started to rain again, so my plan to walk up to the Yellow Fortress was changed. I like these empty streets in the morning when everything is still closed. So I ended up wandering the same streets again as last night. I started with Baščaršija or Sarajevo’s Old Bazaar with an Ottoman-style wooden fountain in the middle. According to local legend, visitors who drink water from the fountain will return to Sarajevo someday. I didn’t. This time the rain stopped and it was light. I saw the Latin Bridge with the sign marking the site of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by a local Young Bosnia activist Gavrilo Princip in 1914, a murder that sparked World War I. This resulted in the end of Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and the creation of the multicultural Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the Balkan region. Later, after World War II, the area was designated the capital of the communist Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. I also saw many Sarajevo “roses”, which is a type of memorial in Sarajevo made from concrete scar caused by a mortar shell’s explosion that was later filled with red resin. Mortar rounds landing on concrete during the siege of Sarajevo created a unique fragmentation pattern that looks almost floral in arrangement, and therefore has been named “rose”. There are around 200 “roses” in the entire city, and they are marked on locations where at least three people were killed during the siege of Sarajevo. By the time I left Sarajevo for Mostar, the sun had come out and gave hope for a better day. According to Waze, it was about three hours drive to the waterfalls and I was planning to make some additional stops along the way. If I look back now then the first warning came when the police were sending the big trucks away in a roundabout in Konjic. But the passenger cars were allowed through. After 20 minutes of driving another police unit stopped everybody and told that the road to Mostar was out in Jablonica and there was no way through for the next few days. But there is an alternative route somewhere and I should consult my Google Maps. So I did because Waze was still determined to send me through Jablonica. But Google already knew and sent me back to Konjic. There I filled up my gas tank just in case and followed the map into the middle of nowhere. About 15 km from Konjic at the site where I was supposed to turn right, I was stopped again. This time by some local men who were speaking only in fluent Croatian. Luckily there were some younger guys there who explained to me what had happened (one even claimed there was an earthquake…not) and that the locals here are cooperating with the police to channel the traffic through the mountain road. I think I was quite lucky to get there as early as I did because there were only like 10 vehicles waiting at the crossroad in a village called Borci. After a while, they claimed that the road was free and that everybody should head up. So we did. The mountain pass was a narrow gravel road with hardly two cars able to pass by one another. As we crept higher and higher the dropoff on the left side of the road went steeper as well. Still, many cars were trying to get to the other way as well. The speed was 10-15 km per hour and I was hoping that no stones would puncture my tyres. It was about 18 km uphill at a crawling pace until we reached the other end of the pass where police were waiting and controlling the chaos. From there it was only downhill on a rather good road compared to the one before towards Potoci and from there to Mostar. It took me more than 2 hours to get through it. There I finally took a moment and had a strong lunch in a local restaurant. I reached the Kravica waterfalls finally at 4:30…about 3 hours later than I originally planned. The sun was shining and there were only a few people on the trail. So it took me almost no time to reach the bottom of the 400 meters of stairs and see the magnificent waterfall. Definitely worth coming here.
DAY 3 – SATURDAY
I was up at 4 AM and out of the apartment by 5 to start my mad dash over the mountains to the sea. That left me about 3 hours to reach the car rental agency in Dubrovnik by 8 AM when they were supposed to open. Despite the early hours on Saturday morning there were still many cars on the roads. I decided to trust Waze again and followed it thinking that I would end up at the same Neum II border station. I didn’t. Instead, the route took me up and down the hills in the countryside with an occasional car here and there. At one point I was a bit worried already that I even drive towards any border station because there weren’t any signs anywhere. But it was too late to turn back so I kept on going. By the time it got light the signs towards Dubrovnik started to show up and by sunrise I crossed the border in Čepikuće. I had less than an hour to go but it was enough and by 7:51 I was at the gate. After the paperwork was done I headed down the hill again and towards my apartment in Dubrovnik. There I finally read what had happened in Bosnia a day before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina_floods
Click here to read about my time in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
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