Sarajevo, BiH to Foca, BiH - June 6

Wow, it has been a long time since I've had a chance to post. I will try to catch up.

Bosnia on June 6th deserves two entries.

James and I left Sarajevo for Jhardina, the ski area about 40 km to the South East of Sarajevo. There are two ski areas around Sarajevo; one that starts with a "B" (I can't remember the name off hand and most of the cities I mention are misspelled anyways) and this is the one where the Olympics were in 1984. It was also mostly destroyed in the Sarajevo siege and the general Serbs-destroying-anything-they-can in non-Serb populated areas. Jahrdina is in Serb populated areas so it was left completely untouched and James wanted to check out what the facilities were like. We've heard about how there is great skiing in Bosnia and might want to go some day. So we began the next leg of our trip.

So 13 km East of Sarajevo in the town of Poling everything changed, everything. I've travelled a lot and seen a lot of different countries, but in Poling my jaw dropped and two weeks later I still have yet to pick it up.

Poling was the military headquarters for the Serbs when they did their three year siege of Sarajevo. James is a history buff so happened to know minutia like that. The first thing that struck us when driving into Poling was all the text is in Cyrillic and maybe repeated using the Roman alphabet. Cyrillic! So suddenly signs pointing to Sarajevo looked like "CarajaBo" (only the 'B' is some Cyrillic letter that vaguely resembles a "B").

As we did a circle around Poling James commented that as the former military headquarters for the Serbs, most likely each male we saw was probably involved in the siege and in the killing of many civilians in Sarajevo. Both of us were a too intimidated to stop the car and try to have a beer at any of the outside bars.

So we bolted and headed to Jhardina. I was still in shock that I had failed to realize that of course Orthodox Serbs would be using the Cyrillic alphabet. James hits the breaks as we're buzzing up through the forest and says, "They're skidding logs, with horses!" Sure enough, he grabbed the camera and ran back to take picture of some poor guy trying to drag logs through all the other trees down to the road with two work horses. We were both surprised that such archaic methods were still being used. As we drive further on and are still talking about the one guy with two horses we pass a whole group of about 6 younger men in army fatigues and about 4 horses hauling more logs into an open area. By this time I was very fast with the camera and managed to get that on video. These younger men looked much better off than the first guy and even laughed and waved at the tourists gaping at them with a camera.

Onto Jhardina... It has a couple of chair lifts, not too exciting. I can't suggest ever going there, especially to ski. The interesting thing about Jhardina though is it is mostly a one-way trip. On the map there is a road connecting to towns in the South, suggesting that maybe the fancy Bosnian ski resort would be available to Southern Bosnia. Not so. This ski area is just for people approaching from the Sarajevo side. James and I mistakenly thought we would have a simple drive down the roads going South.

At the top there were no signs pointing to the correct road to go South. James and followed a wide paved road that turned into unpaved for about 5 km until it just ended even further higher up. James and I drove back and tentatively headed down the road that has a gate across it, but the gate was lifted. At least there was a center line in this narrow road. For the next 40 km we headed through some very tiny villages on very narrow, windy and sometimes washed out roads.

We came to a town where according to the map we could take a narrow, red, almost carriage road or a grey dashed line (whatever that means). We tried the narrow red line and within one kilometer turned into a steep, gravel road. James very much wanted to abandon this route and try the other. I was getting very worried that we had gone too far into rural Bosnia and was afraid we would have to backtrack our whole day to Sarajevo again, but there were thunderstorms up at Jhardina and I did not want to go through those again. I just had to put faith in my husband and the grey, dashed line. This was to be probably the most interesting road we have ever been on.

Right away this road turned into gravel, but at least it was level and looked more travelled (although were were only to see one car in 20 km of this road). It went past a house or two and then no houses or people for the next 20 km. Next we passed over a little bridge and a few pillboxes. It would be very easy to defend this road as we started to get into a serious canyon. For the next 15 km we drove through the high canyon walls along a little river and probably through 100 tunnels just big enough for one car or previously a train (I exaggerate NOT on the at least 100 tunnels). I have an 11 second video on my camera where we drive through 4 tunnels and saw a fifth before I cut the video. I have another 1 minute 10 second video where we pass through two tunnels and the second one if 50 seconds of the video! I had no idea what I would be tapping when I hit the video. Had I known of all the tunnels from the beginning I would have counted to see how many there really are. It is almost worth a trip back (now that I know the road does indeed end and join another real road somewhere, something I had my doubts about when we were on the gravel road and I was terrified that the local para-military force would stop us in the middle of one of the tunnels and demand our car). This was the most surreal road I have ever been on and one of the most interesting experiences of my life. It was so fascinating at the time but it was unnerving not knowing if the road would ever make it out of that canyon.

Finally, finally we made it to the end. In the next town we tried to read the roadsigns, having to guess since they are in Cyrillic, of course. James pulled over so we could closely read the sign. Ah, we could barely make out where the town of "Gorazde" had been painted over in black. Apparently were were still in Serb territory and the townspeople did not want anyone accidentally travelling into Muslim territory (Gorazde was one of the seven Muslim "safe areas" where the Muslims fled to in 1995 when they were being ethnically cleansed from in the rest of Bosnia. We took that road and at least we saw signs using the Roman alphabet again, so we could recognise city names to our map instead of having to try to interpret the Cyrillic names.

Onto Foca where we stayed the night... Foca is Serbian, so everything is in Cyrillic again. James and I had a very hard time finding a hotel since we couldn't read what "hotel" is in Cyrillic anyways. We found one two star "pension" and asked. With our first desperate pleas for "hotel?" the guy thankfully sent us away with the name of another more realistic hotel. There probably were rooms available, but it looked like a working mans hotel and not the type of place American tourists should stay.

It was about 7 pm when we checked into Hotel Ludovika (or something like that). I had taken the old fashioned elevator up to check out the room and declare in bearable, but there was a funny smell to it that I could not place before we went out to eat. It was hard to find a decent pizzeria. The first place we went was a disco/bar/place-to-pick-up-barfly-type place. We were so happy to find the pizzeria. We ordered pizzas by picture, since the menu was in Cyrillic and I started ordering hard drinks from the bar to make this night as hazy as possible. Pizzeria "Tron" in Foca was a very wonderful place and the waiter was very understanding of us, poor lost tourists.

Back at the hotel I unpacked my large can of pepper-spray and we fell asleep. Normally this would be the end of the day, except that around 2 am I woke up, took a few sniffs and finally placed that odd smell that I couldn't identify earlier. Smoke, of course, and also urine. Oh no, what do I do? I can't sleep on the floor because who knows what is in that 40 year old carpet and I can't sleep standing up. So I just lay in bed, trying to convince myself that at least the sheets are clean and are a protective layer between me and the urine stained mattress. The rest of the night I spend waking up, remembering the urine and making myself go back to sleep so I can forget the urine.

While I am trying to get a fitful night's sleep James woke up at 2:15 am and was nervous about the car. He said that of all the places we stayed, the only place he was nervous about the car getting stolen was in Foca. So he went down to check on the car. It turns out that the car was fine, but there is a man smoking outside and when he sees James wants James to come out and have a drink with him. James tries to explain in his Roman alphabet-based language that he just wanted to check on the car. The very friendly Cyrillic-based language fellow tries to insist that James and him should go to the bar for a drink. James was very touched by how friendly this fellow was but he did come back to the room. Perhaps he should have gone out with the nice fellow. James is so good at making friends wherever he goes.

I'll just cover a bit of June 3. At about 6 am when I woke up and recognised the urine-scent, flew out of bed, showered off in the bathroom (for some reason the shower did not have any shower curtains to keep the water in the shower stall) and was tapping my foot, waiting for James so we could clear the heck out of that hotel (unfortunately this was not the worst place we were to stay).

Onto the rest of June 3...