Last time I took the train, and had been amazed at how scenic the journey was. The carriages had been 2nd hand Swedish coaches, a bit rough around the edges and the trip had taken 3 hours. I had learned after line improvements the trip was now 2 hours and there were new Spanish Talgo air conditioned carriages on the line - and not only was I keen to show Sasha this pretty railway route, but riding the flash new train would not be bad either.
It was not to be however. There are only 2 trains a day, one very early in the morning and one later in the afternoon. We wanted preferably the one later in the afternoon, but then we ran into the problem of what to do with our bags - given the trouble we'd had getting into our accommodation, we were not at all keen to try and store our luggage there as we weren't at all sure we could get back in to retrieve it. There was no other place we could see to store our luggage, and part of the whole point of catching the later train was to make use of the time in Sarajevo - but lugging our luggage around wouldn't make this possible. We also tried buying train tickets - only to find the ticket office closed for the day 30mins before it should have been. Not wanting to go on the super early train either, we decided instead to catch the bus.
The bus journey was pretty scenic in itself, and took 2hrs 45min. Catching a bus about 11.30am, it meant we could check out of the accom in good time, catch a tram to the station and catch the bus without having to rush nor try and store our bags. The bus took a similar, but not exactly the same route as the train - but the scenery was just as spectacular as I remembered. Pretty painless all round!
Usually, we go for whatever accommodation is the cheapest or the best looking cheapest which suits our needs. This time I was insistent we had to stay at Hostel Majdas ("Maydas" - remembering J's are Y's in this part of the world!) which was where Dion and I stayed last time I was in Mostar. It was actually one of the cheaper options which was nice, although not the cheapest - but I told Sasha the price difference would be worth it.
It certainly was. The hostel was every bit as friendly and charming as I remembered, and our host, Majda, not only made us feel at home but cooked us the most amazing breakfasts as well. We had a private double room, which looked awfully familiar - it turns out it was the same room Dion and I had stayed in during my previous visit, but it now had a queen size bed instead of the two single beds! We haven't had much of an opportunity to talk with other people in the same accommodation while travelling so far, but this is a very friendly and social Hostel and we got to talking to a whole lot of people during our stay.
A lot of the food and drink is a big aspect of this hostel - but I will deal with that under the food and drink section, suffice to say that as a whole this place definitely lived up to the hype I gave it and Sasha was impressed with it too. I think it has to be one of my top 2 or 3 accommodation places I have stayed in during my time in Europe so far and I would DEFINITELY recommend it to anyone staying in Mostar!
We did a bit of exploring of the town and the Old Bridge after our arrival into Mostar, and also during our last day where we just relaxed around the city a lot - usually either wandering the old town's streets or finding a vantage point to sit and look at the bridge from, and hopefully see a crazy jumper or two from the bridge. We did see a few people jump, and worked out that the local swim club had a really good scam going on - they would have someone stand on the bridge looking like they were about to jump, someone would go around and try and collect enough money so that someone would jump, and when they had "enough money" (usually 25 Euros or 50 Marka) someone would jump from the bridge - but that someone wouldn't be the local person who had been standing on the bridge in speedos, it was a tourist in a wetsuit who had paid for the privilege of jumping. So not only did they get the 25 Euros from the person jumping, they also got the money from the people watching waiting for someone to jump! We did dip our legs in the water for a while which was freezing, so jumping in that water must have been rather awful. The river was a lot higher than my previous visit so it would mean less of a distance to jump and more water to land in. Jumping 20+ metres is no small jump however and some Aussies from our hostel did the jump our first day in Mostar, with both coming out a bit sore - one managing to injure his cocxyx and he couldn't sit down following it!
We also went up the minaret in the Mosque to view the bridge from up high - no thunderstorm to watch this time but we had the whole minaret viewing platform to ourselves which was exceptionally pleasant considering. Mostar is very pretty and charming, but you need to immerse yourself in it a little bit to get the full sense of it - a day trip here I don't think would give you a good, nor the right, impression. We did think about going into the abandoned bank building which was a snipers nest, but after hearing that some of the Aussies got hassled by the Police after visiting it (its a derelict building that you're not meant to go into!) we decided we would give that a miss.
Apart from Majda's wonderful hospitality at the hostel, there was another reason for us to stay at this particular hostel - Majda's brother Bata runs a tour which has a bit of a reputation. It was the reason why Dion and I went to this hostel last time - he'd been there before and done the tour, and wouldn't stop talking about how good the tour was. Unfortunately the tour doesn't run every day which Dion didn't know, and because I'd wrestled a Mostar day into a day going to Dubrovnik we missed out on being able to do Bata's tour that trip. So I'd always wanted to go back to Mostar in itself, but also to do Bata's tour and see what I had missed out on.
It was amazing and it certainly lived up to its crazy name and reputation. Bata is a man which seemingly boundless energy and the tour was almost a full 12 hours, virtually non-stop! So much happened, so much went on but I am not going to go into any deep and full detail of the tour because that would ruin it for anyone else thinking of doing the tour - you've just got to go and do it yourself! However I will mention some things. It was more than just a tour - its educational as well, as we got to learn more about the Bosnian war and in particular how that impacted Mostar. Bata explained how he had grown up Yugoslavian, a communist, and was about 21 when Yugoslavia started breaking up. Slovenia broke away, then Croatia, and then Bosnia. Suddenly one day, Bata finds himself being called a Muslim, a label he had never been called before nor identified with - religion wasn't permitted in Communist Yugoslavia, so no one had placed any importance or even really thought about whether they were Serb, Croat, or Muslim - everyone was Communist and that was it. But all of a sudden people are drawing distinctions along these lines and Bata also finds that as a supposed Muslim, people identifying as Serbs want to kill him for no other reason than was technically a Muslim by descent. That must have been a very scary thing to find out one day and grapple with. He told us how in Mostar the Serb troops attacked Mostar, but with the help of troops from Croatia they are pushed back into the mountains - only to find one day the Croatian troops start attacking Mostar themselves trying to capture it for their own.Croatia wanted the Herzegovina region for itself, but didn't succeed. The Serbs had blown up all the bridges in the town between the "Muslim" and "Croat" side of town, but it was the Croats who blew up the Old Bridge which has subsequently been rebuilt. But as Bata showed us, a lot of Mostar's recent development is taking place in the Bosnian Croat side of Mostar rather than the Bosnian Muslim side of Mostar because a lot of Croatian businesses have set up shop in Mostar and also the city council is controlled mostly by Bosnian Croats. In some ways the Croats and Croatia are gaining control of Mostar anyway, so while in Sarajevo things are a bit more equal between the different ethnicities, Mostar isn't quite the same. However - most definitely it is the Muslim side of Mostar that the tourists want to see and throng through!
We visited quite a few places too - the Kravice Waterfalls by the Croatian border ("Feel free to pee in the water, it flows into Croatia!"), the old Ottoman town of Pocitelj where we also visited "Grandma's House" - a lovely old lady in who's home we had homemade syrups and also Bosnian coffee, and Blagaj where the river literally emerges from a hole in the base of whats essentially a cliff face which is a bit nuts. As we were walking back to the van from this, the final stop I see something stumbling towards us in the dark - it was a teeny tiny puppy! It was so little and young, I patted it but it didn't quite know what to do with the pats or then all the attention it got from our group, but we didn't know where its home was. One of our group, Karl picked it up and took it into the van with us, adamant it couldn't be left alone - but as he did so we saw another small puppy under a vehicle nearby which is where the first puppy had come from. Clearly he was not alone and mummy dog would be either somewhere nearby or would soon find both anyway, so he put it back with its brother or sister. The tour finished up back at the hostel where Majda had made us all dinner - more about that later!
One other thing - at one point during the journey our tour group was chatting with Bata and suddenly the story of how the tour and the hostel came to be got told. Apparently Bata had met some tourists in town who didn't know where to stay, as Mostar had no hostels so Bata invited them to stay at his family's house - they stayed for 2 weeks! Getting the idea that the family could make some money from having people to stay at their family home, he checked the internet after their stay and found a website called Hostelbookers.com and sure enough, Mostar was not listed. So Bata decided to create an entry for a hostel in Mostar, filled out all the different fields but didn't know what half of them meant, and 30 minutes later the place was up live up on the website able to be booked. The next day Bata checks his emails - there's all these bookings for the hostel, except there's a problem as since Bata didn't know what he was filling out, he's said there's about 12 beds in their hostel when they literally only have 2 - and there's bookings for them all! He panics but its his Mum who figures out what to do and they improvise, making up a makeshift set of beds and housing some people at the neighbours house. The family gets right behind the idea and makes a real go of it, except Bata's sister Majda initially hated the fact there were all these strangers coming to stay in their house - so they name the Hostel after her to try and get her onboard! Clearly now Majda revels in running the hostel and having all the strangers, she does such a good job! Mostar now has many hostels, but theirs was the first and probably helped put Mostar on the backpacker's track.
We've done many tours this trip so far, but Bata's was certainly the best yet - and I would be surprised if it gets topped actually. My family will remember Te King's Snorkeling Tour in Aitutaki - Bata's Tour was definitely as memorable for many of the same reasons, if not moreso!
Our Hostel covered a huge amount of our food and drink that we had in Mostar. We got Bosnian coffee when we arrived, and Majda cooked us all breakfast every morning - two of the mornings it was a kind of fat french toast with chutney and jams to go on the bread, with a kind of porridge for dessert. The other morning it was something else which I forget, and a rice pudding for dessert - after the porridge the first morning I declined the dessert for the 2nd from the server lady, and most people at the table did the same. Soon after Majda comes out of the kitchen with the remaining Rice Puddings and tells us we should reconsider as its actually really nice - so everyone who had declined the dessert now takes one! Majda was right though, it was nice (better than the porridge for sure). With breakfast was a homemade tea, the flavour of which I could never put my finger on but it was pleasant, tasty and had actual leaves in it to help give it its flavour. Majda also cooked us dinner following Bata's tour - we sit down to this massive soup and bread, and once we'd all finished it and feeling rather full Majda tells us to bring our bowls inside to get the main course. Everyone was stunned as we'd thought the soup was the main course! Somehow we found room for the heary stew Majda had cooked. Majda's meals were great - she really is like Camp Mother looking after all the children, except the children are youngish adults and its a Hostel! We also drank beer and wine that we'd bought from the nearby store at the hostel while socialising with others in the outdoor common area. There were the big 1.5L plastic bottles of beer we'd seen elsewhere in the Balkans which we got one of, also two cans of Sarajevsko before that and other nights we had another 1.5L bottle of the Mostar Red Wine of the same kind we'd bought in Sarajevo - except this bottle wasn't as nice as the previous one, something about this one was a bit off which was a shame.
Outside of the Hostel - we decided to eat out for dinner the first night in Mostar as we'd not really had much for lunch, but certainly made up for it at a place called Tima-Irma which was rated No.1 on Tripadvisor and certainly deserved its reputation. We decided to order a platter with different local cooked meats and veges, and came in sizes for 1 person through to 4 people. We asked for it for 2 people but when it came out we wondered if they'd given us the one for 4, it was so huge! I had the local Mostarsko beer with this meal as well, and everything was exceptionally tasty, quenching and also a great price! Another day for lunch we went to a restaurant I had been to on my previous visit, called Hindin Han where we also had a great meal for a good price - I had the Cevapi (which came with a bit more than the one in Sarajevo) and Sasha got the grilled Mushroom salad which was enormous, and we shared our plates between us. On Bata's tour we ate a meat and salad platter between the group at a restaurant at the waterfall, and Sasha and I had a Croatian beer while here also. At the visit to Grandma's house we had Bosnian coffee and got told how to drink it and why - the dishing of the crema on the coffee is a social sign, if you get lots of crema you are liked by the host, if you get little you are not and it should be taken as quite the insult. Equally, slurping noises while drinking the coffee is seen as a sign of appreciation - one of our group members really made an art of the slurping noises and had Grandma laughing! Grandma's syrups were amazing as well - we tried three, Pomegranite flavour, Elderflower flavour and another which again, I forget what it was! Grandma also had us quite well fed with biscuits, dried fruits and also cakes. Grandma was not related to Bata in any way - she was simply a kind old lady who used to try and sell her syrups to passing motorists, and one day when it was raining heavily she took pity on Bata and his tour group so invited them into her home to get dry, and fed and watered them with coffee and her syrups. Now Grandma makes enough from hosting Bata's tour and selling her syrups to other tour groups that she doesn't have to rely on trying to eke out a living from the occasional passing motorist - which I think its one of those fantastic little stories about how a little kindness can transform someone's life!
On our last afternoon in Mostar, as we were heading back to the hostel from the minaret Sasha just happens to say that she thought Lee from our shuttle van to Sarajevo might have arrived in Mostar by now. Literally 5 minutes further down the road, we bump into Lee! She'd arrived on the early train that morning, apparently had a performance finding her accommodation - a similar tale to what we had in Sarajevo by the sounds of things, and we caught up on what we'd done since we'd seem last. Lee had done a lot of the things we'd suggested in Sarajevo and had enjoyed them all, and she also went to see the Pyramid although had trouble getting there but found it eventually. We gave a few recommendations for Mostar - and it turns out Lee had just had lunch at xxxx also! This was definitely going to be the last time our paths crossed as our trips were taking us in completely different directions, so we bade our farewells - I hope her trip to Dubrovnik and elsewhere around Croatia was as great as it sounded like it might be!
Summing Up
Just like Sarajevo, I want to come back to Mostar again. Although this time I feel like I've done virtually everything there is to do or see here, I want to go back to Mostar for Mostar rather than any activity. It certainly is nice to think about being able to do the train trip between Mostar and Sarajevo another time, but that would be the aside or the added extra rather than the attraction in itself. Sarajevo I'm not finished with, and nor Mostar - both Sasha and I have said we want to go back to Bosnia and explore more of this beautiful country. I think though we would mostly spend time visiting the more southern parts - the Republika Srpska parts in the north don't really seem to appeal the same as the mountainnous beauty of the south. Added to that it would be nice to spend time exploring Montenegro to the south, which shares a lot of the same dramatic scenery as southern Bosnia and Montenegro is next to Albania and Kosovo - it kind of lends itself to a future trip already!
The Bosnian people are just so friendly, perhaps moreso than any other place we've encountered so far. They open their hearts and their homes to people quite readily, and for a people that have really been through the wringer with the Bosnian war are not only remarkably resilient but well adjusted - sure, our War Scars and New Times tour guide in Sarajevo joked that everyone in Bosnia has PTSD but they don't notice it because everyone has it, but I don't think its true. They've managed to put the past behind them mostly, even though it still figures a lot in their present day - the lines are still drawn between the three ethnicities and the new generations growing up post-war are affected by this too, not able to go to school with each different ethnicity. In Sarajevo everything seemed a bit more cohesive between the different groups, but in Mostar where two of the three groups dominate more heavily it seems a bit more fractuous still. Unfortunately its not hard to see how in the future more troubles may emerge - Republika Srpska trying to wrest itself away as a separate country in its own right, or perhaps Bosnian Croats trying to carve out Herzegovina and have it join Croatia. I certainly hope not, I think the last thing most Bosnians want is another war or conflict but while the status quo and the Dayton Accord works for now, its going to be interesting to see what happens when the country's population is mostly composed of those who never knew the togetherness that existed when it was all Yugoslavia. Whenever I hear the stories of the Bosnian conflict it really hits deeper than stories about elsewhere - it all feels personal to me somehow and I can't understand why. As a schoolkid the closest I ever got to anything to do with the Bosnian war was we had some Bosnian refugees start at Parkvale School in Hastings, but they were not my friends although I did talk to them every so often. Is it because the people are just so friendly? Is it because the cities are just so nice and look really pretty, but its hard to gel the awfulness they went through? is it something to do with the dramatic and beautiful scenery being reminiscent of New Zealand in parts that I'm somehow over-associating it? I don't know. But I do know that I really like Bosnia - to the point that I would say I loved visiting there, which is not something I say much or lightly. Its really made an impact on me and provided the future is as stable as the post-Dayton Accord times have been, Bosnia should have a bright future ahead of it. Maybe even a future part of the EU, who knows.
One last thing - their money. The last time I was in Bosnia, I found the Bosnian Marka to be a curious currency - pegged at a rather strange rate to the Euro, where its 1.9something Marka to 1 Euro but not 2 to 1, and the money seemed to sound strange when jingled - like it was made of cheap metal or was some kind of toy money. It wasn't until we were almost in Bosnia again that I twigged about the exchange rate - that 1.9something value was familiar having lived in Germany, it was the value the old German Deutschmark had been pegged at to the Euro. Bosnian Marka was literally Bosnian "Mark" as in Deutschmark - a Bosnian version of the Deutschmark with the same value as it, except now Germany has the Euro. Reading up, this is indeed the case and was something specified in the Dayton Accord - a new currency pegged to a strong European currency for stability. As for the toy money aspect - well I've been to a few other countries since where their currency has felt just as cheap, so its not just a Bosnia thing!
Undoubtedly I can say, I will be back to Bosnia. I can't see how I can't come back and visit this country at least once more in my lifetime. I might miss the "real steam" that still exists around Tuzla which will surely get replaced as funds allow, but there is so much more to see - even things I have already seen - that it would definitely draw me back. That it lends itself easily to being part of a bigger trip does help too. So, Bosnia - thank you for having me once again, I really enjoyed it - see you next time!