Firstly, some background. I am unsure actually when this trip came about - I know the basic concept has been mooted for a very long time, probably before I even left NZ. My friend Dion, from NZ was planning on going to Canada on a visa much like my one for the UK about the same time I left NZ, and his plan was to stay for the year or nearly the year his visa would allow. At the end of it, he would travel across to the UK and Europe for a visit - and we'd make a bit of a trip out of it. I have no idea how we happened upon August, I think Dion suggested it and it worked out for me with my job holidays - I must have put the constraint in of the Europe part of the holiday being two weeks, being half of my annual leave I had for my first working year in the UK. I think though it was Dion who suggested the first two weeks of August and it was him who decided we'd start on the 3rd August as that's when he would fly over from Canada. Dion knew I was interested in visiting Croatia, and in particular a little town on the coast for reasons which I will explain soon; Dion was also keen on going to Croatia, and also a few other places nearby. Apart from being really interested in travelling, Dion is also interested in trains - which is how I met him, at Steam Incorporated back in Wellington. So naturally some train stuff would feature in the trip - Dion wanted to factor in a night sleeper train in the trip as when first mooted, I'd never been on one (but did my first one in April) and chances to do them were becoming less common; and also, when I was in Germany visiting the Harz Mountain Railway system for the first time in December, I recall being in the restaurant talking to Dion via Facebook on my phone telling him when we did our trip we were going to go there, eat in the restaurant and have our beers delivered by the model train. Dion seemed keen and thought the €70 3-day roaming train pass for the Harz line was good value, as did I.
A lot of the ideas for this trip therefore had a long time to germinate. When it came time to plan it out, I started to have a crack at working out an itinerary but didn't get far as I had no idea what kind of trip Dion had in mind. In terms of countries visited, Croatia and Germany were to be included but Dion strongly suggested Bosnia too and in particular Mostar in Bosnia - he'd shown me pictures from when he had been there previously and it seemed worthwhile to visit there. Also, my perception of Bosnia was that it was a slightly unsafe country or might not be so well suited for travellers so going there with Dion playing tour guide was about the only way I would contemplate going. So I told Dion to come up with a rough draft on how he thought the trip should go, and we'll work on it from there. Which he did - the initial concept had us flying into Split, Croatia (1 night); then going to Podgora on the Croatian coast (2 nights), then to Mostar, Bosnia (3 nights); then Sarajevo, Bosnia (2 nights); train from Sarajevo to Zagreb, Croatia (listed on the Seat61 website as one of Europe's more scenic railway journeys and Dion seemed quite keen on it); then catching an overnight train from Zagreb to Munich, Germany passing through Slovenia and Austria through the night; and going to Wernigerode, Germany to do the Harz Railway (4 nights, to give us 3 full days in which to use the 3-day pass) before going back to the UK via either Hannover, Hamburg, Berlin or Frankfurt. This trip was fine, but I wanted to see what else was possible and see if we can't fit a little bit more in. I came up with 3 options.
The first was much like the original, except we'd visit Nuremberg during the day in between Munich and Wernigerode to visit the Railway Museum there; while the other two options were a bit of a variation of a theme, aiming to bypass the night train from Zagreb to Munich (a route which is apparently supposed to be quite scenic too and worth doing in daylight) in favour of traversing the Gotthard Route in Switzerland, like myself and Dion had talked about in earlier conversations about the trip in order to do it before the mountain route is bypassed by the world's longest tunnel. So Option Two was to fly into Split (1 night), then to Podgora (1 night), then to Mostar (3 nights), to Sarajevo (2 nights), catch the train to Zagreb (1 night); then catch the train(s) and a hill tram to Venice, Italy (1 night) via Ljubjana, Slovenia and Trieste, Italy; take the train to Milan, then another train via the Gotthard to Zurich, Switzerland and then catch an overnight train from Zurich to Halle, Germany; then another train to Nordhausen, Germany and using the Harz Railway to deliver us to Wernigerode (enabling the use of the 3 day pass still), where we would stay 3 nights before flying out of one of the aforementioned 4 German cities. Option Three was the same but different, reversing the order of the first part - instead of Split, we'd fly into Zagreb, Croatia (1 night), catch the train from Zagreb to Sarajevo (2 nights); then to Mostar (3 nights); then to Podgora (1 night), then to Split where we'd catch the overnight ferry to Ancona, Italy; catch a train from Ancona to Milan (1 night); Milan to Zurich via the Gotthard, and then the night train from Zurich to Halle, Germany; then train to Nordhausen, use the Harz to get us to Wernigerode (3 nights) and then fly out of one of the 4 German cities. All had various advantages and disadvantages, slightly different costs but all roughly the same overall and niceties of their own - my preference at the time was actually for Option Two, but I put them all to Dion and let him choose. His preference was Option Three - the overnight boat was what sold it apparently. So Option Three it was, and the flights were booked; a month or so later, after double checking things transport and accommodation were also booked. However during this month, a few curveballs had been thrown our way - we were made aware of how close we would be travelling near an interesting set of Swiss mountain railways, which Dion wanted to know if it was possible to do one or a few of them. This was investigated, and found yes, possible - but only at the expense of one or two other things and even then, it would make a lot of timings really tight and the days action packed all the time. In the end, it was agreed the Swiss train stuff is best left to a separate trip another time. However one late addition which did make it in, was to forgo one of the Mostar days in preference to visiting Dubrovnik, Croatia for a day - I knew nothing of the place until a friend of mine who had been there told me all about it, it sounded rather worthwhile and we were so close it seemed silly not to. Dion was fairly lukewarm to the suggestion to be fair, but agreed nonetheless as it seemed there would be enough time in Mostar to achieve what we wanted to.
With all this sorted, it was just a matter of embarking on the holiday - Dion had gone back to NZ from Canada in March instead of sticking around there as he wasn't earning enough in Canada; but he had gone back a month before our holiday to travel around more properly and visit places. We would have a travelling companion with us too, a little blue soft toy called "Little Joe" - who would be the main reason we would visit Podgora, the little Croatian coastal village. Long story short, one of my colleagues Milada from my last job grew up there, and she always called the students puppies which led to the school commissioning a run of Little Joe's. When Milada heard I was doing my OE, she told me I should visit her beautiful little town. I said I would do so, only if I got a puppy to take there with me. I got given Little Joe (named after Joseph Broz Tito, the former ruler of Yugoslavia whom Milada had been a supporter of and still staunchly called herself Yugoslavian instead of Croatian) and I saw it as an excuse to visit Croatia, a country I might not get around to visiting otherwise (not knowing hardly anything about it before leaving NZ - but after coming to the UK, began to realise it was essentially the "New Greece").
Quite a background! so, lets get to it - Euradventure Part One: The Balkans
Day 1 - London to Zagreb, Croatia
Day 2 - Zagreb, Croatia to Sarajevo, Bosnia
Day 3 - Sarajevo
It seems almost inconceivable that the world sat by and did nothing, but this was a time when there were many distractions - new countries were emerging uneasily everywhere from out of the Iron Curtain, and even Russia itself was having birthing pains. The dynamics of what was going on in Bosnia weren't well understood, and it was seen initially as just a kind of internal civil war - it took time and atrocities to make it clear that two nations were behind the two main combatants, out for their own interests. At first everyone looked to the US to intervene, but George Bush Snr stood in front of the world and said that they wouldn't, because "America is not the world's police". Eventually the world as a whole stepped up to intervene, and the United Nations sent in peacekeeping troops to protect the populations. A good gesture - but in many respects that's all it was, as you had peacekeeping troops from many nations under a very loose central control up against a tight and coordinated army engaged in a war. The UN could protect some areas, but they couldn't push back the wall of war as it wasn't a cohesive military unit, it didn't have the full range of capabilities armed forces usually has at its disposal and especially since the countries which made up the UN couldn't agree on the best course of action. Somewhere along the way the UN intervention persuaded Croatia to change its position back to helping the Bosniaks, making the war Bosnia vs Republika Sprska again. Eventually it took the UN command to sidle up to NATO and ask for strategic air strikes to help push back the battle lines and eventually solve the conflict, with the massacre in Srebrenica highlighting to the world the deficiencies in the UN's efforts in Bosnia and steeling it with new resolve to allow the UN troops more resources and engage more readily in the war. The war formally came to an end in December 1995 with the signing of a treaty. Neither side won and the solution was rather odd - Bosnia and Hercegovina was created as a single nation, but there would be two administrations controlling the nation in two halves - Republica Sprska and Federation of Bosnia-Hercegovina and it's not like one got the north and one got the south, the Federation cuts a big swathe right in the middle of the Republika Sprska. I was too young when all of this was going to understand what was happening and make sense of it, and at the time I used to hate watching the news on TV. During this time Kosovo also happened, and that took a bit more precedence since we ended up with some Kosovoan refugees starting our school. But I remember parts of things, such as NATO being called in for air strikes, white tanks with blue UN letters on them (but Kosovo had them too), and people exclaiming that the solution for peace in Bosnia wasn't a solution at all and they would have been better to split it in two properly as otherwise it will surely erupt into war again. 20 years on, the country is remarkably cohesive and clearly hasn't warred again - if you didn't know it was two nations in one, you wouldn't know. Remember me saying that between Zagreb and Sarajevo on the train, I had seen stations with Cyrillic lettering and then later on in the day the stations didn't have them? That's the difference between stations in Republika Sprska (the Serb part) and the Federation. Tensions still linger - in Sarajevo we saw Cyrillic characters on road signs covered in spray paint crossing them out. How on earth you can get past the fact your Serb neighbor might have massacred some of your Bosniak family while your Croat neighbor might have turned on you I can't fathom, but get past it they seem to. Forget, I am sure they never will.
And knowing this, myself and Dion set out into Sarajevo for the day early as we couldn't sleep in very easily in our somewhat crappy hostel for lack of a curtain. It wasn't bad though - it was still warm out, but not hot yet and no one else was around. Sarajevo has a rather unfortunate place in history - not only being subject to the longest siege in modern warfare (at 3 years, the siege was longer even than the siege of Stalingrad in WW2) but also was where World War One began. World War One had been brewing for a while, but it needed a spark to ignite it and on the 28th June 1914 a Serbian separatist called Gavrillo Princip lit the fuse when he shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. While not acting alone, it was an error by the driver of the motorcade and Gavrillo being in the right place at the right time to shoot them; he was captured of course, but the Archduke and his wife both died and outraged the Austro-Hungarian empire and its allies compelling them to war. With his one gun and two bullets, Gavrillo set off the First World War, and by association the Second World War; as a result, the Cold War and many other wars can all be traced back to him. He reshaped the political face of the planet for all time - actions have consequences, often more far reaching than we will ever know. So we set off in our look around the city to find the very spot where Gavrillo caused the world to change.
We continued up the river to the town hall, then spied a cemetery further up so climbed up the hill hoping to find a good view from there overlooking the city - we weren't disappointed, but Dion reckoned he'd seen a view from a cemetery on the other side of the river last time he was here so we went back down, crossed the river and climbed back up another hill. We came across a round stone wall, and decided to see what it was - it turned out it was the Yellow Fort, and it had a cafe on top of it with a glorious view across Sarajevo. Thirsty, but noting they also did Bosnian Coffee, we didn't need much convincing to stop for a while. We both ordered a local cola plus Bosnian Coffee - Bosnian Coffee is just like Turkish Coffee apparently, so those of you who know what that is will know what this was like. I'd done neither before, but was keen to try and Dion told me how to go about it. I bit off part of the not-so-sweet sugar cube, took a sip of the coffee and after a few goes got the hang of trying to strain the coffee through the cube so it essentially disintegrates the cube in your mouth.
Day 4 - Sarajevo to Mostar; Day in Mostar
Day 5 - Mostar
Day 6 - Mostar to Dubrovnik, Croatia; Time in Dubrovnik
Day 7 - Dubrovnik to Podgora; Day in Podgora
Day 8 - Podgora to Split; Overnight Ferry from Split
To Be Continued...
Monday, London to Zagreb (not shown); Tuesday, Zagreb to Sarajevo by train (green); Wednesday, day in Sarajevo (not shown); Thursday, train from Sarajevo to Mostar (brown); Friday, day in Mostar (not shown); Saturday, bus from Mostar to Dubrovnik (red); Sunday, bus from Dubrovnik to Podgora (purple); Monday, bus from Podgora to Split, ferry from Split into Adriatic sea en route for Ancona (blue).