Geez, what a whirlwind trip. I hardly have a chance to write about my (mis)adventures before I’m off to my next destination!
I left Sarajevo for Mostar on a 7:15am train on Saturday morning. I’d heard the scenery along the Sarajevo-Mostar train route was some of the most beautiful in Europe, so I was looking forward to it. I was not to be disappointed.
Leaving Sarajevo, the scenic route begins in the mountains to the west (Igman and Bjelašnica, I think), where the train skirts the mountain side as it winds its way down into the valley, sometimes with only sheer drops below. The sunshine that graced Sarajevo quickly turned to thick fog as we entered the mountains. We climbed the mountains and eventually emerged from a tunnel above a small town shrouded in fog with mountain tops rising above it into clear skies and sunshine. (Sadly, all the photos I took from inside the moving train are pretty much terrible.)
We eventually came out of the mountains and into the valley, where the line ran alongside the west bank of the Neretva river all the way into Mostar, about another hour and half. The river was narrow, and craggy mountains shot straight up on either side of it. Then, we passed through one last tunnel into a wide valley before finally arriving in Mostar.
The best part of my stay in Mostar was my AirBnB host, Teo. He picked me up at the train station and drove me back to the apartment, telling me about all the various landmarks we came across along the way. He has a few apartments in Mostar and offers tours of the city and surrounding areas to his guests, so he’s very knowledgeable about the place.
The first thing I noticed about Mostar was the war damage. I thought I saw war damage in Sarajevo, but it was obvious after seeing Mostar that a lot of money had gone in to Sarajevo’s recovery and only cosmetic damage remained there. In Mostar, there were many buildings that were merely empty shells, with only the core structure still intact; they obviously hadn’t been touched since the war and there didn’t appear to be any plans for rebuilding. I was shocked by how many of these I saw just driving the main streets from the bus station to the apartment.
When we got back to the apartment, he had a couple other guests who were waiting on him to take them to the local farmer’s market/swap meet, so we all piled in his car and were off. The market was fascinating, of course. They had people there selling everything under the sun, including their own old possessions. According to Teo, they also had plenty of stolen goods for sale, especially bicycles. We tried some dried meats and cheeses. They have a cheese here they make by warming up milk and skimming the skin off the top of the milk, and that skin makes the cheese. It’s very creamy and I used it as a butter substitute on bread with some jam – delicious!
After the swap meet, Teo invited me to come out to his parents’ home in the village on the outskirts of Mostar. They have a few acres there where they used to grow gads and gads of fruits and vegetables – every square inch devoted to producing, Teo said – but the place was badly damaged during the war and they were gone for a few years afterward, so they’re still working on building it up to what it used to be. The one-floor home used to be two floors. Of course, there’s no money to be had from the government for reconstruction, so it’s all on their own dime. We walked around and he showed me all the stuff they produce and used to produce.
The next morning, I got a lazy start and headed over to the old town to see the famous Stari Most – Old Bridge. The bridge had been standing in Mostar for nearly 500 years when it was blown up during the war. They just rebuilt it a few years ago. The old town area of Mostar is tiny, but really picturesque – all cobblestone passageways and stone building facades built up over the steep banks of the exceedingly blue Neretva river.
Jumping from the Old Bridge into the Neretva – a 20m drop – is a long tradition in Mostar. Guys will solicit money from onlookers to jump. You can pay someone to teach you how to do it properly so you don’t get hurt. Teo’s dad used to be a bridge jumper, and even appeared in a book about famous jumpers.
I will say I was disappointed by how touristy Mostar’s old town is. It wouldn’t call it a tourist trap because it has legitimate value as a historic site (the whole area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site), but the unbroken chain of souvenir shops and vendors that lined the narrow main pathway was a disappointment. Mostar is such a tiny little town in the middle of Herzegovina that I didn’t expect it to be much of a tourist destination at all, but it attracts an ungodly number of tourists for the size of the place, even in October.
In the afternoon, Teo took me around to a couple other sites – the Partisan Memorial and the glass bank. The Partisan Memorial honors Yugoslavs who died defending the country against Nazi invasion in WWII. It has a unique terraced design with a fountain that spills into a small rivulet running through the memorial. Stones shaped a bit like puzzle pieces and etched with the names of those who died are scattered across the place. Unfortunately, there’s no money for upkeep of the memorial, so the fountain no longer works and Teo told me the place was full of weeds and trash (people like to go there to drink and hang out in the summertime because it abuts the mountain and is cooler than in town) but that they had recently cleaned it up.
On the way to the glass bank, we ran into this guy in a park:
The glass bank stands about 8 (10?) stories high and used to house a bank on the ground floor and some other businesses on the upper floors. The building had an entirely glass facade, thus the moniker “glass bank.” During the war, snipers shot on the town from this building. Nothing of the glass facade remains, save the broken shards that line the ground in and around the building. No reconstruction has been initiated, and the entrance to the building is permanently closed. That doesn’t stop anyone from going in, though – people just pile up some rocks and hop the wall, which is exactly what we did.
The glass bank has attracted not only photographers and journalists, but graffiti artists, as well. The walls inside the building are covered in elaborate graffiti. Teo told me there was even a type of festival a while ago where a bunch of graffiti artists showed up to paint the walls of the glass bank.
There’s a stairwell you can climb all the way up to the top floor – the eeriest stairwell I’ve ever climbed up.
From the top floor, you have to climb a sort of fire ladder to get to the roof.
That view though…
Monday was a tour of the surrounding areas: Blagaij fort (or Stjepan Grad, the ruins of the fort of the first king of Hercegovina), Blagaj, Počitelj, Mogorjelo, Kravice Falls, and Međugorje. Every single place we went was amazing. Every single one. It rained on Monday, which put a bit of a damper on the day and had me wondering, as I hiked up various hills in my sandals and in the cold and wet, whether the destination was worth the annoyance. It was and then some, every single time.
I was so busy running around Mostar I didn’t take time to arrange for the next leg of my trip. I stayed an extra night in Mostar and spent Tuesday relaxing and making travel arrangements for the following day.
TL;DR: Smitten by all that Mostar has to offer.
