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Over the last week, Wolfie and I have been travelling around Bosnia. This was my birthday trip, brought forward due to a lack of flights in November, coupled with the promise of better weather earlier in the autumn. This certainly didn't disappoint as on all days barring the Friday, the weather was bright sunshine and hitting 25C whilst the leaves across the country were turning a wonderful shade of yellow and brown.
We were flying from Luton on the Saturday (30 September), with the flight scheduled at 7:15pm, giving us most of the day to get down there. We opted to go through London, with us buying the Luton leg of the journey on the day just in case our main train was delayed. In the end it wasn't, and we were early for pretty much all aspects of the journey. We arrived into Leeds with plenty of time to spare, so we headed to Friends of Ham to sample some brews from the previous night tap takeover from a French brewery of which we hadn't heard, and we grabbed a few more for the train down. Furthermore, once we had arrived in London, we realized we had about an hour to kill so we decided to go for a quick drink in The Euston Tap, a place we had always wanted to check out but which was far too small to visit on an evening. Mid-afternoon though, we did manage to get a seat upstairs in one of the two small buildings that make up this unique hostlery. The beer on offer was good, as was the decor (I particularly enjoyed the London Electric Railways map on the wall) but the tables were quite dated. While we were drinking, we noticed a group of three men stood on the pavement beneath our window and found it difficult to work out whether two of them were PCSOs or just on a stag party. Their mannerisms suggested the former but after some deducing, we realised that these were genuine officers, just the least intimidating cops we had ever seen.
We grabbed a panani for the Luton train then headed to get our tickets, arriving at the terminal with a good two hours to spare. With online check-in having already been secured, we sailed through security and found ourselves with yet more time to kill. We decided to get some food at one of the bars, which was reasonable enough, as we waited for our aircraft to board. This was on time and soon enough we were in the air, bound for the city of Tuzla, the third biggest in Bosnia. Tuzla is an industrial city and, in all honesty, there was little much there but it was the only place in the country to which you could get a cheap flight from the UK so in the end this is where we ended up. The terminal itself was incredibly small, with just one small arrival area, but being in row six meant that we got to disembark particularly swiftly and the customs procedures were painless. I had booked ahead with the hotel to get a taxi from the airport to our accommodation - with us slated to pick up a hire car from the airport the next day (they had closed by the time our flight had arrived just after 11pm) - and as soon as we entered the Arrivals Hall, there was a rugged gentleman in his Sixties holding my name on a piece of paper. He spoke no English, meaning I couldn't really explain to him that we needed local currency from an ATM, so soon we were headed for his car, which was parked at the other end of the modest car park.
The ride to the city centre was about 20 minutes along narrow winding country roads. At one point I started to get somewhat suspicious but it turned out that we were going in the right direction and that nearly all roads in the country were twisty turny, something that Wolfie had great fun driving down during our stay. As we entered a steep valley, we noticed the lights of the city below us and, at the bottom, we turned right onto the main drag, spying a brightly illuminated shopping mall in front of us. On the other side of the road to this was our hotel, the Hotel Dorrah, and soon we had checked in and were settled in our modest room. The curtain here wasn't particularly thick, allowing the glaring lights from the mall to shine through, but the place was nice enough, although I did suspect that we were one of only two pairs of guests in the whole building.
There was no bar in the hotel, so we decided to go and look for one, along with a cash machine to get some currency. The problem was it was approaching midnight by now and I knew that the local bars tended to close around about then. Furthermore, the hotel was slightly out of the city and we weren't 100% sure where the centre was, beyond being told to walk a partiuclar direction down the main road. For some reason we didn't have the foresight to load a map of Tuzla onto our phones or indeed take the free copy in our room, so we just set off aimlessly wandering. We did this for about twenty minutes, finding little aside from an old locomotive sat outside a building facing a memorial to those who died in the Bosnian War. I don't know the significance of the memorial or indeed the loco - and Google is not helping me - but it may relate to people who were transported and subsequently killed by the Bosnian Serbs. I'm speculating however, but one creepy thing was that as I was taking a picture of the train, it's front left light flashed on as if it was sentient. This scared the living shit out of me, and it promptly did it again, which made me fret whether I was in the wrong or whether it was some sort of prank. It was quite disconcerting. This was only enhanced by the thick smog which hung over the city that evening, adding a misty and indeed spooky air to proceedings.
We turned around once we had reached the indoor sports centre, not realising that, at that point, the city centre was just over the river. This was hemmed in by concrete and had a few modest bridges going across it, so it wasn't overly obvious, but alas we were starting to get tired and somewhat bored. On the way back, we did notice some ATMs outside of a closed shopping centre, with the creaking of the tarpaulin advertising banners affixed to some metal poles being most disconcerting, so at least we got money. Frustratingly, we also saw a bar across the street but with the time at exactly midnight, we had just hit on their closing time, much to the amusement of the lazy dog who was lying on the front steps of the place, who looked up at us mockingly as we departed. We walked down the other side of the road and as well as noticing the train and bus stations on this side, we also saw a small park where a trio of ladies were drinking on the base of a huge Soviet-era statue dedicated to the Husino rebellion of 1921. Entitled 'After The End Of History' by Asim Rafiqui, the face looked quite similar to that on Queen's 'News of the World' album cover, while aloft he is holding a rifle in fighting pose. In the dark, we couldn't see many of these features and we didn't want to get too close in case we weirded out the women, but this was far more noticeable in the daylight the next morning, at which time we did get chance to have a good look.
Having got back to the hotel, we watched some football on TV and then headed to bed, with the intention of walking back into Tuzla in the morning, thinking we may have better luck finding the centre when it was light. After a rather modest continental breakfast, where I felt a little sorry for the single cook who asked us whether we wanted cooked products and we declined due to time reasons, we set off to retrace the steps we had made the night before. With the sun shining, we did manage to find the rather pretty city centre this time, with the main square (Trg Slobode/Freedom Square) in particular being a delight. There was a rally forming here, with a large number of people in red T-shirts congregating outside a small children's playpark at one end of the plaza, so we decided to avoid this, instead focusing on the beautiful and exquisite fountains and Austro-Hungarian architecture. The Kapija was probably the most striking feature in the city, and this was slightly further away from the square down the old winding streets. This was right in the middle of the residential street Korzo and was a lime-green building of Austro-Hungarian style. Outside here, on 25 May 1995, an artillery shell exploded killing 70 young people on National Youth Day. Their names are enscribed on the wall in memorial, and it was to be our first glimpse of many of the war that resulted in so many deaths in the mid-Nineties.
Like many cities in Bosnia, there are a wide range of religious buildings, particularly churches and mosques due to the history of the country. The Ottomans were here for the best part of 400 years before the Austro-Hungarians came in 1878. The Gazi Turali Beg Mosque, a national monument, is probably the most striking building in the city although the green-domed Orthodox Church was also particularly nice. This sits very near Pannonica Lake, a rather tacky outdoor swimming area which I imagine is a necessity on hot summer days. It looked like great fun but alas it was closed, perhaps due to the early hour or perhaps due to the time of year. I wasn't overly sure. Aside from this, it was just pleasant wandering around the winding old streets lined with coffee shops, with many of them surprisingly busy considering the rather early hour.
There were a number of parks to see too, but it only took us about an hour to see pretty much everything so we decided to head back to the hotel and then to the airport to pick up our rental car. On the way, we stopped at the same shopping mall where we had got our money from the previous night as we needed to get a local SIM card for Wolfie's phone. We figured that this would be cheaper than hiring a sat nav, which really bumped up the price of the rental car, but we were concerned that on a Sunday, finding a SIM would be difficult. We needn't have worried as we found a small mobile phone shop with a guy who understood perfect English, and was able to install the new card for us.
With this in place we headed back, checked out and asked the hotel to call us a taxi to the airport. We had to wait for a short while, during which we got talking to one of the managers in the breakfast area. Like so many people in Bosnia, she was very friendly and really boosted the quality of our trip. Soon it was time to go however, and we were delighted to see our old friend the taxi driver from the night before. He seemed delighted to see us too again and soon we were heading back to the airport, where our rental car awaited. Acquiring this was relatively straightforward, although Wolfie was a little down that we got a better car than advertised (he opted for a Chevrolet for shitness factor and we got a Skoda Felicia). After an inventory check where we noticed that nearly all angles of the car had been bumped or scratched, we sorted out insurance and were given the keys. And this was when the adventure really began.
We were flying from Luton on the Saturday (30 September), with the flight scheduled at 7:15pm, giving us most of the day to get down there. We opted to go through London, with us buying the Luton leg of the journey on the day just in case our main train was delayed. In the end it wasn't, and we were early for pretty much all aspects of the journey. We arrived into Leeds with plenty of time to spare, so we headed to Friends of Ham to sample some brews from the previous night tap takeover from a French brewery of which we hadn't heard, and we grabbed a few more for the train down. Furthermore, once we had arrived in London, we realized we had about an hour to kill so we decided to go for a quick drink in The Euston Tap, a place we had always wanted to check out but which was far too small to visit on an evening. Mid-afternoon though, we did manage to get a seat upstairs in one of the two small buildings that make up this unique hostlery. The beer on offer was good, as was the decor (I particularly enjoyed the London Electric Railways map on the wall) but the tables were quite dated. While we were drinking, we noticed a group of three men stood on the pavement beneath our window and found it difficult to work out whether two of them were PCSOs or just on a stag party. Their mannerisms suggested the former but after some deducing, we realised that these were genuine officers, just the least intimidating cops we had ever seen.
We grabbed a panani for the Luton train then headed to get our tickets, arriving at the terminal with a good two hours to spare. With online check-in having already been secured, we sailed through security and found ourselves with yet more time to kill. We decided to get some food at one of the bars, which was reasonable enough, as we waited for our aircraft to board. This was on time and soon enough we were in the air, bound for the city of Tuzla, the third biggest in Bosnia. Tuzla is an industrial city and, in all honesty, there was little much there but it was the only place in the country to which you could get a cheap flight from the UK so in the end this is where we ended up. The terminal itself was incredibly small, with just one small arrival area, but being in row six meant that we got to disembark particularly swiftly and the customs procedures were painless. I had booked ahead with the hotel to get a taxi from the airport to our accommodation - with us slated to pick up a hire car from the airport the next day (they had closed by the time our flight had arrived just after 11pm) - and as soon as we entered the Arrivals Hall, there was a rugged gentleman in his Sixties holding my name on a piece of paper. He spoke no English, meaning I couldn't really explain to him that we needed local currency from an ATM, so soon we were headed for his car, which was parked at the other end of the modest car park.
The ride to the city centre was about 20 minutes along narrow winding country roads. At one point I started to get somewhat suspicious but it turned out that we were going in the right direction and that nearly all roads in the country were twisty turny, something that Wolfie had great fun driving down during our stay. As we entered a steep valley, we noticed the lights of the city below us and, at the bottom, we turned right onto the main drag, spying a brightly illuminated shopping mall in front of us. On the other side of the road to this was our hotel, the Hotel Dorrah, and soon we had checked in and were settled in our modest room. The curtain here wasn't particularly thick, allowing the glaring lights from the mall to shine through, but the place was nice enough, although I did suspect that we were one of only two pairs of guests in the whole building.
There was no bar in the hotel, so we decided to go and look for one, along with a cash machine to get some currency. The problem was it was approaching midnight by now and I knew that the local bars tended to close around about then. Furthermore, the hotel was slightly out of the city and we weren't 100% sure where the centre was, beyond being told to walk a partiuclar direction down the main road. For some reason we didn't have the foresight to load a map of Tuzla onto our phones or indeed take the free copy in our room, so we just set off aimlessly wandering. We did this for about twenty minutes, finding little aside from an old locomotive sat outside a building facing a memorial to those who died in the Bosnian War. I don't know the significance of the memorial or indeed the loco - and Google is not helping me - but it may relate to people who were transported and subsequently killed by the Bosnian Serbs. I'm speculating however, but one creepy thing was that as I was taking a picture of the train, it's front left light flashed on as if it was sentient. This scared the living shit out of me, and it promptly did it again, which made me fret whether I was in the wrong or whether it was some sort of prank. It was quite disconcerting. This was only enhanced by the thick smog which hung over the city that evening, adding a misty and indeed spooky air to proceedings.
We turned around once we had reached the indoor sports centre, not realising that, at that point, the city centre was just over the river. This was hemmed in by concrete and had a few modest bridges going across it, so it wasn't overly obvious, but alas we were starting to get tired and somewhat bored. On the way back, we did notice some ATMs outside of a closed shopping centre, with the creaking of the tarpaulin advertising banners affixed to some metal poles being most disconcerting, so at least we got money. Frustratingly, we also saw a bar across the street but with the time at exactly midnight, we had just hit on their closing time, much to the amusement of the lazy dog who was lying on the front steps of the place, who looked up at us mockingly as we departed. We walked down the other side of the road and as well as noticing the train and bus stations on this side, we also saw a small park where a trio of ladies were drinking on the base of a huge Soviet-era statue dedicated to the Husino rebellion of 1921. Entitled 'After The End Of History' by Asim Rafiqui, the face looked quite similar to that on Queen's 'News of the World' album cover, while aloft he is holding a rifle in fighting pose. In the dark, we couldn't see many of these features and we didn't want to get too close in case we weirded out the women, but this was far more noticeable in the daylight the next morning, at which time we did get chance to have a good look.
Having got back to the hotel, we watched some football on TV and then headed to bed, with the intention of walking back into Tuzla in the morning, thinking we may have better luck finding the centre when it was light. After a rather modest continental breakfast, where I felt a little sorry for the single cook who asked us whether we wanted cooked products and we declined due to time reasons, we set off to retrace the steps we had made the night before. With the sun shining, we did manage to find the rather pretty city centre this time, with the main square (Trg Slobode/Freedom Square) in particular being a delight. There was a rally forming here, with a large number of people in red T-shirts congregating outside a small children's playpark at one end of the plaza, so we decided to avoid this, instead focusing on the beautiful and exquisite fountains and Austro-Hungarian architecture. The Kapija was probably the most striking feature in the city, and this was slightly further away from the square down the old winding streets. This was right in the middle of the residential street Korzo and was a lime-green building of Austro-Hungarian style. Outside here, on 25 May 1995, an artillery shell exploded killing 70 young people on National Youth Day. Their names are enscribed on the wall in memorial, and it was to be our first glimpse of many of the war that resulted in so many deaths in the mid-Nineties.
Like many cities in Bosnia, there are a wide range of religious buildings, particularly churches and mosques due to the history of the country. The Ottomans were here for the best part of 400 years before the Austro-Hungarians came in 1878. The Gazi Turali Beg Mosque, a national monument, is probably the most striking building in the city although the green-domed Orthodox Church was also particularly nice. This sits very near Pannonica Lake, a rather tacky outdoor swimming area which I imagine is a necessity on hot summer days. It looked like great fun but alas it was closed, perhaps due to the early hour or perhaps due to the time of year. I wasn't overly sure. Aside from this, it was just pleasant wandering around the winding old streets lined with coffee shops, with many of them surprisingly busy considering the rather early hour.
There were a number of parks to see too, but it only took us about an hour to see pretty much everything so we decided to head back to the hotel and then to the airport to pick up our rental car. On the way, we stopped at the same shopping mall where we had got our money from the previous night as we needed to get a local SIM card for Wolfie's phone. We figured that this would be cheaper than hiring a sat nav, which really bumped up the price of the rental car, but we were concerned that on a Sunday, finding a SIM would be difficult. We needn't have worried as we found a small mobile phone shop with a guy who understood perfect English, and was able to install the new card for us.
With this in place we headed back, checked out and asked the hotel to call us a taxi to the airport. We had to wait for a short while, during which we got talking to one of the managers in the breakfast area. Like so many people in Bosnia, she was very friendly and really boosted the quality of our trip. Soon it was time to go however, and we were delighted to see our old friend the taxi driver from the night before. He seemed delighted to see us too again and soon we were heading back to the airport, where our rental car awaited. Acquiring this was relatively straightforward, although Wolfie was a little down that we got a better car than advertised (he opted for a Chevrolet for shitness factor and we got a Skoda Felicia). After an inventory check where we noticed that nearly all angles of the car had been bumped or scratched, we sorted out insurance and were given the keys. And this was when the adventure really began.
