Back home; with a lot of stories to be told

Hello,

I am back at home, sitting in my room with the normal sight out of the window behind me, and my own laptop before me, which will allow me to manage foto's and other stuff on my blog. You ain't seen nothing yet...

The bus drive back home was a true nightmare. Suffering from a stomach disease, caused by a piece of pie I bought back there in Sarajevo, and which probably laid too long in the heath. For those who want to go to Sarajevo; NEVER buy your bread at "Pekara Edin", it is real sick-making food and the service is honestly unfriendly...

The last day in Bosnia & Herzegovina was calm. Just walking and looking what piece of traditional work I could take back home, tasting different sweets at a Slasticarna (sweet shop), and enjoying the moments on their own ... Feeling the breeze that travelling brings, hearing the sounds of an own atmosphere and living on the waves of the local energy.
I had a drink with Munira, the girl I met before while travelling to Sarajevo, and talked about life and the society in Bosnia & Herzegovina. She was a little angered when I said that most people in Sarajevo weren't friendly at all. But she could understand. She wasn't born in Sarajevo, but in Visegrad, a town close to the Serbian frontier. She wanted to return, but that was a difficult task due to the fact that Visegrad became an almost homogenic Bosnian-Serbian town after the war. Nowadays, she is living in France.

"War broke out fast here in B&H. Even faster than you can imagine, and in a way that we couldn't expect. Even our neighbours, who used to be friendly before, could be seen as new enemies. And the most saddest thing is that nobody of us wanted it, but that it just happened and you had to choose quickly, even too quickly what you were going to do", she said. So either you stay, and become a refugee in your own country, hunted because you have this wrong ethnicity, or flee, and become a refugee in another country, and begin another life.

On sunday I went to Mount Igman and Bjelasnica, and the surrounding villages. On my way I saw a lot of destroyed infrastructure from the 1984 Winter Olympics, be it hotels and skilifts, and several Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) graveyards. Igman was Bosniak territory, together with the Bjelasnica range during '92-'95, bordered by the Treskavica range, which was the frontline with the Bosnian Serbs, and changed hands several times. I was struck by the beauty and the pure nature. To go out and walking in this last named range without a guide would be an equivalent to suicide, because of the many minefields the mountain hosts.

There, before Treskavica, and just after Bjelasnica-Igman, you have Sinanovici, a small village, just a few houses and two streets, where you can still meet traditional highland people. I was observed while walking down the village, but it wasn't difficult to melt the ice, I just said hello and the serious faces turned into laughter...

The meadows just outside Sinanovici where good for a short walk. I sat for five minutes, enjoyed the silence and thought how fantastic it would be to explore these mountains. In front of me was one of the least explored ranges in Europe in modern times. Before the Bosnian war, Slovenia was linked to Macedonia with the traditional and well-maintained transversala , a network of walkways that led trough the whole of Yugoslavia. After the war, most of the trails disappeared due to a lack of maintenance or devastation.

When I returned to Sarajevo, Elmrid, the bus driver, dropped me off just before the Holiday Inn, after having raced the whole traject and driven some 100km/h on the former sniper alley, the now called Zmaj od Bosna, the central highway in Sarajevo. The red light of the sunset was beautiful, and captured the day and the past moments in an air of peace. This was the best photograph ever taken of my life. And it wasn't me who did it, but just nature. It will stay in my mind forever.

To be continued...pictures of my trip will soon light these pages up!


Christophe