I made it. I even got a decent night’s sleep, somewhere along the way. 1300km, 29 hours.
Almost suffocated to death sharing a compartment with two chain-smoking Bosnian women between Sarajevo and Banja Luka. I suppose it’s almost karma that one of them left a full packet of cigarettes and a lighter on the seat [...]
I thought we were all Yugoslavian. One day, I woke up and my friends were in the hills, shooting at me. I realized they were Serbs.
–Bata
I’ve spent almost two weeks in former Yugoslav territory (from Slovenia to here), and twice as long in Bosnia and Herzegovina as I initially intended. I’ve been learning a lot [...]
For every shell crater, there seems to be a smiling Bosnian. Sarajevo has an amazing energy and optimism for a city that was the site of one of the worst atrocities of my generation.
Between 1992 and 1996, there were around 62 000 casualties as the result of Bosnian Serb mortar and sniper fire. Nearly [...]
Long day. 6am train, in Ljubljana. Alarm bells start going off when it’s twenty minutes late. Correspondingly, I arrive in Zagreb twenty minutes late and therefore have one minute to change currency, buy a ticket and make my connection. Needless to say, I missed the train to Sarajevo.
The next one comes in eleven hours. Uh [...]