DUBROVNIK CROATIA

Dubrovnik is too beautiful and too popular with tourists. We were lucky it was not so while we were there. We had a decent campsite near a beach and easy access to the old city. We found information on the siege of Dubrovnik and discovered a War Photo Gallery that had journalists photos of the terrible things that happened in the region during the 1992 - 1995 period.


I have tried to record the midday bells over Dubrovnik for you.I have also got this video made by John who is trying to phone me on the camera having lost me again! (Actually, Ruth has no sympathy. This is the video I shot whilst falling over the ramparts while looking down to see what had happened to Ruth. Don't worry. The casts come off in a couple of weeks.)

--

SARAJEVO IN THE RAIN

This is "the yellow hotel", The Holiday Inn, from which journalists observed the siege of Sarajevo from the inside 13 years ago.



Somehow the photo of me holding the yellow umbrella behind me to simulate sunshine got lost, but here is one of me standing in the same spot on the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo with the umbrella a few feet away in a different spot. Just as well we were not standing several feet further back 94 years and a few months earlier, otherwise I might have stopped one or more of the bullets fired by Gavrilo Princip at Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the umbrella might have become slightly less effective at keeping the rain off. (On the other hand, the First World War might not have happened and we should have foregone so much history, but what's that set against a damaged umbrella and me being shot 29 years before I was born?)




Sarajevo people seemed to be gentle like the people in Mostar - maybe they are subdued somehow by the events of their recent history. Like Rebecca West and Michael Palin, we saw Sarajevo in the rain. It was pleasant enough in the Turkish quarter where the mosques are surrounded by rose gardens but one can't get away from the empty buildings, the bullet holes and the war damage. As we walked home through a pleasant suburb we saw shell damage on the street! Our campsite was near the famous tunnel that helped Sarajevo survive.