NO MORE WATER FROM THE WELL

Apparently most wells dry up each year and so has ours - this week. (Not a big problem, you might think, but the French are parsimonious and well water is free, whereas mains water is metered.)
10 days ago I could water the whole garden. a week ago I either did the vegetables or the mixed border and pumpkins.

Very soon I could only fill 5 buckets, then just one watering can.

It is very hot - about 36 - 40. No point in holding your breath for a thunderstorm as they are always miss us and are just a field further away.

I thought I would have to watch as the garden died from drought and disease and stress but -

John has made me a tap for the veggie garden from the mains water. It has very little pressure so after an initial brave squirt of 8 ft it dwindles to a dribble and I am back to filling watering cans from it and putting little amounts on individual plants.

New gardens must be watered to get established.

Hopefully in a year or two most plants will survive the summer and I will just nurse the veggies like M. Blandin on the next farm who can grow 20 metre rows of cabbages with one can of carefully administered water.

It is like Lusaka and Zambia again and my childhood in Zimbabwe where water was always in short supply and a reddish colour. I still cannot bear to see a tap running while someone cleans their teeth even if it is me!! <

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.

FOOTNOTE - BACK TO THE SUN

This feet photo was made in Slovenia as autumn approached with its storms and snow and we headed south for sun and warmth.
There is always some sadness about the declining year and it felt good to defer winter. I said at the end of our Korcula blog that rain was needed and a blessing! Well we have been blessed and soaked and it has been colder than the average mean temperaturre for this reason. When we left Croatia for Bosnia the rain began and stayed with us pretty much till we got to Varna. As we left Brasov there was snow on the Bucegi Mountains. Today there are no naturists. It is raining again. Life in the wheely cabin is limited if the weather is lousy - it is dark inside as the thermal silver screen has to be left up for privacy and warmth. Will we survive the winter I wonder. I have been hit with a cold and no flu jabs are on offer in Bulgaria!

STONED ON KORCULA ISLAND

STONED ON KORCULA ISLAND AT CAMP MINDEL

It was September and over 35 in the shade.
All we could do was sit under the olive tree and get stoned – by dry olives falling from above. Every meal we were bombarded by huge wasps but the Korchula kittens tumbled and climbed to amuse us.
Camp Mindel is on a ridge between several beautiful almost deserted bathing coves. Mr Gorana had his own wine and olive oil to sell and we languished very comfortably in the heat. His mother-in-law makes the most delicious tomato sauce for pasta that I have ever eaten and the figs are soft purple honey!
The island is amazing – the hillsides have been terraced over millennia probably to clear small patches of earth that grow figs, olives, and almonds. Peasants used to live in tiny stone-roofed, stone huts without windows among these metre thick, metre high stone walls. It is impossible to conceive of a harsher existence – even the Greenlanders seem to have had more comfort!
Even now there appears to be a drought and the trees seemed to be dying. Rain is truly a blessing.

STORM OVER SLOVENIA

It rained hard last night - we had over two inches of rain at a guesstimate and the Sava and the Bistrica are torrents today. Yesterday we paddled across the Bistrica and I swam inthe Sava.