WAITING AT THE MOSTAR RAILWAY STATION

There are no camp sites in Mostar. While John hunted for information and eventually found the super Pension Rose, I sat at the station and waited together with the family living in this car.
I don't know what their story is. They used the bushes nearby for a loo and collected brushwood to make a fire to cook.
Bosnia was shocking. People were pleasant and gentle but there was a feeling of depression and trauma and desperate poverty. It was third world but not in our very good pension Rose. However the war damage, the reduced population, the ruined buildings, the miles of roads that pass through minefields leave one shaken and - yes - shocked. This is ethnic cleansing - it is terrible!

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.