War, Reconstruction, and Ice Cream

Peach ice cream - the best!

I'm totally going to ping-pong around in my locations as I blog about last summer -- no need to go in chronological order, as far as I'm concerned.

I ended last time with ice cream, and I'm going to pick up the ice cream theme again, with the place I had the best ice cream. I ate a lot of pretty great ice cream, but the absolute most incredible was the fresh peach ice cream that I ate in the town of Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After I tried it I stopped trying other flavors and vendors, and just came back every day for more. Ronan was a convert, too.

Mostar was a late add to my travel list; I wasn't sure if it was going to work out, because it's a bit off the beaten path. I'd committed to travel to Croatia with a friend, but she could only stay about a week, and I had an extra week to figure out before I wanted to head back to Spain, so I doodled around online looking at accommodations, and trying to figure out whether I could afford to go to Dubrovnik. Dubrovnik is definitely a popular summer tourist destination, and prices reflect it (but more on that later.) So I'd had Mostar on my list of places I'd eventually like to visit, and the more I looked at the map, the more I realized it wasn't really all that far from Split. So I doodled around looking at some more accommodations, and I found a homestay that looked reasonable. I looked at the price, and it was $50-something. My first thought: $50-something per night? (I'd been looking at places in Dubrovnik, so that looked cheap.) No, $50-something total. For 5 nights. I blinked. How was it possible? Well, they weren't charging me for Ronan, so that was part of it. But seriously? I looked at the reviews - was this a dump? No, the reviews were all good, and there were enough reviews that it probably was legit. So I gambled, and made the reservation.

As it turned out, Guesthouse A&O was a fantastic place to stay. The host kindly came and picked us up at the bus station, even though our bus was over an hour late, and it was probably after 10pm by the time we arrived. She was kind and helpful, she invited Ronan to play with her young children, and she dropped us back off at the bus station when we were heading out at the end of the week. Her house was clean and well-appointed -- our room had air conditioning (which was absolutely essential), a private bathroom with a washing machine, and access to a shared kitchenette and a balcony to enjoy the view (and dry our clothes.)

Mostar had been on my list for a while because I'd seen an article about its old bridge (that's where the name comes from: "stari most" is "old bridge" in Bosnian.) The bridge is a gorgeous arc over a blue-green river, and the article that I'd read talked about people jumping off the bridge -- for fun -- and that there's competitions each year where people jump off the bridge. The bridge itself was built in the 16th century, during the Ottoman empire. It was completed in 1566 or 1567. It's a gorgeous arc over the river Neretva, and connects the two halves of the town.

One side of the town is predominantly Christian, and the other side is predominantly Muslim. We were staying on the Muslim side of town, on roads sometimes not found on Google Maps. Or if they were, their connections to each other were sometimes dubious. Mostar is a hilly city. The old part of town is down in a slightly flat area built up on either side of the river. The Muslim side of town very quickly climbs up a hill; there's another hill on the Christian side, but a little further off, and the flat part of the land (of course) follows the course of the Neretva river.

It was the first city I'd been to where I heard the call to prayer - they broadcast it from speakers at the top of the towers at the mosques. I took the opportunity to visit a mosque while we were there -- it was the first time I'd ever been in one. We climbed to the top of the tower and got a great view of the whole area.

You may or may not be aware of it, but there was a pretty awful war all over Bosnia and Herzegovina during the early 1990's. I wasn't really aware of it when it happened -- I was in high school and then starting college, and didn't pay a lot of attention to the news. It was also a part of the world I'd never thought about, so the abstraction of war was made more abstract by my total lack of connection to the area.

Among the many fatalities from that war was the Mostar bridge. Human lives are absolutely precious to me, and many of them were lost, too; but it made me incredibly sad to think of this beautiful span standing for 427 years, only to be destroyed by tank shells in 1993. But humans are pretty neat, as it happens. A bunch of UN groups and nearby nations contributed funds and engineers to rebuild the bridge using local materials, and using the traditional techniques that would have been used in the 16th century. There's a great museum about the bridge and its reconstruction, and if you get a chance to visit Mostar, you should go.

We were up the hill about a kilometer from the old town, more or less straight up. OK, not really, but it always seemed like it on the way home, especially because it was 90+ F degrees out every day. It was hot in Mostar. Interestingly enough, the Neretva river was extremely cold. Sure, you say, it was cold. No, I mean it was cold. OK, I get it. No really. I'm from the Pacific Northwest, and we have the Pacific ocean nearby, and Puget Sound stays around 45 F year round and I sometimes stick my feet in both, and I'm telling you that the Neretva river was cold. When I read that online before we got there, I thought 'Yeah, cold for you, probably.' Nope. It's the kind of cold that makes your feet get numb after you've been standing in it for a little while. It's not the kind of cold that you get used to and decide, 'Oh, it's really not that bad' after a little while. Despite this, lots of people still jump into the river. Some even jump from the middle of the Mostar bridge. See, I'm not kidding:

I'm not going to be able to tell you everything about Mostar in this single post, so don't worry that you're missing something -- I'll tell you more specific stories later. This time, I'm just giving you an overview, so here's the overview "feel" that I want to convey. Mostar is this gorgeous mix of old and new, death and rebirth, Christian and Muslim, western and eastern, devastated by war, and yet friendly and energetic, and it has this poignancy that's hard to avoid. Most tourists only visit the old bridge, but there's a lot more to experience - as there is everywhere. We stayed five days, and I could happily have stayed longer.