The Overland Experience, part 1B

The weather in Sarajevo was amazing. A large electric clock on a building indicated 35 degrees Celsius, there was a slight breeze and I sat down on a metal bench at the tram stop a happy man. After some 10 minutes a girl walked up, put her backpack against the shelter and asked me if I knew when the tram would come. She was Australian. We talked about our trips for 10 minutes or so, but there was still no tram. An older local man had been sitting in the tram shelter since before I had arrived so I walked over and asked him if he knew when the tram would be coming. He lifted a finger and said ‘No tram!’. “No tram?” I asked, and he knodded. ‘No tram. Riots in city centre.’
This was great. I do not wish war on anybody but a small scale riot would only add to the intrigue that surrounds Sarajevo. I thanked him and went back to my new Aussie friend to tell her the news. She dug up one of those doorstopper Lonely Planet guides for the whole of Europe, put it under her arm, said goodbye and walked off in the opposite direction of where I thought I had to go. I went in the direction where the old man had indicated the riot was, full of excitement. Sarajevo had already delivered within the hour.
As it turned out, the riots at city hall were more a protest that had been dispersed by the police with a minimum of fuzz than an actual full scale riot, and a few people with protest sign were still lingering around, but all the action had gone. I made it to my hostel without any problems, checked in and went for a walk around the city. What an amazing place this was. Because of its ethnic diversity, it really is a city that changes every time you walk around the corner. You can find yourself standing in front of a huge mosque, then find a Catholic church across the street, next to which there is a noisy Irish pub with people drinking beer and whiskey on the sidewalk. I spent the first day getting to know the city. I found that, likely because it is not on the main tourist trail, Sarajevo is cheap. A pint of beer set me back about EUR1,50 in a pub, a 3 course meal was about 8 Euro and when I went to get a slice of pizza as a mid-afternoon snack, I found that the 2 Euros they advertised was not for a slice but for an entire 12” pizza. I spent the next half hour in a park eating my pizza while watching elderly man play chess on the nearby tables. The pizza was delicious, by the way.




My second day in Sarajevo, I went to the market which, during the war, had been the scene of several horrible mortar attacks, and also managed to find a brewery. There were no tours on the day, this was more a production facility than a tourist attraction, but they did have a beautiful tap room where I spent a couple of hours trying their beers and having an excellent dinner (which, again, only cost me a couple of Euros). When I had checked in at the hostel, the receptionist, upon finding that I came from Ireland, had pointed at a map and said ‘Celtic bar’. I assumed that he meant ‘Irish Bar’ which is not really what I had come all this way to see. As it happened, I walked by the place later in the day and decided to have a look. The receptionist had been right. For some reason, in a largely muslim city, a place about as far removed from Scottish football culture as possible in Europe, there was a dedicated Glasgow Celtic supporters pub. It had a Celtic crest above the archway that lead to the pub further down an alley. When I got to the pub, I found that the place was full of signed jerseys and photos of Celtic teams past and present, and all staff wore kilts and polo shirts with a Celtic logo on it. It was so weird to find that in a place like this. As it happened, I was wearing my Celtic jersey on the account of it being 35 degrees and football jerseys tend to be good for taking in sweat. Upon seeing an actual Celtic supporter, from Ireland nonetheless, I was welcomed like a long lost son and given many free beers. What a strange experience this was.

At some point in late afternoon, I remembered that I had one more choir to take care of for the day and that was booking the next leg of my journey. I went to the local Eurolines office to get it sorted. Eurolines is loosely aligned collective of local buscompanies that somehow manages to have a central planning office that allows travellers looking to cross Europe on the cheap to go from one place to the next and then decide where to go after that. They have offices in the most out of the way places and whenever you travel somewhere, you can normally rely on Eurolines to get you where you want to go. (Service is better in some places than others though, as I found out a few years later when, while trying to cross the border between Lithuania and Belarus, the driver decided that all this passport checking took up too much of his time and he drove off, leaving me and a few others stranded at the border in a blizard, surrounded by mean looking soldiers with machine guns).
My choir for the day over, I sat down outside a cafe with a cold beer and decided to take it easy. I had one more site to visit tomorrow but for the rest of the day, I had nothing on the agenda. I spent the remainder of the daylight hours drinking in the sun and then went back to the hostel to see if anything was happening. There was. It was cheese and wine night. A table in the main room had been filled with bottles of local wine and plates of cheese, crackers and other snack foods. It was paid for by the tip jar in reception so I put about 3 bottles of wine worth of Bosnian money in it and got stuck in. As the night wore on, the wine kept flowing. Every time a bottle was empty, it was dilligently replaced by a member of staff, and a great night was had by all. At around midnight, the wine ran out and most people called it a day. I decided to have a nocturnal walk around Sarajevo one more time. By this time tomorrow, I would be on my way to Croatia once again. I also realised that the easy part of the trip was over. Up till now, it had been easy. 2 hours here, 3 hours there, no problem. From Sarajevo to Zagreb would be a 10 hour overnight bus trip, which would be followed by another 3 hours through to Ljublijana, after a 3 hour layover in Zagreb. I walked around Sarajevo by night one more time, had a drink here and another one there, and went to bed a happy and really drunk man.





The next morning I was up early, despite the 3 bottles of wine and 12 or so pints of beer I had consumed the day before. It was my last day in Sarajevo and I still had one very important thing to do: visit the Olympic stadium. The stadium and most of the other Olympic locations were a 20 minute walk North of the city centre. I set off early to make the most of my last day here. Tonight at 10, I would take the bus to Zagreb. On my way North, I passed a curious work of art. It looked like a giant soup can on a stone plint. I looked at it for a while and found, when I walked around it, that it was actually a can of beef. The monument had been erected by the local population as a thank you to the UN and other international organisations for food drops organised during the siege of Sarajevo during the war. I thought this was odd, and after I took a few photos, I went on my way.
When I did some research later, when I got home, I found that it was actually a wry joke as much of the food that had been dropped during the siege was past the Best Before date, with some of it even dating back to the end of the Vietnam war, and that some of it had contained pork, which obviously isn’t very useful in a city where the majority of the population is muslim. I continued uphill to the former Olympic park and arrived there in mid morning under an overcast sky. Though the clouds obscured the sun, it was still in the mid 30s, so I arrived at the stadium with sweat pouring down my back.
One of the big issues with organising an Olympic Games is that, after the games, the host city is left with a whole lot of expensive infrastructure that is essentially useless now. Some things are easy to re-purpose. The Olympic Village, more often than not, is turned into student housing, and swimming pools usually find some sort of use too. But what do you do with a 50.000 seater athletics stadium?

The main stadium in Sarajevo, I am happy to announce, is still in use. Local football team FK Sarajevo, when in need of a new home ground, took up the offer of playing in the Olympic stadium so I’m glad to see it put to good use.
This was clear on the outside of the stadium when I approached. It is covered in graffiti depicting club heroes, historic moments and, inevitably in a place like Sarajevo, political leanings. After making a circuit of the stadium, I was now faced with my next challenge: how to get in.

I had not expected there to be organised tours or anything like it, and there weren’t, but there was surprisingly little activity around the stadium. I have been to many stadiums, and I live next to one, but no matter what time of day, there is always something going on; deliveries, maintenance, tour groups, you name it. Here in Sarajevo, it was deserted. I had not come all this way just to look at the graffit on the outer walls. Just as I was about to finish my first lap around, passing behind the main stand, where the Olympic flame had been situated (the cauldron is still there) I noticed that some sort of service entrance was half open. I decided to give it a go. I pushed the door open and found myself at the start of a dark passage way. In the distance, I saw a faint light, so I moved towards it. After some 30 yards, the light became brighter and when I turned a corner, I found a local handy man who was trying to fix a door, illuminated only by the beam of a flashlight. When he noticed me, he wasn’t startled or anything, just looked at me quizically. I asked him if there were any tours, which I knew there weren’t but I hoped he would understand that I was a tourist because of that. He lifted his index finger and indicated with his arm that I should follow him. We went into another passage way and a little while later, some light began to appear in the distance. We turned around a corner, he pointed ahead and said ‘There’ and then went back to his chore. I went in the direction of the light and 15 seconds later, I walked up a couple of steps, into the light and found myself on the pitch side athletics track. After looking around dumbfounded for about half a minute, I realised I had the entire stadium to myself. There wasn’t a soul around. This was unbelievable! I had secretly hoped that I would be let in to have a quick peek inside, but this was beyond my wildest dreams. I had wanted to see this place since I was 9 and now I had it all to myself. I walked a couple of steps towards the main stand, and then I realised that this was the first time that I was on an Olympic running track. Nevermind that the Sarajevo games were winter Olympics, this was still the same track the athletes had walked on during the opening ceremony I had watched as a little boy. A tear formed in the corner of my eye while a smile appeared on my face. I was the happiest man in the world at that moment.

I spent the next 45 minutes or so touring the stadium. I climbed up the main stand, all the way to the top. The Olympic flame has ofcourse been extinguished long ago, but the cauldron is still there. It is behind the main stand and I stood next to it for a few minutes, thinking back to the games in 1984. I walked back down and around the far side. I sat down opposite the main stand and just sat there in silence. Just at the moment I got up, a guy in running gear came out of the same tunnel I had come out half an hour before, and started running around the track. When he passed me at the other side of the track I waved at him as a way of greeting. He waved back and smiled, not at all perturbed by the presence of a rough looking tourist in an otherwise abandoned stadium. When he came by for the second time, I decided to make my way back to the exit. When I reached the main stand again, and my running friend passed by for his third lap, a man in his sixties came from another tunnel in the main stand and he greeted me too. I asked him to take a couple of pictures of me with the stadium in the background and when he went off to his next chore, I made my way to the exit again. I passed by where the maintenance guy had been, but he was no longer there. I left the stadium with a warm feeling. This was the highlight of my trip, without any doubt.




On my way back into town, I took a different route as there was another thing I wanted to see. Sarajevo’s main cemetary was just a little bit out of the way, so I decided to check it out. It was a place that will stick with me for the rest of my life. Because of Sarajevo’s place in the landscape, essentially situated in a valley, with mountains on all sides, when the war intensified, the invading armies closed in on Sarajevo and cut the city off from the outside world for an unbelievable 3 years and 10 months. During this time, the people of Sarajevo had to rely on  a system of tunnels underneath and out of the city for supplies. The most well known of these tunnels led all the way to the airport, which was part of the Sarajevo safe zone and received drop offs of supplies, food and water. Inevitably, within weeks, people trapped within the city started using this tunnel to get weapons into the city so that they could fight back against the Serb forces that surrounded the city. There is a Sarajevo Tunnel museum, and I actually walked past it, but I did not visit it, something I now regret. As the situation grew worse and fighting intensified, more and more people died, and you can clearly see this here. There is such a disproportionate number of headstones with 1994 on it that it is chilling. The ugliness of war really grabs you in places like this, especially when I realised that nearly all of the deceased were around my age with the big difference being that I was walking around there and they had been dead for well over a decade. 

As I reached the city centre again, I made a final tour of central Sarajevo and vowed to come back. It is a beautiful city with a fascinating history and the weather in summer is amazing. A clock on the side of a shop read 37 degrees Celsius.

Back at the hostel, it was wine and cheese night again so I had to make a decision. I could take it easy and face the 10 hour overnight bus trip like that, or I could drink to such an extent that I would pass out as soon as the bus left the station. I decided on the latter. I spent my last 2 hours in Sarajevo drinking a mix of wine, beer and palinka, and then headed off to the busstation. The bus, as it turned out, was not a proper full sized coach, but a 25 seater mid sized vehicle. Fortunately, my strategy worked and my eyes got heavy as we drove out of the darkening city. I woke up a few times during the night, but as there wasn’t much to see outside (all was dark) I closed my eyes and faded away again soon on each occasion. It wasn’t until early in the morning when we got to the border with Croatia that we had to spring into action. Passports were collected, taken to a customs shack next to the road, stamped and then returned. And so, for the fifth time on this trip, I entered Croatia, this time at the town of Brod, or Brodski Varos as it is called on the Croatian side of the border.

The rest of the way to Zagreb passed slowly, and I failed to fall asleep entirely again. By the time we reached the outskirts of the city, the sun was climbing into the sky and the temperatures were already pushing 30 degrees again.

Here’s a really valuable tip, and I’ll throw it in for free here: When you’re travelling in a part of the world where life is cheap and a bottle of water costs about 20 cents in a shop, buy bottled water in a shop and don’t fill up your old bottle from a tap in a bus station toilet. With a 10 hour trip ahead, and not entirely sober at the time, I had checked my water stash and found that I only had about 1.5 litres with me. As I was unsure about any stopping arrangements and the possibility to restock en route, I had decided to refill an empty bottle I had in my backpack from the tap in the toilets at Sarajevo bus station. By the time we reached Zagreb, I had finished my final bottle of shop-fresh water so, without giving it a second thought, I dug into the refilled one. I sat down outside Zagreb bus station, trying to decide what to do with the 3.5 hours of spare time I had on my hands now. Should I go into the city and maybe get some breakfast, or should I just wait it out in the sun and maybe get some light sleep. Thanks to my moron decision to fill a water bottle from a public tap, I didn’t have to make the choice. Less than 10 minutes after I had gotten off the bus, the automatic alarm sign in the back of my brain went off and I walked into a toilet stall where I spent the next 20 minutes puking my guts out into a pristine Croatian toilet bowl. After I assumed the worst was over, I had a look at my water bottle and then realised what had been the cause of my misery. I stumbled back outside under weird looks from the toilet lady and went to buy a bottle of water that wouldn’t make me sick and a ticket for the bus to Ljubljana. I sat back down outside the station and took a cautious sip of water. As it turned out, the demon water wasn’t quite done with me just yet and to save you some time and me some space on the page, let’s just say that for the next 2 hours or so, I commuted between the bench outside and the toilet section of the station to get rid of whatever was left in my stomach. It was exhausting.
So, I know I’m a few years late on this, but I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to the people of Zagreb, and especially the toilet lady at the bus station, for not paying any attention to their beautiful city and instead spending my time there doing a close up inspection of the sanitary facilities. I promise I’ll come back and pay the city a proper visit.

The dirty water debacle over, I boarded the bus to Ljubljana knowing 3 things: This bus trip would only take about 2 ½ hours; I would not have to be on a bus for 2 days once I got there; and in Slovenia I could pay in Euros.