22 October, Bari, Italy



The last few days since Medugorje have been disappointing, other than a few new friends I made, and a few bright moments here in Bari. Mostar, the place I stopped on the way to Sarajevo from there was good two hours spent walking around a small old town. In the heart of Bosnia, it was damaged badly in the war, including the unique bridge that crosses the river, which gives it its name.



The bridge is called Stari Most, which literally means Old Bridge. The two words were combined, and the city came to be called Mostar, and when you are there, you see why it is so fundamental to their identity. Parking in new town, I walked a short distance and then crossed it, and was immediately on the main street of the old town. The bridge looks stunning, but isn’t really a very practical bridge, as its very steep up and down, and has deep ridges on the walkway which are good for helping pedestrians cross it, but make any sort of wheels difficult at best. I’m sure there was a time that this was the only bridge across the strong flowing river, and probably the distinctive architecture was done for a reason, but I can’t fathom what it must have been. Of course now there are several other bridges, but this is still the focal point of the city, on nearly all the postcards and t shirts being sold on the street around it. I’m guessing it was bombed pretty early in the war, since it probably didn’t take much to destroy it, and the city looks to have been hit pretty hard. From what the guidebooks say, I think it was only fully rebuilt in the last four or five years, and that has probably coincided with the return of at least a small tourist economy.



I only looked around Mostar for about two hours, which is really all that is necessary to see the town. The old town is very small, really just the one street, and then spreading out to either side lets you see a bit of the newer town, which ironically is in much worse condition as much of it hasn’t been rebuilt since the war, and still shows the damage.



I got some good views of Stari Most, and some good photo opportunities, but soon I felt like I’d covered everything I needed to see and headed back for the main street in old town, back across the fast moving river (good for kayaking, I imagine) and found my car. Weirdly, as small as the town is, the signage was terrible and I got turned around and spent about half an hour or more trying to find the North road out of town, towards Sarajevo. On my second pass around the city I went the opposite direction from how I’d gone the first time and that eventually worked out.



Walking around Mostar, and Sarajevo as well, I was most struck by the way the destruction from the war still lingers. Nearly every building still shows pocket marks from bullets, at the very least. A few of them have been repaired and repainted, and a few others repaired but not yet painted, so that you can see the splotches of new concrete, but most just still have them there.



Depending on the neighborhood, there might be much worse damage, and there are some buildings that have been bombed out that they haven’t gotten around to tearing down or repairing yet, sometimes surprisingly large and central buildings. Mostar especially seems to only be able to rebuild slowly, with an entire neighborhood of what looks like hotels and residences half standing, and no movement or human presence on those streets at all. The difference between here and Croatia is amazing… much more of the fighting took place on Bosnian soil than in Croatia, but Dubrovnik took heavy damage from shelling, and with the exception of two or three buildings which still have no roof, and the brighter orange color of the modern ceramic tiles, you can’t tell at all. In Mostar and Sarajevo, you can’t miss it. Not just that it was bombed, but that the fighting was house to house and street to street.

Which is of course, part of the reason I was there. In addition to the obvious damage, Bosnia is still covered with landmines from the war. Estimates are that close to a million landmines remain, even now, twelve years later. A few weeks ago I’d finally managed to connect with the Bosnia and Herzegovina (this is the official name of the country, though I keep shortening it to Bosnia. Do that there and you will be tersely corrected. I know, because I was, several times.) Mine Action Committee. BH MAC is a locally based organization, funded by the UN and the Bosnian government that is supervising much of the demining of the country. They choose the priority for the areas to be made safe, work to raise awareness in the areas that haven’t been, and help deal with the victims of landmines. In addition to dealing with the day to day practicalities of removing one million landmines from their country, they also have a good informational website and PR program to inform people about the work as well. After looking around, I’d decided that they were the group I wanted to try to connect with for the research for the film, to try to go there and interview some of the soldiers working on the demining operations and get some photos and video of the work in progress. As some of you might remember, I was planning on leaving Croatia quite a bit earlier, but when the woman from BH MAC wrote me back with a positive response to my request, but wanting to schedule our meeting for a week later than I wanted, I was happy to make the change to my schedule. So that it why I ended up staying in Croatia for a full month, and killing so much time on the Islands and in Dubrovnik and Split.

Well, checking my email in Mostar and Sarajevo, I was beginning to get worried. Svjetlana, my contact with BH MAC had said that she would be in Croatia on the 16 – 18th, and that we should meet on the 20th, a Friday, in Sarajevo. But as of the 19th, I still hadn’t heard from her since setting that appointment. After driving the rest of the way to Sarajevo (a gorgeous drive on a road that followed the deep ravine, along the river for most of the way. I couldn’t help thinking of my Dad and my Uncle Larry, who both drove a lot as I was growing up, and appreciated a drive with a good view.





This one was maddening in that it was a small, two lane road with almost no passing lanes to get around the trucks and buses, but at least the scenery was nice.) and checking into the Holiday Inn there (central and easy to find, and something of a landmark, as this is where all the journalists stayed while covering the war, I figured she would know exactly where I was), I was annoyed to find that I still had nothing from her in my inbox, even the night before we were supposed to meet. Even so, I made plans to get up and go to their office, as an address was listed on the website, first thing in the morning.



In the meantime, I spent my evening walking around the old town and getting a feel for Sarajevo. My impressions were two-fold. The single biggest thing I have to say about Sarajevo is that it is without a doubt the most polluted city I have ever seen. I could barely breathe from the time I arrived, and was shocked at how the dark haze over the city literally blocked the sun and made it seem almost foggy. Within hours there, my clothes were starting to smell like car exhaust, and I was feeling ill. (The above picture might look like an overcast day, but this is as good as it gets in Sarajevo, and you can see the cloud of pollution over the main part of the city in the distance) The second impression the city made, which had to work hard to overcome the first, was that I really loved the way it was a true mix of religions. Mosques and churches were both apparent and it was clear that the Muslim and Christian communities were living pretty peacefully alongside one another. This is especially true in the old town, where there are lines of shops crowding the streets for the tourists to pick up bargains, and you see a good mix of Arabic and English on the signs and on the t-shirts for sale. Walking there in the evening, I stepped into the courtyard of a large Mosque and watched as the evening prayers were said, which made for a nice break from the shopkeepers hawking wares.



It was a good feeling walking around that neighborhood, hearing many different languages being spoken, the different accents, the crappy speakers on the Mosques announcing that it was time for prayers, the mix of musics and cultures. In a way it was always what I imagined a big city should be… what I thought NYC was going to be the first time I was there (which turned out not to be the case… there’s a variety of cultures in NYC, but they all feel and sound like… NYC). At the end of the day I felt pretty good about Sarajevo… my clothes still stank and I was having trouble breathing, but I appreciated it for what it was… a truly multicultural city.


(a Muslim graveyard... some new and some old... the new ones are almost all from the war, dated between 91 and 93)


(I love the attitude of this statue! I also love that the strongest female figure I've photographed yet is in such a traditional country)

Which didn’t solve the issue of my contacts with the BH MAC group, of course. There was nothing I could do that night, so I got up early and did what I could do. First I checked my email, to see if Svjetlana had answered me yet. She’d said she would be out of town Monday to Wednesday, so perhaps she had been busy on Thursday as well. There was nothing though, no reply at all. I tried calling the number on the website, but couldn’t get through. Strike two. For my third attempt, since the office wasn’t too far from the neighborhood where I was, I drove to the street, planning on just going there and seeing what was up. But when I got there, the street was lightly covered with industrial looking places, and there seemed to be nothing at the given address for the BH MAC offices. I spent a good while driving up and down the road, pulling into the parking lots on either side of the given address, trying to ask the locals if they knew anything about this place, but had absolutely no luck at all. Finally after wasting more than two hours driving around, I went back to the hotel. I tried checking my email again, but there was nothing, and tried calling the number I had again, but again, nothing. I considered trying to get the hotel to look up their number, but, while I haven’t mentioned it until now, this was the single most unhelpful, rude and annoying hotel staff I’ve run into the entire trip. When I’d asked for a map of the city (something even the one star hotels have, to show you the basics of getting around) all they had was a photocopied page of the city center, which didn’t even show the location of their own hotel! At that point I’d already made it clear to them how I felt, so I didn’t think that I was going to get any extra customer service to help me out.

I needed a break, so I ate some lunch and tried to figure out another plan, but really, with no phone number and a bad address, and no one answering my emails, my options were pretty limited. I checked my email one more time, well after noon, and still there was nothing there. With more than half the day gone, and no good way to contact them, and having spent the entire morning driving around in the traffic and the car exhaust smell, I was really sick of the city, and sick of smelling bad, and coughing all the time, I decided I wasn’t going to waste any more time on Svjetlana. I took out my camera and headed back to the city, intending to do a little more sightseeing that day and then start driving South. I had a ferry to catch the next day, and no true sense of how long it was going to take me to drive back to Dubrovnik (I had driven from there to Split, then to Medugorje, then through Mostar and finally to Sarajevo, which was such a roundabout path, and with so many stops, I didn’t know if the drive back was going to take four hours or eight, and with the Croatian roads, it’s hard to guess by looking on the map). So I walked around, did some half hearted shopping again (I’d long since decided that I didn’t need a jacket, since I’d gotten by fine with my fleece the last two nights, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t look), took some photos and stewed about wasting so much time and then having nothing come of it.

I was absolutely furious at Svjetlana. I hate being jerked around even in my own country, and here I was half way around the world. I’d changed my plans drastically for her, staying in Croatia for a full week longer than I wanted to, rented a car, pretty much lost any chance I had to go to Egypt, and spent far more money than I would have, all for the opportunity to meet these people, take some photos and make some contacts for this film. I only became even angrier when I checked my messages that evening (having left the Holiday in, which was too expensive and too rude. For less than half the price I went to a more interesting hotel with a room nearly as nice and a staff that kicked butt). She’d sent me an email around 1:30 that afternoon, saying basically that she’d just gotten back from Croatia and was sorry she hadn’t emailed me from there to let me know she was going to be late. I could come in anytime that afternoon, until four pm, or if I liked we could meet on Monday. Reading that, I had conflicting emotions. I should bottle up my anger, change my plans, stay in Sarajevo until Monday and do what I came to do. But at the same time, I felt certain that if she was able to blow me off that easily, and reschedule that easily, then she hadn’t actually set up anything as we’d discussed, as far as me going to the actual sites where they were working. I felt pretty certain that she was planning on meeting with me, showing me around their office or maybe some places close by and nothing more. Maybe this was just me justifying wanting to tell her off and escape the pollution as quickly as I could, but if so, then I let it win out. I sent her an email back telling her that her behavior had been extremely unprofessional, and that I had to catch the ferry on Saturday and that I would not be meeting with her on Monday. Further, for the sake of the Bosnian people, I hoped that the people in her organization who were involved in the actual demining operations were far more capable in handling their positions than she was at hers. Its no surprise that I haven’t heard back from her since then, I suppose.

Telling her off, through email even, felt really good, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I finally got out of Sarajevo the next morning, stopping along the way to take a deep breath of clean air and take a photo of the road and the river valley, but it leaves me in a frustrating position. I took this trip, not wholly, but in a big part, to try to do research for this film. I got some good ideas and information in Ukraine, but that was the place I knew I would be fine… I knew Sean already. Now I am faced with the fact that I’m going to return home in November much poorer than I expected to be (financially) and with almost nothing to show in the way of research. No new contacts in Bosnia or Serbia, and starting from scratch again, looking for groups to work with. Maybe I should have just stayed in Bosnia for a few extra days, and made a bigger effort to get to know the people from BH MAC, even if I didn’t get the interviews with the soldiers I wanted or whatever, at least I would know the group, and it would make it easier to come back and get what I want when I have the real cameras with me, which is what counts. Yes, I was blown off and treated badly, but given what I saw and experienced in Sarajevo, that was par for the course. Now I’m left wondering if I gave up too easily there, and worse, what I’m going to do once I get back to Austin with little more than I started with on this project. I don’t know why I was so ready to run away from Sarajevo… it couldn’t have been just the pollution…


(a fountain outside of one of the Mosques... a nice calm image to finish up this post.)

More about Bari, and Athens soon...

Stephen