Zagreb onwards

In Zagreb we couch-surfed with Maris and Fran who were a couple in their thirties. The guy Fran was this geeky computer nerd and they were both bog fans of doctor who, sci-fi etc!! Maris had made us made us a meal of mackerel, eggplant and stuffed tomatoes with Dalmatian red wine and water which was lovely. They have this lovely flat on the 6th floor and really made us feel at home. They invited us to come with them to a surfing party. It was fun, though absolutely everyone was Croatian, so they were all talking to each other. But we chatter to Maris for ages, who was lovely. Fran got very drunk, and ended up being sick, it was very funny! We got to see Zagreb by night which was nice, though we were both pretty knackered. Next day it was Tom’s birthday, though we had a bit of a rubbish morning. Zagreb was HOT! We walked around the old town, nice, but didn’t really rate that high on our lovely scale!! It took us ages to find somewhere to eat because everywhere was so expencive and everywhere just seemed to serve coffee and cakes!
In the afternoon we got the train to Lipovljani. I was very nervous, I just didn’t know what they would be like, didn’t know if someone would pick us up! I felt like how I felt before meeting the babushka in Russia. Anyway, half way through the journey, the conductress comes in with a tray of hot, sweet coffee, 2 ice creams, a bottle of whipped cream, and a bottle of ice tea, saying that it is a present from ‘your cousin’! We were both in shock. We had no idea how a. She knew that it was for us, b. How the family had got it on the train! We were both very freaked out! So after enjoying our ice cream, we arrived in Lipovljani and were met by Stefka and Tanja. Tanja was pretty much our translator for the whole time we were there. She speaks very good English. I spoke a bit of Russian and we got by fine! After being picked up at the station, we went to Auntie Natalka, Bapcha’s sister’s house where we were immediately bombarded with food. We had made the error of eating a pizza in Zagreb, as it had been late and we need to have something and all the supermarkets were closed! So neither of us was hungry! We then went to Stefka’s house. It is a lovely house with huge fields all around and a big family sized patio. Ivana, the eldest of Stefka’s daughters lives with her husband Mario and their two adorably cute kids Ema (6) and Petr (3) live in a house built behind Stefka’s. It was really nice that all the family live so close and they all just pop round all the time and sit and have a chat or have dinner. We were given tea and coffee with yet more cake! After sitting chatting, a bit awkwardly at times, me, tom, Michaela, Tanja, Ivana and her kids went to their local lake. We had a nice time throwing stones, chatting, and laughing at the two kids. Tom and Ema bonded over races and throwing big stones! We went back to the house, had some beer, and met Mario, Ivana’s husband. He speaks pretty good English, and he and Tom had some manly chats and Mario tried to persuade him to go to the pub with him! We started dinner with a shot of Rakija followed by noodle soup, then big chunks of veal with potato wedges, and salad. Yum. Then sat and chatted more. Tom and Mario got onto a debate about economics and the infrastructures of the economy in Croatia and the UK! Tom likes to argue, so I had to hit him under the table! The dinner was delicious and everyone was chatting, so I think everyone was having a good time. Next morning, got up to the hugest pile of pancakes I think I have ever seen. Not only pancakes though, but ham, cheese, salami, cucumbers, cheesy/eggy filo pastry things... so much food, again! So we ate as much as a normal person would and still they were insisting that we eat more, even after we had explained that we couldn’t eat any more. THEN, Stefka, obviously assuming that we hadn’t already eaten enough started to make us a packed lunch. Now this was some packed lunch. We left with three tupperware tubs jam-packed with food: pancakes filled with plum jam and nuts, little nutty layered chocolate cakes, about 20 of the eggy filo pastry things, and finally one with 5 pork schnitzels! Oh and also, if that wasn’t enough, 2 huge sandwiches, 2 cartons of juice and 3 packets of sweets!
Pretty much the whole evening before, the adults had been talking about where Tom and I were going next and trying to figure out amongst themselves how we were going to get there! We planned to go to Banja Luka and from there to some waterfalls I had read about. This seemed to cause a lot of stress on them all! In the end, Franjo (Husband of one of Olga’s daughter) very kindly volunteered to drive us into Bosnia to one of the border towns, where there was a bus station. So, at about mid-day he came to pick us up and brought with him as a present to Tom and I a battered copy of a Croatian to English phrase book, so we could learn Croatian on the bus for something to do!! So sweet! So we got on the next bus to Banja Luka which was a pretty hot, sticky experience! Sorry to say it, I know that Bapcha’s roots lie in Banja Luka, but it is a dump! Not very nice at all! But, driving out of the town of Banja Luka was beautiful! Huge big rocky ravines with a fast paced river beneath; apparently some of the best rafting takes place in Banja Luka. This was confirmed by the sign I saw for the “World Rafting Competition. Start”. So, this was now a bus from Banja Luka to Jajce, the town with the waterfalls. It was another stunning journey, the scenery was just fantastic. Lots of big mountains with pretty houses and for the most part of the journey we were perilously driving on skinny mountain roads with the river beneath us and huge mountains on either side of us. We got to Jajce at about 5 and had decided to go to the tourist information centre, as I had read that they could sort out homestays. So we were on our way us a hill, with bags in tow, when a nice looking guy said Hello, do you need a room? We both turned round in a comedy, ‘how did you know’ way and said well yes, in fact we do! He offered us a room for 10 euros a night, which was cheaper than the guide book said, and seemed a much better option that trekking into town in the rain! So he gave us a lift to his house, which was in a perfect location and showed us our little room in the house that he lived in with his mother and grandmother. It was lovely! All of the attractions in Jajce have keyholders from whom you have to get a key to see the sights. It turned out that this family were the keyholders for the catacombs, so we felt like they must be trustworthy people! So we wandered around the town, saw the catacombs, the castle and the old town (in about 3 hours, it’s very small!) We then went back to our little room where we had some of Stefka’s packed lunch for dinner. The next day, after a breakfast of Stefka’s packed lunch, we went to the waterfalls, which were pretty impressive, though pretty small I thought! The town was really nice and the surrounding countryside with its run-down buildings and sad looking houses was also beautiful. There were lots of houses that people had just abandoned, I assume that they had either been forced out or people had just fled to somewhere safer during the war and had never returned out of choice or not. We spent the rest of the day wandering, having a coffee here and a fanta there, and waiting for our bus to Sarajevo. The journey to Sarajevo was really interesting, it has the beautiful green mountainous terrain as the bus from Banja Luka, but also we passed through lots of towns which had obviously been hit really badly in the war. One town, Travnik, I saw an apartment block which has written ‘guerrilla 1989’ on it and it had huge holes where shells had hit it and was pockmarked with bullet holes. I was really fascinated by all these houses with bullet holes and would look at all the houses to see if they had any marks on them. But the more houses I saw, the more it made me think that those holes weren’t just marks, they were holes made by people shooting at houses where normal people lived.
So, got to Sarajevo and had booked a room in this guys house, so he picked us up from the station and took us to the house. We then headed straight out for dinner in the old part of town. Sarajevo is great, the old town is like a Middle Eastern bazaar, with cobbled streets, lots of little alleyways, short little stalls crammed with copper coffee pots, rugs and jewellery and mosques galore! Just a little side note for you Mum, the Muslim women here look a lot like their glamorous Arab equivalents, with heavy make-up, designer bags and lots of shiny jewellery in comparison to British Muslims. On our first proper day, we went to the national history museum, which was not as informative as we had hoped, though it did have a very good, though very sad exhibition about the war. When we left the museum, I just couldn’t help but look at all of the people on the tram and think, you had to live through that, you had to make a dash across the street with a group of people to avoid being picked off by a sniper. I just can’t even begin to comprehend how life must have been, how everyday must have just been terrifying and how just trying to do the most basic thing, like crossing the road, or lining up to buy bread would mean risking your life. We then went to a museum called the tunnel museum which was right out by the airport. For most of the war, Sarajevo was surrounded by Serb forces, there was a part called Butmir which was the last Bosnia-held part of the city which linked to the outside world. Between Butmir and Sarajevo was the airport runway. Despite being neutral and under UN control, to cross it would have been suicidal. A hand dug 800m tunnel was built under the runway in order to get supplies in and was able to keep Sarajevo supplied with food and arms during the three year war. The tunnel was build under someone’s house which again was full of bullet holes as were the houses around it. Despite being closed when we got there, the guy heard us an opened it up for us for 5 mins. Most of the tunnel has now collapsed, though you can still go through a bit of it. It was incredible to see, and incredible to believe that only 15 years ago people had to resort to this to survive, not just some abstract war that took place decades ago.
So, tomorrow we are going back to Croatia to Split. So sunbathing, island hoping and red wine next!!