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Mostar, Bosnia — August 2006
From Kotor, we took a couple buses back up into Bosnia, with Mostar as our first destination there. Mostar is one of the most exotic places I've ever been. It feels more like far-away Istanbul than nearby Dubrovnik.
We arrived at night and immediately went off in search of the town's most famous sight, the Mostar bridge. The bridge was originally built about 500 years ago, but it was destroyed during the war in the 90s, and rebuilt a few years later, using exactly the same materials and technology as when it was first constructed.
The town itself is beautifully lit at night, with hundreds of little shops and cafes lining the cobblestone streets.
Here's the bridge in the daytime. Keep your eye on the guy in the red speedo.
There he goes! Man, that water did not look deep.
Guys do this all day, every day. It's a tradition in the town, no lie. Then they come back up all dripping wet and collecting tips from the tourists.
I sneakily took this photo in an internet cafe of two on-duty cops goofing off and shopping for used cars online.
This is the most famous view of the bridge, where the tourists line up to all take this same photo. Hey, I took it too, I'm just sayin'.
I was kind of hoping these guys would start singing like a barbershop quartet.
A common scene in Mostar, and seemingly all of Bosnia: the smooth white walls of a renovated building next to the graying, bullethole-riddled walls of the house next door. We stayed the night with a family in town who explained to us that Mostar was the most heavily bombed city in the entire war. It's a miracle it's as rebuilt as it is; it's a beautiful and comfortable place to be a tourist, and it's very hard to imagine the sheer magnitude of the violence that took place there, not too long ago. We were in Mostar for less than 24 hours, and then raced back to Sarajevo to meet up with Lada and Alexis and spend a lot of time with them, now that the Hospitality Club meeting was over and we could monopolize all their time. The first thing we did with them was a nice drive in the countryside...
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