Day 16 How much of Montenegro can you fit into a daytrip?

Today was the big montengro tour with Montenegro hostel.  We had only 1 full day and 2 nights in Montengro and wanted to see as much as possible so this seemed like a tour for us.  Overall the tour was pretty good...except the entire thing about 12 hours in a car where the driver refused to turn on the ac.  Needless to say we needed lots of cold drinks to survive.

Mini breakfast in the hostel before heading out

View of the Kotor walls as we left.  Our driver was actually 20 min late because of bad traffic from Kotor so we got to sit around for a while.

 Map of where we went for the day (note Dubrovnik was from earlier, we were only in Montengro today)

First stop was on the austro hungarian road with 26 sharp curves leading up the mountain.  We had a great view of most of Boca Bay

Real breakfast in Njeguši, Montenegro.  They are famous for their smoked ham and cheese

After breakfast we went to see the smoking room for the ham.  This building was filled with 11 layers of ham going up all ageing in the barn (yes that is mold)

A short but twisted drive later we reached Loven national park.  Here their famous military and religious leader is buried in a mausoleum.  It is also the second tallest mountain so the views are great.

Centje monestary.  We didn't actually see much in this town.  Mostly everybody sat down and had coffee and I looked around, took pictures and bought some souvenirs

Snack time at the grocery store since "lunch" was at 5 pm.  This is eggplant/red pepper flavored.

Ostreg monestary.  It is Serbian Orthodox church built into the mountain

The river that flows into Skadar lack

Lunch at 5 pm was a feast.  We had trout which I still can't figure out how to debone without looking like a moron.  Everything was very good though and came to a total of like $8

Sveti Stefan island.  Now an exclusive place at like 1000 euro a night.  It is owned by a Russian billionaire and it is hard to get onto if you aren't rich

Catholic church back in Kotor.  We arrived back around 8:30

We didnt need actual dinner so we picked up a few things at the backery including some fermenting watermelon.  Overall it was pretty good.  

And that was our crazy day seeing a lot of Montenegro.  Tomorrow we transfer to Albania and end up in Berat.

Day 15 Sarajevo then back to the Montenegro coast

Today was a race against time to see as much of Sarajevo as possible.  We had to get our transfer to the airport at 1:15 and tried to do as much as possible before that.  Highlights of the day include seeing some of the recent war sites, an exhibit in Srebenica, a walking tour covering much of the older sites, a long time in the Sarajevo and Belgrade airports and finally hiking the city walls in Kotor.

Before getting to the day in pictures, a few reflections on traveling through the worst hit part of the Balkans so close to the 20th anniversary of Srebrenica massacre.  While getting ready for this trip I read a few books on the area including the Cellist of Sarajevo (totally recommend) and I am currently finishing Love Thy Neighbor (really eye opening).  As we travel the more I realize that Americans in general have no clue what is going on in the world.  I for one had no idea how terrible the Balkans war was, or what a big role the UN had in allowing civilians to be killed and large cities to be held under seige like medieval times.  Love Thy Neighbor and the Srebrenica exhibit are both heartbreaking stories of the war.  I don't understand how not so long after WWII that  we allowed so many people to be killed in such terrible ways.  It is like we never learn anything from history.  I also have a better understanding of the driving forces of Islamic fundamentalism.  What mostly the Serbs did to the Muslims here is aweful and the world stood by and let it happened. While I don't condone violence I really can see how Muslims can look at the horrible things that happened and decide that the world doesn't support them.  Maybe this time we will learn from history, but I doubt it. I am sure 20 years from now we will be going to another site (maybe Syria) and learning about another mass killing that the world made excuses to ignore.

Anyway back to happier pictures of the day

Zach leaving our hostel.  It looks a little sketchy on the outside and it is totally dark once you get inside that outside door

We walked toward sniper alley to see sites from the Balkans war.  On the way we passed reminders of how diverse Sarajevo is and was.  This is a 15th century mosque

The mosque was sitting in the middle of this area full of Art Nouveux architecture from the 40 years of Austro Hugarian rule.  Many of the buildings have been pretty much restored, but you can still see the shrapnel damage in places. 

Memorial on the Romeo and Julliet bridge.  This young couple was shot trying to cross the bridge and their bodies stayed there in embrace for 5 days because it was too dangerous to retrieve them

Memorial to the UN aid.  I guess we dropped food aid for the trapped civilians.  This included left over rations from WWII and the Vietnam war.  Most of the food was not really identifiable.  Since this was the only food the people got though, they ate it and this is their tongue in check thank you for the food aid.

The holiday inn on sniper alley where many of the journalists covering the war stayed.

We had a quick break for for Bosnian coffee and Baklava at Morica Han.  It was very good, but the bottom of the coffee is really sludgy.  (Still better than the nescafe we have often been served around here.

Sadly we only had 45 min to see this exhibit and there were no pictures allowed.  If you have been to a Holocaust museum that is pretty much the atmosphere.  They had the names of all the dead and showed pictures and movies of the events.  They also had pictures of some Dutch graffiti.  The UN soldiers did very little to help the people who were being murdered 

Eternal flame monument that was actually from before the war.

Markale market (which today is still a market).  Here a shell hit during the war and killed 68 people in 93 and another 43 in 95.  The wall has the names of all the victims and they left the shell spot covered in glass

This is a Sarajevo rose.  They are all over the city and indicate where a shell hit that killed at least 3 people

The big catholic church in Sarajevo

The Latin bridge where WWI started (ok only sort of).  Franz Ferdinand was shot near the pink building

Old Ottoman market (16th century I think) that is now filled with shops

Oldest operating public restroom in the world.  It is from 1530 and had to be seriously rebuilt due to the Balkans war

Gazi Husrev-beg mosque also from 1530 (and built by the same guy who built the toilet and library).  We had hoped to go inside and climb the mineret but due to time we just had enough time to look in the courtyard

When we got back to the hostel the driver was already waiting for us.  I thought he was going to kill us since he was texting the entire time and not really looking at the road.  Luckily we made it to the airport in one piece.

It was a good thing that I stopped at the bakery on the way back because the airport had no food past security.  We had this meat/potato pastery and a poppyseed cheese cake like thing

The plane from Sarajevo to Belgrade was small and we had seats right by the propellers.  Good thing it was only a 40 min flight

Grossest sandwhich ever (but note that even on such a short flight they feed everyone).  It was like rotten summer sausage, cucumbers and maybe olives.  Gross!

Real lattes and cheesecake in the Belgrade airport.  We had about 1.5 hours here to kill

Coming into Boca bay.  The flight was a little scary coming in because it looked like we were going into the ocean, but that is just because it was a short runway

We got ripped off by a taxi again, although not as bad as Slovakia.  Here they just charged us double the price it should have been.  We went from Tivat where I flight landed to Kotor.  Kotor is a smallish city on the bay with city walls...a little like Dubrovnik but way smaller

We arrived at old town hostel to have shots of some sort of fruit liquor.  They invited us to shot night later, but we declined.  Would have been great...like 10 years ago!

Our room was quite and away from the party.  The entire hostel is in a 13th century renovated building

Catholic church and the mountains at sunset

What do we do when we see stairs?  We climb of course.  We didn't have enough daylight to hike the entire town walls but we made it up to the church overlooking the town for some great views.

More views hiking down

Dinner was at the Old Winery.  The wine was amazing.  The food was horrible.  Maybe the worst pasta I have had in a restuarant and it wasn't very cheap either

View from our balcony in old town

Tomorrow we have a crazy 12 hour tour that takes us to much of Montenegro.  Should be fun!

Day 14 Bosnia

We are officially at the halfway point.  We come home in 2 weeks and we left slightly under 2 weeks ago.  We spent all of day 14 exploring Bosnia (our only full day in Bosnia).  Highlights were visiting 4 really cool sites in Herzegovina (the southern more Mediterranean part of the country), a bus ride with beautiful scenery to Sarajevo, the cheapest dinner yet in Sarajevo, and visiting the more than 150 year old Sarajevo brewery

Breakfast was great especially for 3 euros.  They had everything you could ask for including eggs (for Zach not me) and french toast.  Well they did forget one thing.  There was no syrup for the toast.  

The only bad part about breakfast was the very load drilling noise.  They are building something next to the hotel that involving breaking lots of rocks very loudly.

Next we went to ihouse were our tour was supposed to start at 9.  We waited until 9:15 and the guy didn't show up.  After getting our hotel to call we learned there was some sort of miscommunication and he never got the final confirmation from us.  Luckily he was still up for taking us because we eventually had a great tour of the countryside.  This is the Dervish house in Blagaj.  It is a Dervish monestary at the source of a local river coming out of the rocks near it.  

Next stop was Zitomislici to see the recently rebuilt Serbian Orthodox church.  It was destroyed to the foundation and rebuilt in 2004.  There is currently 2 monks living there and the paintings are amazing.

The main part of the Serbian church

Our guide asked us if we wanted local fresh fruit and we said of course.  We stopped at this little fruit stand on the way to the next stop and enjoyed about 6 types of fruit each for all of $1.5 total (all local and organic)

Pocitelj was the next stop.  Our guide said we had 40 min which judged to be enough time to climb to the top of the ruins.  At this point it was already over 90 so it was quite the hot climb, but worth it

Dinky and the view from the tower.  We tried to climb to the other side of the ruins but got lost and had to come down

Final stop of our tour was this national park type place called Kravice.  I had totally missed the part about bring your swim suit but if I had we could have swam here.  At least we got to stick our hot feet in.

We had the national Bosnian dish.  It is like minced meat sausages, eggplant red pepper sauce, fresh onions and bread.  All while sitting pretty close to the waterfalls.

We hardly had any time after arrival in Mostar.  We managed to snag 2 souvenirs and get one more picture of the bridge during the day.

The taxi ride to the bus station was all of $1.5.  We got there 15 min early and of course our bus was 20 min late.

Great views from the bus on the way to Sarajevo

At the bus station we needed money but this super aggressive lady kept following us.  We had to get money and run or we weren't sure she would leave us alone

Sarajevo has the second oldest tram system in Europe.  We took the 1a line to our hostel

We stated at the Markale guesthouse (which is now the Massimo rooms).  I don't recommend it based on our stay.  While it seemed clean enough the guy checking us in didn't seem to care less that we were there.  He required payment before handing over our passports and then said he had abolutely no change.  Then our room had only 1 lightbulb, a broken shower head holder and no toilet paper.  At least it was clean and cheap!

We spent a few minutes figuring things out and then set off to find dinner.  We walked through old town as the sun was going down and it was very pretty.  You could see all sorts of different types of churches and mosques and a wide mix of people

Dinner was supper cheap.  We had these Burek things which is a pastry stuffed with things.  I had spinach, Zach and meat and garlic.  It was pretty good especially for a grand total of 5 dollars including the drink

Once we had some food in us we headed over to the Sarajevo brewery.  I was excited to try their unfiltered beer, but they were out.  The filtered light beer was as bad (or good) as anything else we have had.  The dark beer was pretty ok

Clock tower on the walk back to our place

Overall so far Sarajevo was somewhat overwhelming.  Perhaps it was because we reached the halfway point of our trip or because we have so much to see in so little time.  I am hoping so sleep we get us back into things.

Tomorrow we explore the city for a little, do a walking tour and then catch a flight to Montenegro.