Day 7, Part I
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina – Višegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina
As we got to Sarajevo rather late, we thought we’d have a quick look around the place before setting off to Serbia. The city is rather small, and could easily be seen in an hour or so. The smell of cooking ćevapi was still in the air and the crowds of people were larger, and so were the groups of pigeons.
I was half tempted to buy a fez, as they were on sale in the many shops that surrounded the square along with the cafés. In the end I didn’t, but I did see a fez on the head of this old man sitting in front of the gates of a mosque as he was smoking a rolled cigarette and possibly preaching his wise words to the passing public.
Back at the hotel, we tried to find out about Serbia, the Green Card and the tolls for the motorways there. The receptionist didn’t know, but a Polish guy, dressed rather smartly in a suit, recognised our accents and asked if it was our car outside with the Welsh sticker on the back. Indeed it was mine, and he went on about when he lived in Porthcawl for some time and we were all talking about Swansea, Trecco Bay and other random stuff about home.
We also asked him about the tolls of the motorway in Serbia. We heard that it would cost us an equivalent of 85 Euros, to which he replied was crap… of the bull kind. He said it was much cheaper, but not sure by how much, though it certainly didn’t add up to such an amount. Though he agreed that the Green Card for Serbia was significantly worse for the wallet, in places it can add up to around a hundred Euros, but in some places, especially the more isolated and smaller border stations, it can be for much less. He also told us of someone he knew had an ‘under the table’ deal with the border guards, which cost him just twenty Euros. So even the border guards think it’s a rip-off.
And so off we went and out of Sarajevo. Leaving the noise and smells and bustle of a city and entering valleys of farmland and forests with bad roads. Later on, we passed a couple of police officers or soldiers with small automatic rifles. We weren’t sure what they were there for or why they were armed like that until we went under a small tunnel and around the corner saw a large sign, both in Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, welcoming us to the Srpska Republika.
From this point onwards, things began to change in this Serb region. The roads became worse, the road signs were all in Cyrillic and the fuel prices were all the same in every garage. It really did feel as if we were in Eastern Europe, luckily, I could read what the signs, otherwise we may well have been stuck. But the landscape was still scarce of human life. There were few houses, and the villages we passed were more like hamlets and there wasn’t much traffic on the roads apart from the few small tractor like carts struggling the ascent of the many steep roads.
As we got closer to the border, we weren’t sure where the best place to go was. We didn’t have any decent maps of the area, as the government may be a bit sceptical about allowing images and mapping being loaded on the Internet. So we stopped in this seemingly isolated town called Višegrad.
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina – Višegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina
As we got to Sarajevo rather late, we thought we’d have a quick look around the place before setting off to Serbia. The city is rather small, and could easily be seen in an hour or so. The smell of cooking ćevapi was still in the air and the crowds of people were larger, and so were the groups of pigeons.
I was half tempted to buy a fez, as they were on sale in the many shops that surrounded the square along with the cafés. In the end I didn’t, but I did see a fez on the head of this old man sitting in front of the gates of a mosque as he was smoking a rolled cigarette and possibly preaching his wise words to the passing public.
Back at the hotel, we tried to find out about Serbia, the Green Card and the tolls for the motorways there. The receptionist didn’t know, but a Polish guy, dressed rather smartly in a suit, recognised our accents and asked if it was our car outside with the Welsh sticker on the back. Indeed it was mine, and he went on about when he lived in Porthcawl for some time and we were all talking about Swansea, Trecco Bay and other random stuff about home.
We also asked him about the tolls of the motorway in Serbia. We heard that it would cost us an equivalent of 85 Euros, to which he replied was crap… of the bull kind. He said it was much cheaper, but not sure by how much, though it certainly didn’t add up to such an amount. Though he agreed that the Green Card for Serbia was significantly worse for the wallet, in places it can add up to around a hundred Euros, but in some places, especially the more isolated and smaller border stations, it can be for much less. He also told us of someone he knew had an ‘under the table’ deal with the border guards, which cost him just twenty Euros. So even the border guards think it’s a rip-off.
And so off we went and out of Sarajevo. Leaving the noise and smells and bustle of a city and entering valleys of farmland and forests with bad roads. Later on, we passed a couple of police officers or soldiers with small automatic rifles. We weren’t sure what they were there for or why they were armed like that until we went under a small tunnel and around the corner saw a large sign, both in Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, welcoming us to the Srpska Republika.
From this point onwards, things began to change in this Serb region. The roads became worse, the road signs were all in Cyrillic and the fuel prices were all the same in every garage. It really did feel as if we were in Eastern Europe, luckily, I could read what the signs, otherwise we may well have been stuck. But the landscape was still scarce of human life. There were few houses, and the villages we passed were more like hamlets and there wasn’t much traffic on the roads apart from the few small tractor like carts struggling the ascent of the many steep roads.
As we got closer to the border, we weren’t sure where the best place to go was. We didn’t have any decent maps of the area, as the government may be a bit sceptical about allowing images and mapping being loaded on the Internet. So we stopped in this seemingly isolated town called Višegrad.
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