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Published: July 17th 2009
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Well im finally back on the road again and it feels great if you exclude the incredible pain I have when walking (with an extra 20kg of luggage). A few days ago I caught a ferry back to split and then a 4 hour bus ride to the town of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Mostar is the capital of Herzegovina). Arriving at the bus stop, I was greeted by a mate I had met back in Hvar and a lady from the hostel who had a car to drive us back to the hostel. For those who are unaware of it, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia were all involved in a series of wars over the break up of Yugoslavia throughout the 1990's, and Bosnia copped the worse of it. Walking around mostar and seeing the destruction that had gone on here and seeing the locals who were all involved in the war was an eye-opening experience. The majority of the destroyed buildings have been cleared and rebuilt but the buildings that weren't completely destroyed still show significant scars from the war. However there are still many many buildings that have literally been abandoned and are now modern day ruins.
One of the more moving scenes was the bank that was used as a sniper building. This building was a quite new 7 story glass building that had no windows left and all you could see were the skinny metal columns holding the floors up. It was gutted. What was moving about it was that this is the kind of building you would encounter at home. Most of the other buildings that were in ruins with mortar holes/craters were the much older traditional style. What was also quite shocking were the bullet holes on all buildings throughout the residential parts of the town. The ugly communistic style 12 story-ish residential apartment complexes had massive amounts of bullet holes all the way up them to the top floors. Over the last few days I have developed the feeling that the bosnians (particularly the muslims) are quite friendly to foreigners, very polite and service with a smile is common. However the tensions between the locals (bosnian muslims and bosnian croats) is still very much there. The muslims and croats each have 'their part of town', and when they cross into the other part of town (to live or do business) then they
are to expect trouble.
On the other hand Mostar is a beautiful place with the narrow cobble stone pedestrian rodes through the old town, the beautiful old village buildings through the old town with slabs of stone for roofing. All this surrounding cliffs that drop away into a wonderfully blue river, and the town also being surrounded by some incredibly large moutains. On the day that I arrived I spent quite a few hours strolling through the city taking in the sights and pondering about what to do the next day (as the famous Bata tour everyone had been talking about wasn't on till my third day in Mostar). I had a good idea that I wanted to jump off the town's very famous stari-most (old bridge), but I needed a partner in crime and no-one at that point was willing to jump off as it is a significant 21-25m tall (around 7 storeys). The following day on the first bus from split, I was very pleased to see that another good friend (Fraser, canadian) from Hvar had rocked up and decided that he would jump with me. So at around 4pm we muster up the courage to go,
and we haggle with the diving club who control what happens on the bridge and bring the price down from 25 euros to 15. After they taught us the proper technique for jumping from heights (which could be dangerous for me in the future) they sent us off to a 10 m platform for a few practise jumps where we quickly realised that the water is bloody cold (around 9 degrees). We each took 3 jumps and on my third jump something very weird happened where the pressure to my ears was so severe that I was in a lot of pain (that ended up lingering all day/night). We then made our way to the bridge for the jump and immediately the wind picks up to a level where the divers seem a little concerned but they dont say much to us. After we had sorted out some ppls to take photos and videos for us, we jumped. Fraser begged to go first as he was a little more hesitant than me and felt he needed a pep talk when he was over the edge. He jumped. On the way down he was waving his arms around like a retard
but pulled it off nicely. As I jumped 30 seconds later, I was focusing on not waiving my arms like fraser (as we had a pretty large crowd and I wanted to do it in style) but as I was about to hit the water I realised that my legs werent pointed and were apart. Well I managed to move them inwards and straighten them but it wasnt quite enough and the full force of the water was gifted to the crutch region.........As fraser is screaming with excitement I swam through the fast flowing water to the rocky edge and huddled over for a few minutes in silence but with a smile on my face. Fraser and I were the 301st and 302nd persons to jump off the bridge. In the evening a few of us from the hostel went down to a basketball/soccer court and taught around 15 local children aussie rules which was a lot of fun.
The last full day I had in mostar was reserved for the famous tour from the hostel that Bata (the owner) ran. This tour was amazing, we heard alot about the war from the Muslim's perspective and had the city
tour (23ppl jammed into a minivan with no aircon on a 30+ day (although it had a disco ball and pumping music), but was still great). After the city tour we lost 5 people to a car and did a tour of the surrounding area. Bata took us to some amazing waterfalls for swimming and cliff jumping, and to a railway bridge (11m) for more jumping and kayaking. He took us to a castle and its ancient village and gave us the history of the region and finally he took us to 2 places of worship. The first was a town called Medjugorje where the Virgin Mary appeared to the 6 children, you would have heard of this. It was quite amazing. The other place was a monastry located on a river that flowed straight out a massive rock face/mountain which was also awesome. After the 14 hour tour it was time for bed, and the beers consumed throughout the tour made getting to sleep a breeze.
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