Once the Siberian trip was put on indefinite hold I could turn my attention to the remaining white spots on the map of Europe. One of the largest ones was in the area previously known as Yugoslavia. I bought two Easy Jet tickets: London-Split, Ljubljana-London and gave myself eight days to make it from Split to Ljubljana. The first day was a challenge. The flight left at 6 in the morning and so I had to get up shortly after 2 a.m., walk over to the Victoria station and take a train to Gatwick in order to be there the recommended two hours prior to departure. On the other hand, I fell asleep as soon as I sat down in the plane and woke up at 9 a.m. in Split with the whole day ahead of me.
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The problem was that Dalmatia was hot, almost Texas hot (around 35 degrees C). The sudden change, 24 hour exposure (no air conditioning) and the last 3 years in the cooler climate of London, made it tiring. I immediately took remedial action: bought a pair of light sandals, unzipped the lower part of my pants converting them into long Bermuda shorts, forced myself to slow down and started to drink lots of water. All of that helped, but I realized that I will have to scale down the original plan of seeing all of Yugoslavia in a week.

Even though I spent only one day in Split, it was enough to get a flavour of the of the city with its multiple layers of history, starting with the large and well preserved Diocletian’s Palace, through Venetian period and including traces of the socialist past which seem to mark all the places where communist parties once ruled. Next morning I took a bus for Dubrovnik. While Split was interesting, Dubrovnik was stunning. Medieval city with its wall intact (in fact you can walk up on the wall all around the town, something which takes over one hour), no cars, street pavement of polished limestone which one normally finds in the lobbies of large banks, narrow and therefore shady streets, cafes and restaurants, and at this time of the year, still only a modest number of tourists. Description or even photographs cannot capture the magic, it is one of those places you have to see in person. The rather uniformly red roofs are no accident, most of the roofs are very new. They had to be replaced after the Yugo navy shelled the town in 91, during which, according to a map displayed on the city wall, most of the houses have been damaged. The military objective of this exercise totally escapes me.

I discovered many years ago, that one day in a city, even as nice as Dubrovnik, is typically enough and one tends to see the same things the following day. However, because the transport options are somewhat limited and I felt I needed another day to pull myself together, I decided to spend two nights. To make the stay more interesting, I took a little boat the next day and visited a small port town of Civet, further south along the coast. I realized why Dalmatia is such an popular summer destination. With its very long coastline, there are plenty of little towns and villages where one could easily spend a week, swimming in the clear and warm Adriatic. I imagine the volume of tourists may be a bit of a problem in July and August, but September would be perfect, water still warm, number of visitors and prices starting to drop and perhaps air temperatures a little bit lower as well.

The other reason for staying two nights in Dubrovnik was that I was not sure what to do next. The heat, less than comfortable bus ride and the general lack of confidence in transportation schedules beyond Dubrovnik made me seriously consider an alternative to following a circular route through Yugoslavia. I found out that a large ferry sailed between Dubrovnik and Rijeka and I wanted to find out more details from the agency. It turned out that the ship took 19 hours and for a reasonable price it was possible to buy a place in a 4 berth cabin. It certainly seemed more comfortable than the bus. The only problem was that it sailed only on Sunday and it would mean spending an extra night in Dubrovnik. I also went to the bus station to check on the schedule and found out there was one bus per day going to Sarajevo. The length of the journey was somewhat unclear, at the bus station they told me 4 hours, my guide book said 5 hours in one place and 7 hours in another. I also saw the bus and it seemed to be of a more comfortable design and was run by Eurolines, a company which operates throughout Europe and specializes in multiday trips. I did not decide what to do until the next morning. I wanted to test my tolerance for bus travel and felt I was going to see more if I head to Sarajevo and beyond. And if the bus ticket office was right and the trip would take only 4 hours – well, I could handle that.

The bus that turned up at 8 o’clock was not the same bus as the day before. In fact, it was barely more than a glorified school bus ( the glorification consisting of purple drapes in the windows). No toilet, no reclining seats, not much room for legs and knees. But, the die was cast. Luckily for the first 4 hours I had the seat all to myself, even though the bus was otherwise quite full and I had taken a shower that morning and had a freshly shaven head. No 5 o’clock shadow!

At first we backtracked along the road we took few days earlier from Split, this time heading north. This meant that there were 2 more border checks. Most people (myself included) do not realize that Bosnia-Herzegovina has a narrow strip of the coast and this effectively creates a little “island” of Croatia on which Dubrovnik lies. So you go through a Croatian border post on the way out, then entry formalities on the BiH side and 50 km later the same thing but in reverse order. If you are homesick for the travel in the style of the old days, with multiple stamping of passports and many strange currencies which require constant mental arithmetic (something that has effectively disappeared with the expanded EU and euro) former Yugoslavia is a place to do it.

Then the bus made a sharp right turn and we headed inland. The dry coastal scenery was replaced by green forest covered hills. Lot of hills, that is why it is called Balkan, which is a Turkish word meaning ‘hill’. The river we were passing along was repeatedly dammed, creating long narrow lakes with fair recreational potential. The bus driver started to make more frequent stops – each ostensibly for 10 minutes even though they tended to last 40. That was the main reason why the trip took 7 hours, even though the distance covered was not so large. As we moved higher and along steeper slopes, the bus was having a hard time even in the first gear and it was only by switching off the so called air conditioning that we were able to make it uphill.

One of the reasons why I was not initially keen on this routing was that my image of Sarajevo was rather negative – run down modern city – impression I probably got from news clips during the 2 year siege. Traces of war were not difficult to find but they seemed to stand out more in the suburbs where grey socialist housing had innumerable shrapnel scars on the walls and from time to time evidence of more direct impact. But the center of town was totally surprising. A unique mix of European and Near Eastern, both in terms of architecture and atmosphere. Had a bit of a fright when I was repeatedly unable to withdraw money from local banking machines. I had to go to the post office and exchange pounds in cash for the local ‘convertible mark’ or KM so that I would at least have some spending money. After trying few machines I realized that either the computer system is down or that there is something wrong with my card. Since I saw other people getting money without a problem I realized it must be me. I tried the American card I have and luckily it worked. So be warned if you travel to BiH, your British cash card may not work – it was fine everywhere else.

I walked around, had a real cevabcici (there are many restaurants that specialize in this) and in the evening I watched the two quarterfinal football games. All the pubs and street cafes had large screens installed and the whole town was watching. Since it was also Saturday night and a day of university graduation the town did not go to sleep until late next morning. I did go to sleep and next day made a point of walking on the bridge where Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke. There was supposed to be a plaque with his footprints, commemorating the spot where he stood. Apparently the bridge became damaged during the siege and when they repaired it they did not put the footprints back. Gavrilo has been reclassified from a Yugoslav freedom fighter into a Serbian terrorist and I heard they are even talking about building a monument of the archduke.

Two days of bus travel were about all I could tolerate and I was looking forward to taking the train. There is only one long haul train per day and the platform was quite full. Luckily the train arrived virtually empty and I was able to get a seat. On the platform I met a young couple from Mannyberries in southern Alberta. Small world. The train moved very slowly and the trip to Zagreb took 10 hours. But it did not seem long. It was an old fashioned train with compartments and a corridor. It was possible to stretch out and from time to time go in the corridor, pull the window out and watch the world go by. As we were passing through smaller stations where we did not stop, the stationmaster with a red cap was always outside his office, standing at attention, watching us go by. Traces of the K&K monarchy? Bosnia is now a federation separated into Moslem, Croat and Serb areas. When we arrived at the first Serb station they switched the locomotive for one which stated in Cyrillic that it belongs to the Serb Republic railways. Obviously not a happy federation. Villages close to the border were quite sad. Empty houses, fields lying fallow, some looked like people left several years ago without harvesting and nobody touched them since. Clearly there was a lot of enforced migration.

One more border crossing and I was back in Croatia where I could use the remaining ‘kuna’- the local currency. Zagreb has a very impressive train station and it opens up on a beautiful park with a gallery and rows of art nouveau houses. In front of the station is a huge, underground, modern, upscale shopping center. The city takes on a more baroque signature little bit further away from the station. If you look on a map you will see that Croatia has a rather unwieldy shape, little bit like a croissant. If the coastal part is very Mediterranean, the part around Zagreb is very Mittle Europa. In order to try new things I ordered the local speciality but was rather unimpressed. Sort of a lasagne where the cook forgot couple of essential ingredients. May be an acquired taste. On the other hand, the numerous pastry shops more than made up for this little deficiency. Next morning I walked through a very large fruit and vegetable market and bought a little box of huge, beautiful raspberries. Completely without flavour, I still do not understand why.

The trip to Ljubljana was easy. The train, which starts in Belgrade and goes all the way to Munich, left and arrived on time. The whole trip took only a little bit over three hours and would have been shorter if it had not had to go through another passport control at the Slovenian border. After the border patrol left, the girl in my compartment launched into a long tirade (there was another Croatian woman) and from the fragments of Croatian I could understand, she was complaining about what an arrogant, unfriendly nation the Slovenes are. Slovenia is dramatically different. Even from the train window on instantly notices different standards. Everything is cleaner, better organized and wealthier. The Slovenes, and there are only 2 million of them, managed to create a little Switzerland and during the Yugoslav times paid most of the bills. They were the richest of the 10 new EU countries and they managed all that without great natural wealth, just by hard work. They are clearly proud of what they have done and it would not surprise me if the other ex Yugo nationalities feel they look down on them a little.

Even though Ljubljana does not have as impressive a train station as Zagreb, one needs to walk only about 5 minutes to realize that this town is an absolute jewel. Imagine selecting the best parts of Prague and dropping them into the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. At only a quarter million inhabitants everything is tiny and easily manageable. Very pretty baroque core, filled with restaurants, cafes and shops. But this was the first place I had a hard time finding a place to stay. Had to go to three hotels before finding a free room. It turns out there were several conventions in town, including the World Saxophone Congress with 1000 participants.

Next day I went on a trip to the mountains organized by a local travel company – minivan and 7 other tourists: two from Brazil, two from Ireland, two Americans and one from England. We visited the lake of Bled with its hot springs, hiked down a mountain gorge in the Triglav National Park, visited a cheese museum, tried buckwheat grits and soured milk and had a fresh trout with a bottle of very good Slovenian wine. The reason you may have never heard of Slovenian wine may be that the Slovenes drink 90% of what they produce. Next morning it was Ljubljana airport and three hours later I was back in London.

With little bit more than two weeks left we made the last heroic effort to squeeze out as much as possible from our European stay and headed to Cornwall. We used Penzance as our base – five hours by train from London. We stayed at a small, reasonably priced bed and breakfast and used the local bus system to move around the western part of Cornwall. The local tourist bureau calls it “train-bus-boot” and we did manage to mix bus travel with walking along parts of a superb coastal hiking trail, which follows the entire coast of southwest England. We saw the unusual serpentinites (part of an old oceanic floor) on Lizard Peninsula, visited the artist colony in St. Ives, ate Cornwall pasties (Kumiko had hers stolen by a sea gull directly from her hand and never found another one so good) went down an old tin mine, stood at Land’s End and walked on the beaches. The beaches are fabulous, water is crystal clear and when you see people swimming it looks perfect. That is, until you stick a toe in the water – pretty close to ice cold. Definitely not the Gulf of Mexico temperature. The key to the success of the trip was the weather. Warm, blue sky for the whole five days, something which, we were told by the locals, happens very rarely.

Well and now we are back in London, where 35 degree temperatures are trying to ease our transition to Houston climate. We have ahead of us a week of packing, moving to a hotel for the last 5 days and on the 31 we will be leaving for the U.S.A., one month short of three years in the U.K. If we had a million pounds to spare and could buy a small apartment, it would be a very nice place to live.

I will be cancelling the current internet contract with BT, but hopefully these pages will be left as an “electronic fossil” just as happened with our previous ISP in Houston. It will take a while to get settled in and get a new internet service – consequently, the next update will be at the end of September at the earliest.