Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
always dreamed might be yours. The French philosopher Voltaire once said: “Man is free
at the moment he wishes to be.”
Fraser would be gone for four years, a far greater length of time than my own adventure,
but he wasn't running away. I knew that. He was committing instead to that great and open
road of self-discovery. Sadly, so many of us live behind the mask of “Everything's fine,”
and we never get to ask the question, “What if?” What if I followed my dream? What if I
learned to play the violin? What if I started rowing on the weekends? What if I traveled the
world on a motorbike with only kindness to carry me? I knew Fraser would find that the
road was not an easy one, but the one thing it did promise was the ability for us to accept
our own fates. It showed us that we would never have to ask, “What if?”
I drove out of Zagreb and headed toward Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
It was only a five-hour drive, but Kindness One was beginning to act up for the first time
since that breakdown in Chicago—less than five thousand miles and yet so many memor-
ies ago. The bike would trick me into a false sense of security, moving along nicely, only
to conk out in the middle of a cliffside road. Not terrifying at all, I tell you. The five-hour
drive turned into a ten-hour one, and I still had seventy-five miles to go as the sun set across
the Bosnian countryside. It took me a number of gas stations before I found someone will-
ing to offer me shelter for the night, a young couple who kindly loaned me their couch and
some much-needed rest.
The next morning, I finally arrived in Sarajevo, which was described by one of the locals
as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.” I soon understood why. Mosques, churches, and syn-
agogues all live side by side, just as they have for centuries.
It was in Sarajevo that I met a Bosnian named Edis. Though I had decided that most
of my journey would be free of tourist attractions, choosing instead to get to know a city
through its people rather than its museums and castles, Sarajevo's rich history had always
fascinated me. As in many of the cities I had already wandered, walking through Sara-
jevo's cobbled streets connected me to a past that seemed to rise up from the boulevards,
calling out from the stone walls and towering trees of eras gone by. History had come to
life. Though Sarajevo will always be linked to the dreadful wars of the 1990s—especially
the siege that strangled the city from 1992 to 1995—it is also the city where the Archduke
Franz Ferdinand was assassinated along with his wife in 1914, lighting the fuse of World
War I. The city's history runs through it like lightning, leaving the air taut as the most recent
memories still try to settle.
