Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
time to avoid an oncoming truck or acting as if the brakes had failed as we hurtled down a more or less
perpendicular incline at the sort of speed usually experienced only by astronauts, causing Katz and me to try
to sit on each other's laps.
In the afternoon, after many hours of such bouncing excitation, the bus crested the mountains and
began a steep descent into a broad valley of the most inexpressible lushness and beauty. I had never seen
such a charmed and dreamy landscape. At every town and village people would emerge from houses as if
our arrival were a kind of miracle and trot along with the bus, sometimes passing little bags of cherries
through the windows to their friends and the driver and even to Katz and me.
We arrived in Belgrade in the early evening, found by some miracle a cheap and lovely hotel high on a
hill, and dined on a rooftop terrace as we watched the sun sink over the Danube and the lights of the city
twinkle on. We drank many beers and ate the last of our cherries.
It had been a nearly perfect day and I itched to repeat it now. In a strange way, I was looking forward to
the dangers of the mountain road - it was such an exhilarating combination of terror and excitement, like
having a heart attack and enjoying it. The bus laboured through the streets of Split and up into the steep,
cement-coloured mountains at its back. I was disappointed to discover that the roads had been improved in
my long absence - in many places they had been widened and crash barriers had been installed on the
more dangerous bends - and that the driver was not obviously psychotic. He drove with both hands and
kept his eyes on the road.
Clearly any drama I was to find would come from the landscape, though of this there was plenty. Most
people are unaware of the richness and beauty of Yugoslavia's interior. It is as green as England and as
stunningly scenic as Austria, but almost wholly untouristed. Within an hour or two of leaving the baking
coastline, with its teeming resorts and cereal-box hotels, you find yourself descending from the empty
mountains into this lush, lost world of orchards and fields, lakes and woodlands, tidy farmhouses and snug
villages - a corner of Europe lost to time. In the fields people cut and gathered hay by hand, with scythes
and wooden pitchforks, and crossed their fields behind horse-drawn ploughs. In the villages the elderly
women were almost all dressed in black, with scarves around their heads. It was like a picture out of the
distant past.
Seven slow, hot hours after leaving Split we rolled into Sarajevo, capital of the republic of Bosnia-
Hercegovina. I truly was in another world now. There were minarets everywhere and the writing on shops
and street signs was in Cyrillic. Sarajevo is surrounded by steep hills - the 1984 Winter Olympics were held
there - and bisected by a narrow, swift, very straight river, the Miljacka. The street along one side of it,
connecting the new part of town near the bus station with the old town a mile or so away, was the scene of
Sarajevo's most famous incident, the assassination in June 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
I got a room in the Hotel Europa, a dark and faded establishment still clinging to a hint of former grand-
ness. There was no television in the room and only about fourteen watts of illumination with all the lights on,
but the bed looked comfortable enough and the bath, I noted with a sigh of gratitude, issued steaming
water. I had a long soak and, much refreshed, went out to see the town.
Sarajevo was a wonderful surprise, with lots of small parks and leafy squares. In the centre of town is
one of Europe's largest bazaars, a series of alleyways lined with tiny shops selling hand-worked brass and
copperware. But because there are no tourists, there are none of those irksome little gits tugging at your
sleeve and thrusting goods in your face as you find in the more famous bazaars of Istanbul and Tangier.
Here no one paid any attention to me at all.
I took a steep walk up into the hills, where old, sometimes tumbledown houses were packed together in
a dense and picturesque jumble along roughly cobbled streets that were sometimes all but vertical. It was a
strenuous climb - even locals could be seen pausing for breath, a hand against a wall - but the views from
the higher points were memorable and exotic, with the setting sun crowning a skyline of minarets, and the
muezzins' tortured calls to prayer echoing over the rooftops.
I returned to town in time to join the nightly promenade along the main street - the only time, it
appeared, the Yugoslavs get cheerful. I examined restaurant menus along the way and settled on the dining-
room of the Hotel Central, which had much the same faded grandeur of the Europa, like a stately home
inhabited by an impoverished aristocrat. I was the only customer. Yugoslavia was going through a period of
