TRAVELING THROUGH THE BALKANS LAST WEEK

And now for something completely different. . . 

Back last night from 16 days in the Balkans — Croatia (called Hrvatska by the Croatians, the hrv pronounced with a guttural growl, like the French “r”) Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia. My wife and I began by driving counter-clockwise for a week from Dubrovnik up through Mostar and Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina to Zagreb in Croatia, then down to Rijeka on the Dalmatian Coast and along the winding coastline to Zadar, Split and back to Dubrovnik, where we joined a bus tour (consisting of a lively mix of Aussies and Americans) back the other way for 9 days, up the coast to Split, then stopping at several small towns along the way, up to Bled in Slovenia for a couple of nights, then ending in Zagreb for a couple of days with a stop enroute in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia.

During the driving portion, my wife made several professional calls on Croatian medical clinics. She found the facilities thoroughly up-to-date and medical staff to be competent and well-informed/trained. The roads throughout the region were well-paved and signed; in several instances there were long stretches of 4-lane toll roads comparable to what you might expect in Europe or the U.S.. Through the car rental company we secured a Garmin GPS system, which proved to be somewhat unreliable (on one occasion insisting that we drive through the peatonal town square) but seemed to know every back road and goat trail on or off the map. It also tended to list two very separate locations under the exact same address, so we were guided to a location in the suburbs of Zagreb once, when our Hotel Dubrovnik was smack dab in the center of the city. (Best to have a detailed map handy to double check Garmin’s directions.)

Dubrovnik, we found, was uncomfortably overrun by tourist groups from cruise ships, but the remaining cities exhibited a reasonable balance between tourists and locals. Split, a large working port north of Dubrovnik, offers, perhaps, the most interesting sights from an architectural point of view, featuring Diocletian’s palace, built around 300 AD by the only Roman emperor with the good sense to retire before being overthrown and/or assassinated , according to our local guide. In addition, like several towns we visited along the Dalmatian Coast, Split displayed a marvelous broad promenade along the shore dotted with the ubiquitous outdoor cafes and restaurants we found everywhere along our route. People watching seems to be a major pastime, and from a male point of view, with good reason: the women are uniformly tall, often quite beautiful, slender and fashionably dressed. The men, not so much. Dubrovnik’s main attraction is its walled mediaeval city, including a 14th century Franciscan monastery housing one of the four oldest pharmacies in Europe, all remarkably well preserved and restored, despite ruthless shelling by the Serbs during the 1991-1995 war.

The signs of the war are most visible in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with many bullet-pocked buildings and the occasional house blown apart by tank or artillery shells visible from the road. Very few towns were spared some sort of military engagement during the war, which is still fresh in the minds of the older population some 17 years later, according to our local guides, although you’d be hard-pressed to know it from the tranquility and tourist-friendly demeanor of the region now. We felt entirely comfortable and safe, day and night, during all our travels. Bosnia-Herzegovina is clearly Muslim, with mosques and their minarets sprinkled liberally throughout the countryside. That was the only region in which we encountered Cyrillic road signs. The rest of the region is strongly  Roman Catholic, although active church membership seems to have eroded considerably in recent years.  

Of the six countries constituting the former Yugoslavia, the three we visited clearly understand that tourism is their main industry, and have adapted their infrastructure to accommodate it, with the aforementioned excellent roads, and an abundance of good hotels and ubiquitous B&Bs, restaurants, cafes, souvenir shops, restored mediaeval buildings, churches, cathedrals and museums (including the quirky Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb). All the hotels we stayed at provided free Internet wireless services, most of them in-room. Plenty of ATM machines are available to obtain the local currency (euros in Slovenia, Kuna in Croatia and convertible marks (KM) in B-H).  Like the Levant, the Balkans have been repeatedly conquered and occupied, in this case by the Slavs, Greeks, Romans, Venetians, Austrians, French, Germans, Italians and Hungarians. Each civilization has left its cultural and architectural traces for the delight of photographers.

Being a war history buff, I was particularly moved to stand on the corner by the bridge in Sarajevo where Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his Duchess, to set off World War I. I had previously seen the convertible car in Vienna in which the Archduke and Duchess had been traveling, with a bullet hole in the right side (Princips was a notoriously bad shot.) There’s a museum commemorating the event right across from the bridge, regrettably closed the Sunday we were there.

Bled, a spa town by a lake in northern Slovenia, seemed straight out of Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain,” with an impressive mediaeval castle on a hilltop overlooking the lake, a large church on a very small island in the middle of the lake, and many hotel/ spas dedicated to healthful rest and restoration. Single-oar boats ply the waters for tourists. Split, Zagreb and Ljubljana, in particular, had large swathes of the center of town open only to peatonal traffic, making it very pleasant to stroll through the local markets, sidewalk cafes, narrow shop-lined streets and historic buildings. The Austrians have set up a phenomenal, modern spa at Zadar, the ultra-modern Falkensteiner Hotel and Spa, which I would recommend to anyone traveling along the Dalmatian Coast. Cost was around 200 euros a night with breakfast, gourmet dinner and a massage thrown in. The caves at Postojna are not to be missed, comparable in size to Carlsbad in New Mexico. An electric train ride to the bowels of the earth remind one of a Disneyland experience.

The food was unremarkable, with the exception of seafood, which as you might expect from towns bordering the Adriatic, was exceptionally fresh and varied -- fish served whole, dead eyes remonstrating as you fillet the corpse with needle-like bones ready to exact revenge on the unwary. Beef, veal, pork and chicken dishes were mediocre — often very dry if breaded; vegetables soggily over-boiled. Sumptuous hotel breakfast buffets satisfied varied ethnic palates, including Asians, well represented by many groups of Japanese, Koreans and Chinese. Pizza shops are everywhere, featuring thin-crust pizza with a wide assortment of toppings with prices ranging from about the equivalent of 7 to 10 dollars. Lots of gelato stands with a scoop costing about a dollar-and-a-quarter. Prices in general were quite reasonable.

In terms of modernity, Slovenia, a member of the EU, was the most developed of the three, followed by Croatia, and, in turn, by Bosnia-Herzegovina. Overall, it was a very pleasant, worthwhile experience in a region which since the war has dedicated considerable resources to the tourist trade.