This is one of the few legs on our current trip that can be done by train.

We knew, courtesy of The Man in Seat 61, that you could buy train tickets from Sarajevo to Mostar online, but you had to collect the actual tickets at the station before you travel.

So we did the online booking. Almost immediately we were informed that our electronic payment had been returned. Strange, we thought, but maybe it's a bit like a hotel booking: They test out the card, but don't deduct the money until there's actually a bill to pay.

When we arrived in Sarajevo, one of our first priorities was to collect our tickets from the railway station (very close to both the bus station and our flat).



We sauntered up to the ticket window. The woman on duty seemed very surprised that we wanted to collect tickets for a journey that was still five days away, but set about locating our booking for us. And our online reservation, it seemed, involved TONS of paper...

First, a big book of slips, from which ours had to be extricated. And second, a closely-written sheet of paper, ram-jam full of dates and names and reference numbers. The lead traveller has to proffer a passport, and insert a signature into the trellis-trails of tiny writing already covering the sheet. And that, apparently, is it...

At this point, we were expecting to hand over money (being as how our electronic payment had been rejected and all...). But the tickets were proffered, without any additional request for payment. We stood there, thinking, "As far as we know, we've not paid for these..." But the woman definitely regarded the process as terminated. Seeing us standing there, she stretched her arms out, as if to say, "Why are you still here?" And so we ambled off, bemused.

The website says that you need a seat reservation, which comes with the ticket, and adds that most people just pick the seat they want anyway. Our ticket had no sign of a seat reservation. So that confused us too.

Yesterday morning, however, nothing could have been easier. In the foggy cold of pre-sunrise (the train leaves at 0715), we walked the short distance from the flat to the railway station. The train was already at the platform, and we just had to wait a few minutes for the doors to be opened. People sat where they wanted (if you're travelling from Sarajevo to Mostar, it's advisable to sit on the left).

So nice to be on a big, roomy train...


The ticket collector came round shortly after departure. There were no problems. We settled back to enjoy our breakfast sandwiches and the scenery.

And the two-hour journey is an extraordinarily beautiful ride. Really difficult to take pictures, though. First, the windows were dirty (when are they not?). Second, it was foggy for quite a long time this morning. And third, there are lots of tunnels (and even when you emerge from the tunnels, the change in temperature makes your window steam up temporarily).

Still, well impressive... Frost coated the ground and the trees. We travelled high up in huge valleys, with banks of haze beneath us, protruding from which were little fields, and mosques, and houses with smoking chimneys. We wound back on ourselves in massive loops. Then there was an enormous river, with big cliffs, which we followed all the way to Mostar.

Below is the best we could do in terms of photos:







Our host picked us up from the station, a very kind gesture on his part. On the way to the flat (a small studio on the fourth floor of a narrow apartment building), he mentioned casually that the Bosniak (Muslim) community mostly lives on one side of the river, its Croat equivalent (Christian) on the other.

A reminder that Mostar "remains a de facto divided city, with Bosniaks and Croats coexisting rather than living together"...

It was Croat forces who, in November 1993, brought down the famous bridge over the Neretva, the "Old Bridge", which had stood since the 16th century, and was regarded as a treasure of Ottoman architecture.

Ironically, the destruction of the bridge marked a turning-point. Soon afterwards, the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) and the Bosnian Army (consisting of Bosniaks) decided to join forces to fight the Bosnian Serbs...

The bridge was reopened in July 2004, after years of reconstruction work.






Mostar has the dubious distinction of being the worst-damaged city in the country as a result of the conflicts of the early 1990s: "In the early days of the war, from April 1992, the Bosnian Serbs attacked the city first. Croats and Bosniaks joined forces and responded, forcing the Serbs to direct their troops to other fronts. In September 1992, the Croat-led HVO started its attack on the eastern part of the city, populated mostly by Bosniaks. Several prison camps were set up where Bosniak men and boys were held. Some 100,000 shells were fired at the city until March 1994, when the so-called Washington Treaty was signed and a truce was made between the HVO and the Bosnian Army, uniting them in the fight against Bosnian Serb forces."






I hadn't realized that Mostar also has a rep for street art:




In all, there are plenty of interesting things here, and they kept us happily occupied over the course of yesterday and today. We have also moved (temporarily, at least) from winter to spring. It has been plenty warm enough to sit outside to drink coffee, and we've shed a few of the freezing-Sarajevo layers:











It's extraordinary how different each of these four Bosnian stops has been...