Mostar, Bosnia

As we were trying to leave our hotel in Gradac, we got waylaid by the owners for coffee and stilted chats in English. Turns out a lot of their family are living in New Zealand and have been for about 50 odd years - making wine in Auckland. Which proves Joanna's point that no matter where you go, everyone has a New Zealand connection ... well maybe not everywhere, but a lot of places!

And we were back on the open road (with mole and toad - guess which is which), retracing our steps to the Bosnia border. Much simpler process on Mondays than on Sundays and we were waived through with our new insurance papers. The main road to Mostar wasn't at all bad, despite Lonely Planet warnings.

On the way into the town we started noticing lots of buildings had signs like this:

There are still a lot of abandoned buildings that need mine clearance / demolishing so the signs of war haven't been totally eradicated yet. However, at Mostar Bridge it's all shiny, new and very touristy:

It was destroyed in November 1993 during the war and rebuilt in 2005 as a symbol of peace and reconciliation. As we learned in the museum, it was originally built by the Turks in 1566 and UNESCO got them back to rebuild it in 2003/4.

Also rebuilt was this mosque on the east side of the town - the before and after pictures were amazing:


Our route out of Bosnia was not quite as well trodden as the way in. We decided to take a back route to Dubrovnik ... which turned out to be a long way for a short cut. Ben enjoyed the windy, single track road with bonkers Bosnian drivers playing chicken coming the other way. We always lost.

On the way we saw a number of forest fires, some of which the aged fire engines were having difficulty getting to:


Our back route meant we had to disturb a lone Croatian border guard who was very disgruntled at having to leave the shade to deal with us! But we made it safely to our campsite outside Dubrovnik.