In the afternoon of our last day in Sarajevo, fortified by a good lunch and several strong Bosanka Kava (Bosnian coffees), we head back to the square and from there south to Mostar. It gets mountainous once again before the terrain slowly becomes rockier and drier as we slowly enter Herzegovina. Once again, we camp in the mountains with a great view over the city, where we spend an extremely windy night of horror despite the panorama, during which Svenja asks me more than once at what wind speed the camper can fall over…
While in Sarajevo the apparent fusion of cultures is imprinted on the cityscape, in Mostar the internal division of the country into mostly Bosniaks and Croats is obvious. The division of the city along the Neretva river can already be seen from above and today, viewed from close up, the contrast between the spotlessly clean Croatian part and the somewhat dingy and poorer-looking Bosniak part of the old town is almost caricature-like.
One exception is the so-called Sniper Tower, which, in keeping with its name, played an inglorious part in the city’s gruesome history during the sieges of Mostar around 1992-1994 and which today, covered in graffiti, stands out like a memorial from the otherwise rather suburban-looking part of Mostar that surrounds it. The extremely touristy core of the old town around the Old Bridge (Stari Most), on the other hand, is remarkably well-kept. With a little distance from the crowds of tourists (which, admittedly, are still somewhat bearable at this time of the late low season), we overlook the old town from the Minaret of the Koskin-Mehmed Pasha Mosque and also see one of the famous bridge jumpers, who plunge over 24 meters from the Old Bridge into the ice-cold waters of the Neretva river.
By lunchtime, however, we are already somewhat saturated by the abundance of tourists and leave earlier than planned for Trebinje, located in the Republika Srbska, not far from the Montenegrin border. Here we spend the night near a winery, where we spontaneously enjoy a wine tasting with matching Bosnian snacks and talk to the winemaker, who is Serbian himself and has been running the family business for many generations. An extremely interesting conversation!