The Minefield

"Stick to the path or you will die. And you'll kill others."

The minefield in the forested hills is dense—about ten mines per square metre. We gingerly follow the leader along the snaking cleared path. I have never seen a more perfect conga line.

Ivan is a veteran of the siege of Sarajevo. A stocky and innocuous-looking father in his forties, he today runs a hostel in a 300-year-old house near the eclectic and lively Ottoman centre with its quaint cafes and wooden-shuttered shops. But he also takes his young guests on tours of the frontlines of the 1992-1995 blockade. He is keen to educate them; most are hardly older than the siege itself.

Earlier, Ivan picked me up at the East Sarajevo bus station, a cheerless place inside a fenced parking lot. He greeted me gruffly and lugged my backpack out of the foyer as I felt sullen eyes follow us out. The bus station is disconnected from the main Sarajevo bus depot by the division of the city between the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic, and it was not until we crossed the administrative line back into the Federation in his rattling Volkswagen that he relaxed.

"I'm not comfortable there," he said. "Those people know me."

Ivan was one of the civilians who armed themselves and established a frontline in the surrounding mountains to protect the city from the Serb Army when it shelled the population. In those days he alternated fighting with collecting wood for his family for the bitterly cold winters.

In these lush, silent mountains once popular with hikers, scores of plastic mines still exist, invisible to metal detectors. Clearing them is expensive and time-consuming. We walk the tightrope behind Ivan through the eerie wooded minefield that separated the two-kilometre-long frontlines. After a hushed few minutes we reach the other side and look back. The Bosniaks and Serbs were barely fifty metres apart.

Ivan had been stunned at how neighbours who spoke the same language suddenly hated each other over religion. He never saw it until the war. Since then the division has been even greater.

"To be a patriot is stupid," he tells us. "They all died in the first few months. I fought for my wife, my child, my sister, my mother. I fought for those who loved me."

He turns to the tour group with an earnest expression. They are his son's age. "If ever there is a problem in your country, just take your passport and leave," he says. "I made a mistake. I didn't think war would actually happen in Bosnia."

Ória storm

I had just finished lunch in a cafe in a grotto in Ória.  I wasn't planning to stop in Ória, but on my way to Ostuni I was enticed by the picturesque castle on the hill (and overpaid for a short and lame €5 tour in Italian of a pristinely drab restoration featuring replica chain mail and cloth hats).  But the cafe in the cave at the bottom of the hill was curious and atmospheric with its low, rocky ceiling and dim lighting.  A humourless waiter took my order and brought my food with solemn service, stooping in the cave like Igor serving his master.

I finished quickly.  Stopping in Ória had put me behind schedule, so I had to get moving.  I paid the bill and Igor crept away with my empty plates, silhouetted against the glass of the cafe door.  As he climbed the steps out of the grotto—crash!—a heavy, Gothic thunderstorm struck.  He stole a glance of crazed glee at me over his hunched shoulder and scurried around the corner.  Trapped!

The delta of narrow stone lanes scoring the hillside spilled torrents of water.  A new inland sea separated me from my car as I sheltered in the cave.  I waited for the storm to abate, but the thunder indicated other intentions, so at last I cast open the grotto door and fled out into the maelstrom.  I was instantly soaked to the skin.  Trying to keep my balance on the slippery marble paving, leaping channels and fording straits, I reached my car and dived in.

On the other side of the windshield some dark blobs with smeary lights drifted through a grey haze of pelting rain.  I pressed the car forward.  Driving in Italy is always a bit cat-and-mouse in dodgem cars, even when the visibility is good, and intersections are typically a case of picking your way around the other cars that are already in it.  But I missed a stop sign as I entered this intersection and one of the blobs was suddenly upon me.  I slammed the brakes and hydroplaned to a stop within inches of a prang.  Italian drivers have a reputation of being insolent, or at least reckless, but the stereotype of Italian passions compared to Anglo stoicism is not borne out in Salentine traffic.  The drivers in Salento are very courteous.  As I sheepishly reversed out of his right of way, the other driver nonchalantly waved thanks to me for not actually hitting him.

Montenegrin pljeskavica

Montenegro is cheap.  I spent a fortune in Italy.  Although Montenegro is de facto in the euro zone, its economy is not tied to the other euro zone nations; it simply adopted the euro unilaterally.  This goes a small way to explaining why a half litre of beer in Montenegro costs €1.20 and three or four times that in Italy.

At a bar in Bar, I ordered an omelette.  I just got off the ferry from Bari, Italy, and wanted some breakfast while waiting for the train to Podgorica.  The waiter indicated in Serbian that they had no eggs.  I really only ordered it because the word for omelette is omlet, one of only two words on the menu I could understand.  Since the other was hamburger, I ordered that.  He indicated they had no hamburgers.  Off to a rollicking start, this breakfast.  He recommended pljeskavica instead.  "What's pljeskavica?" I asked, and he rattled off something in Serbian and made a shape with his hands.  I shrugged and said, "okay."  I was just hungry.  When travelling, it makes things a lot easier to eat adventurously, and I'm not by nature a fussy eater.  I was ready to try whatever Montenegrin cuisine had to throw at me.

The waiter brought me my pljeskavica.  It was a hamburger.

Locked out

A man in a uniform tapped me on the shoulder.  "Are you still waiting?" he said, and pointed to the carousel.  "All the luggage is out."

I can't say I was surprised.  I rerouted my luggage in Istanbul so it would arrive in Sydney.  The delay of my whitewater rafting trip meant I had to fly from Sarajevo, Bosnia, to rendezvous with my Istanbul flight.  The Sarajevo to Istanbul leg was not included in my original itinerary, so my luggage had to be retagged for Sydney.  It was my oversight—I should have explained this when I checked in in Bosnia—but I thought I resolved it when I spoke to the Turkish Airlines flight transfer desk in Istanbul.  After all, both flights were with Turkish Air.

"Sir, you have two options," said the bloke at the transfer desk.  "You can go out passport control"—he gestured to a deep and wide drove of bodies being herded through the barrier ropes like cattle at a feedlot—"collect your luggage from the carousel and check it onto your next flight...."

"Or?" I interrupted, already deciding on option number two.

"Or I can do it for you."

These are my options?  Do I also have the choice to get my own meals on the plane?  "So, you'll go out and collect my luggage, which is right now on the conveyor belt, and put it on the plane for me?"

"Yes sir.  I'll take care of it myself."

"That's it?  Great!" I said, pleased with this efficiency.  "Teşekkür ederim!"


When I recounted this story to the lady at the lost baggage counter in Sydney, she said: "Don't believe them."  She looked up lost baggage in Istanbul and, sure enough, my backpack was still there, I imagine circulating alone on a carousel in a deserted terminal.  "It should get here in 48 hours."


All of this was really just a minor nuisance.  After all, I was home.  Except that when I got home, I realised my house keys were in my backpack.


@#$!

Stand by...

What a shock to the system it is to return to "the real world" after seven weeks on the road.  The Monster of Banality assaulted me with laundry, groceries and bills, and in the few frail moments of my escape I was trapped by the inexorable Tentacles of Television.  This leaves me with still outstanding stories for this blog, including whitewater rafting, tendonitis, and navigating live minefields.

Stay tuned.

Injury

I have had the most excruciating ache in my arm for the last two days, enough to keep me awake at night.  I don’t normally take painkillers for headaches and such, but I’ve been popping Panadol to get some relief and attempt to sleep.  The first night they didn’t seem to work, but I suppose without any Panadol at all it would have been worse.  The only other time I was ever kept awake by pain is when I broke my wrist.

How did I do this?  By holding my phone.  In my room in Lecce I had to hold it against the wall to get a Wi-Fi signal, and I did emails and blogs and bookings for 45 minutes in that position.  It is bizarre and ridiculous.  It didn’t seem like anything at the time, but that’s what isolated pilates on one underused forearm muscle can do.  I’ve been in agony.

And this just days before whitewater rafting.

Delayed broadcast

I have a few more brief stories to tell, but I’m currently in Montenegro preparing to go camping and whitewater rafting for three days.  Following this I make a lightning trip to Sarajevo to catch a flight to Istanbul (the rafting was delayed so I have to forgo Macedonia, Bulgaria, and even my Turkish hammam, damn it), and then I catch my flight home.  I’ll round out the trip blog with all those stories (and whatever the rafting holds), but these will likely be after I get back to Sydney on August 8th.

Galatina

Galatina’s Basilica di Santa Caterina has the most vivid frescoes I’ve ever seen, and for this fact alone I can’t understand why the town doesn’t draw more people.  I went back twice to see them all.  Galatina is a pleasant little town in its own right, but perhaps there just isn’t enough to keep tourists occupied.  It is certainly quiet.  So quiet, in fact, that between the hours of 12.30pm and 4.30pm it is actually closed. 

I wandered within the small boundary of the old town for hours and found no one but a few stragglers.  I was completely puzzled.  I asked the guy at the hotel about it and he told me this is the region’s four-to-five-hour-long siesta.  “It’s too hot to stay open,” he said.  I think it was about 28°C.

These hours are when I’m at my most mobile, exploring places I am passing through, but all the small towns of Salento close.  Even the restaurants!  I don’t know how people eat.  Apparently they sleep.  And when, starving, I find a place miraculously open at 3pm, they say lunch is over and they’re no longer serving food.

That night in Galatina I ate at one of the best restaurants on the entire trip – not because of the standard of the food, but because of the experience.  I saw the sign for La Tana del Lupo in an alley near my hotel earlier in the day.  When dinner time came, then, I walked straight in through the door and almost turned over tables, plates and guests.  There were exactly four tables, one free, in a living room.  There was a kitchen two paces away, I think there was a broom closet with a toilet in it, and that was it.  There wasn’t even room for a menu.  I sat down and the waiter (who is the cook’s husband) brought me bottled water and a stoppered bottle of rosé and asked me if I was very hungry or just a little.  That’s the choice: apart from this, you get what you’re given.  Which is wonderful southern Italian home cooking.

The living room had a vaulted ceiling, and the walls were filled with family photos, bottles of wine, pewter jugs, dried chilis, paintings, and shelves of curios and ornaments.  Two families somehow fit at two of the other tables, and there was a solo bloke behind me in the corner.  The animated husband moved between the tables and spoke to the diners, regaling everyone with funny stories (I assume, since everyone was laughing).  He spoke a little broken English with me and I a little broken Italian with him, and then plates came: cold antipasto (pickled onions, zucchini and eggplant in olive oil, soft cheese), then hot antipasto (fritters of vegetables and a bacon-flavoured egg frittata), then handmade pasta shells in broccoli sauce (scuisito!), then veal meatballs in tomato sauce, and beef in jus.  Dessert is watermelon, and then for aperitif I’m offered coffee or limoncello.  I ask for the limoncello and am given a half-full corked glass bottle from the freezer of the bright yellow liquid, thick and alcoholic, and a shot glass.  It would be all but impossible, especially after a litre of wine, but I could have sat and finished it if I wanted to.  And all this for a flat €25.  AND as I walked out the husband gave me a bottle of wine!

The Gallipoli landing

I went back to my car and discovered another parking ticket. This, while other cars are parked over kerbs, on footpaths, across railroad tracks, and in shopfront windows. I don't own a car for reasons such as this.  The train or the bus is mindless and stress-free. I’m going to make these tickets go away by ignoring them.

An old man past the age of retirement, who wrought what meaning he could from the remainder of his life by monitoring other people's parking, sat on a stoop in front of my ticketed car, waiting for me.  He told me in Italian that there’s no parking here.  “Si,” I drew out, mildly exasperated at the obviousness of the fact.  The parking is in the port, he said.  “Yes, I know, I know,” I said in English.  You have to move your car, he said.  “Look,” I said to non-understanding ears.  “I’ve been ticketed.  What do you want?  For the carabinieri to take me out and shoot me?”  You’ll get two tickets, he said.  I looked at him.  “Lei è polizia, si?  No!  So don’t bother me!”  I wasn’t at all in the mood.  Old prick.

Parking in Gallipoli is horrendous.  Parking in shop windows and up chimneys requires a resident’s pass, and though copious free parking is provided at the port outside the island of the old city, inserting an entire car into a spot there is performing delicate keyhole surgery with a battering ram.  Further out there are more car parks.  These are also packed.  You can find more full ones if you look, and if you keep going you can park in Lecce 20km away and walk back.

Gallipoli, Italy

Italy has a Gallipoli as well, on the west coast of Puglia, and just as many Italians flock there in high season as Aussies do its Turkish namesake on Anzac Day.  Arriving here in summer with no reservation is foolhardy, but I’ve done that everywhere for this entire trip and I’ve always been able to find something. 

The bloke at the tourist information centre (who speaks no English) says it could be a problem when I tell him I'm looking for a room. He rings around and after about five minutes a stout bloke with a waddle (who speaks no English) arrives. He leads me through the winding streets to a mini-market selling vegetables and paper towels and cans of tomatoes. I’m sleeping among the produce? He passes me off to his wife who emerges from behind the cash register (and who speaks no English).  She's a friendly lady but she rattles off long Italian sentences and looks at me expectantly, despite my having just answered her previous long Italian sentence with “no capisco, no parlo Italiano”. She plucks from the shelf a bottle of water and a package of sheets (they sell sheets?) and, smiling, leads me out again through the winding streets.

Eventually I'm taken to a clean and decent room with its own entrance up a flight of steps.  She makes the bed with the new sheets and gives me the bottle of water, all the time persisting with her rambling Italian. I recognise a word or two—“Street! Door! Key! Yes!”—and then we look at each other and say, “err….”  This goes on until I am exhausted.

“Thank you, shut up and goodbye!” I say and throw her down the stairs.