I try my best in life to steer clear of vanity metrics. For example, I used to track how many books I read each year. I stopped doing that because i) the goal of book reading is quality, not volume and ii) nobody cares how many books I read.
However, a vanity metric I haven’t been able to quit counting is the number of countries I've visited. This is probably because I care about how many countries other people have visited. I don't know why. Maybe it's because my mother is an immigrant. Or because travel is linked to intelligence. Or because most people I've met traveling are friendly. Whatever the reason, if you've visited a lot of countries in your life, I think that's cool. It's hard to be a well-traveled asshole.
This is a long-winded way of explaining why I went to Bosnia last Friday.
Actually, it’s called “Bosnia and Herzegovina,” as the northern part of the country comprises “Bosnia” and the southern part comprises “Herzegovina.” Some quick facts about B&H: it was a member of the communist nation of Yugoslavia from 1945-1992. It declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1992. Bosnia's exit from Yugoslavia sparked the Bosnian War, which lasted from 1992-1995 and resulted in the death of some 100k citizens (including the genocide of thousands of Bosnian Muslims). Today, Bosnia has a slim majority Muslim population (51%), three active presidents, 30% unemployment, and its population has shrunk from 4.1M to 3.9M over the last 10 years. Also, it's one of 6 countries in the world with an "and" in its name.
We chose to visit a country its own citizens are actively leaving because of Annie. Annie is a 20-something Tennessee native who followed the winding road of life into the Croatian tourism industry. We visited Annie's store last Thursday in Dubrovnik with the intention of booking a tour of Montenegro (another ex-Yugoslavian nation due south of Croatia). A travel blog informed me that Montenegro is the "perfect day trip" from Dubrovnik.
Annie decided to pitch us on a trip to Bosnia instead. Her reasoning: "Montenegro looks a lot like Croatia, but Bosnia is very different." My fiancee, whom I had recently urged to be more equivocal in her decision-making, agreed with Annie—even though she had just learned Bosnia was a country one minute earlier (she later called Bosnia "Slavnia" after forgetting its name).
So for the price of 50 euro each, we caught a tour bus at 6:45AM the next day bound for Bosnia. The problems started fairly quickly due to a family of four who had also signed up for the tour. A quick description of this family using derisive nicknames my fiancee gave them:
Ringo (Dad): short, chubby, potentially Jewish
Melania (Mom): eastern European, spiteful
Angelica (Daughter 1): 2-3 years old, immature
Regina (Daughter 2): girl, 4-5 years old, even more immature
At 7AM, Angelica and Regina were screaming, crying, climbing over seats, running up and down the aisle, and generally being as insufferable as little children can be—and Ringo and Melania were uninterested in stopping them (aside from when Melania demanded the bus pull over so Regina could pee). Why Ringo and Melania thought it was a good idea to take their daughters on a day trip to Bosnia, and subject a busload of strangers to their foul behavior, I’ll never know. But it is a decision they would soon regret.
The bus spends an hour picking up tourists all over Dubrovnik, then promptly breaks down from a water leak. After an hour waiting in a hotel parking lot, another bus picks us up and drives us to the Bosnian border, which takes roughly one hour to cross given the 5 other tourist buses in front of us (a byproduct of Croatia’s tourism boom is folks wandering into much less tourist-friendly countries).
Once we cross the border in Neum (the only part of Bosnia that touches the ocean), we have a planned stop at a hotel for 30 minutes. During that time, our tour guide Rosalina—a delicate woman in her mid 30s who's about to have her worst day on the job—informs us that the leaking bus in Dubrovnik is fixed and is coming to take us the rest of the way. An hour later, said bus finally arrives, alleviating the tour company's need to pay for a full day of a replacement bus. We pile on and continue on our merry way to Mostar (with one additional stop so Regina can pee again).
The one-lane highway we traveled through Bosnia was buffeted on either side by rocky fields that gave way to craggy mountains. As we got closer to Mostar—B&H's 5th largest city—the countryside turned into half-finished housing developments and bombed out storefronts and warehouses. As I took in the sights, I realized why Annie said Bosnia looks different than Croatia and Montenegro: it's still struggling to rebuild from a war that ended 28 years ago.
In Mostar, we parked outside a church that featured Mostar's second-most famous landmark: a bell tower constructed in the year 2000. Our new tour guide (not Rosalina, but Rosalina's friend who lives in Mostar) explained to us that the church and tower were built in 1866, then destroyed during WW2, then rebuilt in 1988, then destroyed again 4 years later when Serbians laid siege to Mostar during the Bosnian War. This last piece of information proved contentious, as a local man who had apparently been eavesdropping interjected to say that Muslims had burned down the church and our guide was lying to us. Our guide refuted his statement, and the two debated recent history for a minute or so while I wandered to myself if our guide had paid this man to interrupt to make the tour seem more interesting.
After the church, we walked to Mostar's most famous landmark: a bridge. The bridge was in the same exact location as another bridge built in 1557 when Bosnia & Herzegovina was part of the Ottoman Empire. However, like the church, that bridge was destroyed during the Bosnian War (this time nobody blamed the Muslims). What we were looking at now was a pedestrian bridge built in 2004.
After that, the tour was over.
We ate lunch at a decent falafel spot, walked around the old town (lots of tourist stores selling mass-produced trinkets), and bought a fridge magnet. I chatted with one of the vendors—a guy in his late 20s—about what life was like in Bosnia. He told me the country was better off under communism, and that he was actively trying to leave.
We returned to the bus at 4PM but had to wait an extra 15 minutes for Ringo, Melania, and co.—who returned with seemingly no excuse for their tardiness. Rosalina was visibly agitated. An hour later we reached Kravica Waterfalls—a truly beautiful oasis in the Bosnian countryside where the Trebižat River cascades some 80 feet into a large freshwater pond. After an hour and 15 minutes of swimming and picture taking, we returned to the bus once more for the 2.5 hour trip back to Dubrovnik.
And once again, Ringo, Melania, and the kids were late.
I lingered outside the bus with Rosalina, finishing a beer I had bought at the falls. She asked me if I had spotted the family of four, and I told her I had seen them making (slow) progress up the hill from the waterfall. She said she was considering leaving without them, and claimed she already had multiple conversations with Melania about her family's behavior.
I told her she should leave them, as I also found the family rude and annoying, and rude and annoying people should be taught a lesson, otherwise they'll continue to be rude and annoying. In hindsight, I wish I had made it clear I was joking, and that leaving a family with two small children in rural Bosnia at sunset is a messed up thing to do, regardless of how much you may dislike them.
Maybe her mind was already made up though, because at 6:30PM (roughly 15 minutes after we had been asked to return to the bus) we pulled away from Kravica Falls ... without Ringo, Melania and their kids. The mood on the bus at that moment could best be described as tittillatted disbelief. Sure, we all knew leaving the family behind was wrong—but there was something so very satisfying about seeing a group of people nobody liked receive their comeuppance.
I guess that's why only one person out of the 30+ people on the tour got up and said we should turn around for them. This man, a young South African guy we'll call "Jim," confronted Rosalina twice. But Rosalina stuck to her guns. A few minutes later, she got on the PA and told the bus "I did what I had to do," as if she was trying to justify a crime (which, for all we knew, she was). For most of the day our tour group hadn't been very talkative. But now, thanks to the shared experience abandoning four innocent human beings in a foreign land, the tour bus was abuzz in conversation, and as the sun faded behind the Bosnian mountains, it started to feel like the day wasn't a total waste.
But that feeling would soon pass.
Past 8PM, we pull back into the hotel in Neum—just minutes from the Croatian border. It's here that Rosalina—seemingly chastened from her behavior back at the waterfall— informed us that we'd need to wait for the family she discarded at the waterfall to catch up to us in a cab. This struck me as tremendously disappointing, mostly because I had taken Rosalina for a take-no-prisoners kind of gal who would readily abandon you in Bosnia if you disrespected her. Instead, she had cow-towed to the demands of her employer, who I assume told her it's not okay to abandon small children just because you're in a vengeful mood (which is never a mood a tour guide should be in).
After an hour of waiting, the cab with Ringo, Melania and the kids reached the hotel. We half expected a blowup between Melania and Rosalina, but both parties—perhaps tuckered out from a day of poor decisions—just meekly piled on the bus. Even Angelica and Regina fell asleep.
I wish that was the end of it, but it wasn't. After a full-day of waiting around longer than expected, we waited around longer than expected at the Croatian border. This time the culprit was Jim, who had issues with his visa. In the context of a day gone completely wrong, I think it's poetic that the one guy who said we shouldn't leave people behind in Bosnia...was left behind in Bosnia. We spent the last 45 minutes of the tour listening to the sound of his girlfriend's muffled tears.
When we signed up for the tour, it said we'd be home by 6PM. At midnight, we finally reached Dubrovnik. Rosalina got on the PA one last time to apologize, claiming this was the "worst" tour she'd ever conducted, before mercifully letting us off the bus—some 17 hours after we initially got on.
In my unapproved Google Review of the tour, I gave the tour company 2 stars because the day provided real entertainment value in the form of the ongoing feud between Rosalina and the family. However, if the highlight of your tour of a foreign country is your guide taking retribution against an annoying family with a severe case of main character syndrome, something has probably gone terribly wrong.
All that being said, I now get to add Bosnia to the list of countries I've visited. And while that's completely meaningless, the experience of visiting Bosnia wasn't. It's something I'll remember for quite some time, and that's as good a reason as any to keep exploring.