Balkan Trip Part 3 — Solo in the Balkans
This part has a high proportion of historical/political/opinion elements compared to ‘what I did’ elements. If you want a funner post, skip to Part 4.
After dropping Rachel at the bus station I started off on my own. My only constraint was that I had to be in Munich, 600 kilometers away, in seven days. How do I get there? Go north. Contrary to Rachel’s methodical trip planning, my strategy was a little… looser. I had nothing planned.
I was able to have this nonchalant attitude because I’m Canadian, and therefore my passport is a golden ticket. I didn’t realize what an incredible gift my passport was until I moved to Kosovo. I promise I’ll never again take for granted the travel liberties I have as a Canadian.
I say this because Kosovo has virtually no travel rights. A Kosovo passport has the same strength as one from North Korea. For Kosovars, being tethered to their country is saddening-ly isolating, and something I didn’t appreciate before having friends living with this reality. Because Canada doesn’t have adjacent countries to travel to (other then the trump-y one obviously), I would venture an easy guess that most Canadians don’t appreciate how incredible their passport is. I know I didn’t.
In Europe you are always at most a four hour drive from a national border, which means the liberty to travel among countries freely is super important. But Kosovo citizens cannot travel to the EU, or most other countries, without a visa. The criteria to get a visa varies by country and trip motivation, but standard elements needed for a visa are proof of employment in Kosovo, an invitation from someone within the country, and a visit to the local embassy of the country you wish to travel. The approval process confirming these requirements is a mountain of paperwork that will probably require birth certificates, police checks, financial record checks, and more. Not to mention the potential six months waitlist for an appointment at an embassy. If I was from Kosovo this trip would be impossible. I don’t have a job, I don’t have someone inviting me to each country, and I decided to go about a week in advance.
For Kosovars, this geographical constraint sucks so bad. The only countries they can travel to without a visa are Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Imagine that you’re living in Cape Breton and you can only travel within the maritimes, less you commit to months of planning and applications. Want to go to a swim meet in Montreal next spring? Better start filing paperwork now. Want to take a road trip to New York? Good luck in succeeding with each separate application for each state you will pass through.
However, I’m Canadian, so I can travel without a care in the world, and I wanted to travel to Bosnia. Chris traveled the Balkans last spring and strongly suggested a specific hostel in Mostar. I took the suggestion and found my way to the Madjas Hostel. I gotta say, thank you Chris, because Madjas Hostel exceeded my expectations.
Bosnia was devastated by the wars of the 90’s. The whole Balkan region is heavily defined by that decade, but Bosnia in particular was ravaged. Bosnia is in the centre of Balkan countries and was a mixing pot of many ethnicities. These circumstances meant they had some of the longest, brutalist fighting during the war. The scars from the fighting are visibly apparent amongst many of the buildings, and invisibly lingering among all of it’s people.
My destination, the Majdas Hostel, is run by a muslim Bosnian family. What’s unique about this hostel is that it’s the family’s way of coping with the aftermath of the war. Running their hostel and telling their story over and over to travellers is their therapy. It helps them come to terms with what happened to their city.
The main guy who started the hostel is a cool dude named Batta. He runs a tour for travellers — backpackers as he says in his heavy Bosnian accent — every day out of the hostel. The tour is 10 hours long and consists of historical context, political insight, and personal stories. The personal parts of it are particularly powerful. For Batta, as he mentioned several times during the tour, telling his story over and over again day after day is his form of therapy. He’s done the tour everyday, 8 months of the year, for 11 years.
This hostel was the best quick travelling experience I’ve had for a connection with someone from a region. I had to remind myself how much your impressions of a country hinge on only a couple personal interactions. I’ll have a strong impression of Bosnians for a long time because of Batta and his family. In my mind I’ve extended his positive impression to all Bosnians, which shows the importance that a handful of personal encounters can have.
Batta’s tour, although very thorough in some aspects, only gave the Bosnian side of the story. In the Balkans it’s particularly important to always get both sides of the story. I caught him a few times when he said something wrong or misleading, but most of his exaggerations or inaccuracies were minor things, which can be forgiven under the license of personal and patriotic pride.
There are a lot of parallels between Kosovo and Bosnia. Both conflicts involved similar tactics of fear and culture expulsion. In both conflicts a major player was the Serb Nationalists — however in Bosnia the Serbs won and in Kosovo the Serbs lost. And both conflicts had NATO interventions, although in Bosnia it took a lot longer.
Something that I’m particularly interested in that Batta touched upon is the current problems and sentiments in Bosnia. As he expressed his personal grievances, I noticed that many Bosnians’ concerns are shared by other Balkan states. Issues like corruption of government officials and gridlock caused by patchwork democracy (different political and voting rights for different ethnic groups). Another prominent feeling I got from several Bosnians, and something I’ve heard in many Balkan countries, is that things aren’t getting better. Many people I’ve met in Kosovo and Bosnia feel that life was far better during Yugoslav times. They are quick to point out that Yugoslavia wasn’t communist but rather socialist, and that it was non-aligned, holding out against both the USSR and the USA.
To summarize Batta’s tour: Bosnia used to be grey, and now it’s black and white. What I mean by this is that for centuries, Bosnia had many mixed ethnic marriages, however now they are rare. In Bosnia, ethnicity and religion used to be weakly correlated, but now one implies the other. Similarly, there used to be a heavy geographic overlap of ethnic groups — the war changed that.
Batta had an idealist perspective of the past. In his opinion, Bosnia was everyone just doing their thing, living in harmony, deciding how they wanted to live. Batta explained that since the war, the Bosnian people have been divided into three groups. The groups are isolated, homogenous, and in competition with each other. This new division means that if you are Serbian you can now only be Orthodox, if you are Croat you can only be Catholic. It means Bosnian Muslims only live here, Serbs live here, and so on. In this new narrative everyone has to fit into a box, and there are only a couple boxes to choose from. Each box has its set of religious, political, geographical, and ethnic traits. Even if you don’t want to be placed in a box, you’ve got to pick one.
Politically, when circumstances arise where a population is susceptible to division, it’s an incredible opportunity for the people in power. The people who define the boxes you will have to jump into have the power to shape how people view themselves and their peers. Indeed this is the basis of modern political strategy: you define the issue to divide the populous, and then pick and promote the side you believe will be advantageous. However, I’d never seen this strong an example of the human consequences when this strategy is pushed to it’s limits, and the issues are ethnic, geographical, and religious. The only other country I’ve experienced this at such an extreme is Kosovo. Note another similarity between the two.
Below is a personal point, so you can skip to the three star page break if you want travel stuff.
While traveling through a second country struggling so deeply with the Us/Them mindset, something became clear to me, and it started to unnerve me. The first apparent observation is that people like to put each other in boxes. You, the reader, the traveler, the educated observer, like it because it’s easy to understand and easy to digest. If I had told you that “in Mostar, Muslims live on one side of the river and the Catholics on the other”, you would memorize that fact and accepted it as true, happily moving on and considering yourself ‘better-informed’. False dichotomies are very appealing from an intellectual perspective, and it’s incredibly hard to fight against their temptation.
Ignorant well intentioned foreigners aren’t the sole victims of this temptation. The appealing simplification extends to the intimate players in the field of grey. It takes effort not to use the boxes given to you. And in Bosnia, the population has mostly succumbed to using the boxes provided. Once you accept the boxes the world starts looking awfully black and white, and it gets harder and harder to see all the grey for what it once was. Furthermore, once you put yourself in a box, you naturally take the shape of that box, regardless of who you were before.
Bosnia taught me that people who had been living together for a very long time are still susceptible to being divided. The exact thing that unnerved me was the realization of how little energy it takes to divide people compared to how much energy it takes to bring them back together. This asymmetry is what I realized and what made me feel uncomfortable. It’s so easy to divide compared with how hard it is unite.
This realization has changed how I watch news and politics. When I see someone using a dividing strategy all I can think of is, “Don’t you realize how hard it’s going to be to put that back together once you’ve broken it?”. Divisive propaganda is laughably easy, and as far as I can tell the only way to fight it is through a lot of human interactions which take a lot of time, effort, and are comparably very slow. I’ll touch this idea again with specific Kosovo examples in a future post, but man, it’s troublesome how our temptation to segregate can be so easily manipulated.
Enough preaching. After Mostar I bussed to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Sarajevo is famous for withstanding a siege of Serbian forces for over three years, from 1992 to 1995.
As crude as it is, what I’m looking for when I visit a place which has been through war is bullet holes. It’s cliche, but if there are bullet holes then there has undeniably been fighting. It’s been 20 years since the war and in Sarajevo every second building has pockmarks.
The other thing that struck me in Sarajevo was walking by a graveyard where every single tombstone had the same year: 1992. I haven’t visited military cemeteries before — and in Europe there are plenty to choose from — but seeing every single tombstone in the graveyard with the same date got me. Not only did it make the history more human and serious but it made everything feel recent. I was alive in 1992 when all the people in that graveyard were killed.
I only had an afternoon in Sarajevo. I went to a museum, read at a cafe, went to the bridge where ww1 started, ate supper, and then departed on an overnight bus to Zagreb, Croatia. I found Sarajevo sometimes funky, somewhat heavy, and somehow elusive. I liked it.
At 10pm I got on my bus to return to Croatia. My plan for Zagreb was hazy — as in, I had no plan. At 4am on the bus, in a moment of groggy initiative, I decided I should go to Plitvice Lakes National Park. This meant another bus at 7am (after arriving at 6), and deferring sorting out a hostel until the evening. I left my backpack at baggage storage and departed for another two hour bus ride.
Entering the park at 9:30am, my state was slightly compromised. I’d slept maybe 2 hours in the pervious 48, I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and the shoes I was wearing were of the lowest of quality (i.e. falling apart). I was not in the ideal capacity to tackle a national park. But the fresh air and flowing water gave me energy. Looking at the map stationed at the park entrance, I decided to tackle the 4+ hour hiking trail. Who needs boots, water, food, and sleep to do a hike?
I took off through the beginning of the park, which was a boardwalk along the lakes and waterfalls. This part, being close to the entrance, was full of people. Although the scenery was beautiful the place felt too… accessible. But I didn’t come to dwell on the people around me; I came to see waterfalls. I circled around the lakes, taking pictures of the water and cliffs and enjoying myself. After about an hour, I started getting hungry. My plan of tackling the four hour loop seemed in jeopardy as I still hadn’t even found the beginning of my trail. More then an hour passed and still no trail, still more hungry, still waterfalls. I started to think that maybe I wasn’t in good enough shape to take on this hike. However, I was in Europe, which means that you are never too far away from civilization even when within a national park. Just as my thirst started to override my hunger, I walked around a bend and there was a restaurant.
Plitvice Lakes park is the biggest in Croatia, and has 1.2 million visitors per year. The boardwalks are crammed as people meander up the gorge. I was looking forward to getting on an actual trail with less people. When I started the trail (which was not easy to find because it actually starts a little out of the park) I realized soon enough that there weren’t only going to be less people, there were going to be no people! Of the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people walking around the boardwalks, how many decided to take the easiest, shortest hiking trail? Only five! During my three hour hike which was beautiful, well marked, and serene, I came across four people. From all the people cramming the boardwalk only five took the hiking trail? What? Com’on Europe. Anyways, it was super nice to be isolated in the woods for an hour.
Finishing my personal hiking trail I re-integrated with the sauntering columns of photographers. I snapped a couple pictures of my own as I navigated back to the park entrance. The trail through the woods was not nearly as exceptional as the waterfalls, but I liked it more. Europe has too many people I’ve decided.
At 4pm I bussed back to my bag in Zagreb and then decided to skip Zagreb all together. I got a bus to Ljubljana, Slovenia, arriving at midnight. At midnight I wandering into the city, found a hostel, and got in bed for the first time in what seemed like forever.
My stay in Ljubljana was brief: only one day and two nights. Ljubljana is a beautiful city and I wouldn’t have minded staying longer. I went to some museums, saw the castle, and meet some people at a couchsurfing meet up. The next day I took the train to Salszburg.
My day in Salzburg was much the same as Ljubljana. My stay was so short I could’t really do much other than see the sights. I was also getting close to the end of my trip, so I was tired and conscious that my Oktoberfest was tomorrow. I decided to play my day pretty low key, so I spent most of the time thinking about the journey I had just taken — from Kosovo up to Austria.
Thinking about my trip thus far, there were two things that I couldn’t get out of my mind. For the entire trip as I got farther north everything got nicer: the houses improved in quality, the architecture was better, the traffic less chaotic, and the streets less dirty. It was a steady gradient from poor to rich. There weren’t harsh jumps of wealth but instead it was a smooth-ish transition as I moved north from Kosovo. The two questions I couldn’t get out of my head were, “why is the north (Germany) rich and Kosovo poor?”, and “why is there a smooth transition from poor to rich?”.
Everyone has answers to these questions, and I’ll venture a guess I know most of them to a degree. One easy explanation is that I’d been approaching the heart of industrial Europe. But at the end of my trip — at the end of physically transversing this economic progression — none of the standard answers seemed satisfying. I won’t go into details on my train of thought because Part 3 is already out of hand, but my main contemplation was, “is it a couple big reasons? Or a thousand little ones?”. Anyway, next time we have a beer together we can talk about it.
On Friday morning I departed for Munich to visit the industrious peoples of Bavaria. Germany has enthusiastically optimized everything they can think of, including how much beer you can drink in one sitting. And that process is explained in Part 4: Oktoberfest.