All Aboard!!

The train station in pre-war sarajevo, according to local legend, was the chic place to hang and shop. I somehow find that hard to imagine. Let me tell you why. Although the building has been reconstructed after Serbian artillery laid into it for some 1,400 days - it strikes me as a place where KGB agents might sneak up on you and slip a note into your pocket looking for asylum in the west.
I know, I know...the KGB is long gone, but the feeling is not.

Then i turn around and there are dodgy immigrants from Sandzak and Kosovo running shitty coffee bars (and lord knows what else from behind the counter). I step up to the counter to buy my tickets and they are very kind. That, i noticed, wasn't old school Sarajevo.

The clerks were attentive and smiling, did they get laid last night or what?

There was an older grumpy looking woman next to me. I had to wait for her to buy her tickets first, for although she was at the next counter, she had piled her grocery bags so high in front of my counter that there was no way i was going to climb kupus mountain this morning. Kupus is bosnian and serbian and croatian for cabbage. And there was lots of it.

When my turn did finally come i asked for my four tickets. She asked me if we were all traveling together, which seemed a bit obvious to me, but what the hell ya know. She then asked if she could write up all four tickets on one -- which made me happy as a hen, three less peices of paper in the river is always a good deal to me. She could have written them on my hand and i'd been cool with it.

I asked her if the trains were all on time and if everything was 'alright', as i buried my neck into my shoulders. I knew that the the day before the train had skipped the tracks just outside and wound up on the friggin street.

She acted totally oblivious to my concerns and answered 'pa da, sto da ne?' Translation...'well yes, why not?'

Fair enough, the train had certainly been lifted by a corps of massive bosnian men who LOVED working on the railroad. The company, half state and half private, seems semi-defunct, yet i haven't seen that kind of pride in southeastern Europe in quite some time -- unless it was some bad toothed mug of man who had just 'fucked the shit' out of his girlfriends cousin. So the finely dressed men of the railroad, with red caps and little whistles and hand flags stood almost at attention as we boarded the train.

The choice this morning was either a passenger carriage from 1972 Sweden or a later Eastern German version. The Swedish car, even though it was much older, was by far the best bet.

We sat just below the plaque that read ' A gift from the people of Sweden.'

Shit, they could have at least given us a train car that reclined or something. The lights flickered...and made a lot of noise doing so. We thought we might be in for a long ride.

So it was me, Bregje - my Dutch friend who i had met on my way from Lake Titicaca in Peru to La Paz, Bolivia last year. She was as easy-going as they come, and we hit it off on the long busride through the Andes and around the 4,000 meter above sea level lake. Oh yes, also traveling with us was Alex and Carly. Alex is a 1970 baby, former Seminole (he quickly abandoned us for the bulldogs of all things), and a great travel writer. He's also fucking hilarious and constantly sends me into deja vu with his tallahassee boy's sense of humour. His partner, a very cute, very Swedish looking southern bell from North Carolina is a great photographer and cooks a mean lemon cake. So the four of us decided to mingle on down to Mostar to check out the Oriental Mediterrenean jewel. I also had to pick up documents for my court case, but that's sort of irrelevant at the moment. The ride was smooth as we gently made our way down through the heart of the Central Dinaric Alps.

We stopped for a moment in Bradina. There he was, the bright eyed and bushy tailed station attendant. He was dressed in a blue suit, dawned his red had and hand flag and proudly waved us on from the bombed out station. This hole in the wall is only famous for one thing - Ante Pavelic, the fascist Croatian leader who aligned himself with Hilter, was born in this miserable place. No wonder he killed so many thousands. The only place where people got on was in Konjic. It must have been a workcrew or something that boarded, it certainly smelled as such. The ride down through Celebici and Jablanica was similar to that at Bradina. Proud men with barely any teeth waving us on as if Tito himself was watching over them. I liked it, I liked it very much. There they were in these run down, bombed out train stations where nobody got on and they couldn't have been happier. Maybe they still held onto the good ole days when the railroad workers unions were amongst the strongest in Yugoslavia and they enjoyed job security and helped people trek about that once beautiful socialist republic. Whatever is was, their smiles were contagious, and i too felt a slight tinge of their pride as the old swedish train pulled out of each station.

We reached Mostar by 9am. It was a decent morning, much warmer than Sarajevo. This train station had also seen better days. The Serbs bombed the shit out of it, the Croats did the same, and the Muslims do a horrendous job of taking care of what was reconstructed after the bang-bang, or boom-boom stopped. The floors are filthy and its an empty ghost-like place. In the lobby are about a half dozen cafe's, the rent must be cheap because its certainly not an ideal place to sip a nice hot cup of joe. In front we stumble across a memorial fountain for Jerrie Hume. Jerrie, a former royal navy admiral who was with the United Nations High Commission for Refugee's during the seige of Mostar, is single handedly responsible for bringing the conflict to the centre of political attention in 1993. The fountain, built in his honour for 'saving' the city of Mostar, is a black, mildewed, leaking pit now. So much for pride. No doubt we had arrived in Mostar -- the good, the bad, the ugly. Its all here.