Driving to Mostar

On Saturday we all woke up early and gathered into a bus with our History professor, Amer Dardagan, to go to Mostar. I’ll explain more about Mostar in the actual Mostar post, but until then, I have to share the way there, because it was so beautiful.

It was hard to get pictures because I had a window seat on a bus, but we started off the morning with a cloudy, cold drive out of Sarajevo itself.

Once we left Sarajevo and Bosnia (the country is split in geographic terminology between “Bosnia” and “Hercegovina.” Technically I haven’t left the Bosnia part yet, and Mostar is located in Hercegovina.

Anyway, the mountains started getting larger, the sky bluer, and the grass greener, and all signs of the city soon vanished.

The drive there, perhaps, was even more beautiful. Once you leave Sarajevo and begin to follow the Neretva (which at points is so wide it looks like a lake rather than the river it really is), framed on all sides with lush mountains, and the sedimentary colors of your vision go from candy teal to lush green to dark grey rock to snow-tipped peaks to the blue and white sky, all dotted (of course) with boats and houses and patches of wildflowers in all manner of bright, intractable colors…

Halfway there we stopped at a place to have coffee, and it was stunning. The water is naturally this blue.

Naturally we stopped for photos, and though Merima didn’t want one, I got a few anyway.

And then Arnela jumped in.

Before I had my turn.

And then the scenery had a turn, too, and stole the show.

After breakfast (for me, a cappuccino), Arnela and I used the bridge for more pictures. The first ones on my camera of Arnela looked like this:

And the first one of me looked like this.

But we remedied that.

We headed back on the road until we reached Mostar, which was perhaps more beautiful.

A teaser from that trip:

In better news, I got my hard drive back, so I couldn’t be happier!

Until tomorrow,

-Kris ❤