A huge day. Up at 4.00am to catch the one and only 5.30am hi speed catamaran from Vela Luka to return to Split to pick up our rental car to drive the 6 hour journey to Sarajevo, Bosnia - the host of the 1984 Olympic Games. We travelled through some beautiful countryside that climbed several thousand meters above sea level. Among this beauty, we saw several destroyed houses in villages on the way to Sarajevo.
Other than main highways, no roads have yet been plotted for GPS systems which makes navigation interesting. I would recommend to anyone travelling the app - Citymaps2go. Any country can be chosen drilled down to region/city/etc. then downloaded and saved on the iPhone or iPad. Once downloaded, no Internet connection is required. So with this piece of technology in hand we got lost. We couldn't find any street names. I showed a person the electronic map and as he was working out where to go a person from a shop came out to help followed by another. It turns out the second man was friends with Benjamin who is the son of the people who look after the apartment and the person we had to contact. He rang Benjamin who quickly came so we could follow him to the apartment.
Zeljka, Benjamin's mother also came then proceeded to walk with us around town to show where to eat, shop for groceries and where the bank was as we needed to change our currency to Denar. They lent us their mobile should we need to contact them, insisted on being our tour guide tomorrow and invited us to their weekender still under construction on Sunday. They also organized a neighbour to run a cable from their apartment to ours so we had television. Zeljka and her family lived in Australia during the Bosnian war so can speak English fairly well.
A friend, Vesna organized our stay in Sarajevo as her mother owns the apartment and has very kindly let us stay here. Three weeks before we left on our trip we had dinner with Vesna and her husband Franjo. They told us of some experiences they had during the war such as the mortar bombs that hit their unit, knocking down walls and almost totally destroying it. Vesna escaped by a split second from being possibly killed due to a mortar exploding where she just stood. Franjo also told us that groups of people were always a target for the snipers. He said you would never want to be the third person in a group as snipers would generally miss the first person running, focus better on the second and usually always hit the third.
I'm looking forward to seeing more of the city tomorrow with the aide of Benjamin.
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