Back in the summer of 2019, I went on some 10-day trip to Dubrovnik, Croatia. There's about 300 things I could write on....regarding this trip, but the key 'adventure' was this 15-hour trip arranged with a local tour bus deal (note: I went by myself, the wife didn't care for the deal).
The trip was basically built around seeing the landscape of Croatia, crossing the border into Kosovo, spending an hour around Apparition Hill/Medjugorje, then going down some 15-degree inclined hill to reach Mostar, and then walking around a half-civilized-half-warlike Mostar. It was one of those five-star adventures that you kinda fall into.
First, the tour bus was marginally qualified as 'safe'. It was a no-name brand, and you generally lifted up in the air about three inches each time you hit a pot-hole.
The tour-guide lady had some thick accent....so whatever came out during the tour....was about 50-percent understood.
About two hours into this adventure, we got to the 2-mile Bosnia border (along the port area). On entry, you had to show a passport. You drove two miles, to reach Croatian border, where you showed the passport again.
About an hour after this, we ended up at Medjugorje. It has some status...basically going back to 1981. Six kids had walked up to some hillside, and then came back to swear they'd seen Mary (of Jesus-fame). She'd appeared as a apparition (ghost figure).
It took around 15 years, but eventually in the 1990s....this whole thing (Apparition Hill) had become some tourist hot-spot for Catholics to come to and spend time in hopes of seeing or feeling the apparition.
Thousands drive in each day, and the whole town is focused on apparition tourism (the Catholics hate this term).
I asked if anyone else besides the six juveniles had ever seen anything.....'no' was mostly the answer you got.
This ate up an hour, and I sipped through a Pepsi because of the dry heat for the day. Seeing any apparitions? Well....no. I did feel something but it was probably from the lack of shock absorbers on the bus than anything else.
Then we proceed on. The description of the roads to Mostar? Well....I would have marked all the speed limits to 45 mph at best, but I'm guessing the bus driver was easily doing 65 mph. On my scale pot-hole intensity....this road (R424) was a '8'.
How best to describe Mostar? Well....prior to the 1993/1994 war period....it was a tourist 'hot-spot'. After the war, it's safe to say that about every single building in the town had bullet-holes....some more than others.
The driver dumped us at some central point, and the tour-lady led us to the shopping 'zone' (mostly cheapo gift items that were mostly made in China). I separated from the group, and did a two-hour walk.
The bridge business? Well, that's what 99-percent of tourists come to Mostar to see, but it's just not as big as you'd kinda expect.
At the end of the walk....I stopped at some local grill and had a fantastic plate of beef and fries (double your normal portion), with two local beers....all for about $6.
I came back to the bus point thirty minutes early and sat at a bench. Across from me....sat some 12-story apartment building. I sat for a few minutes and counted bullet-holes (probably 300 noted up to the 5th floor, and then I just stopped counting).
Our group assembled and then we drove like some bat-outta-hell through some marginal roads, and then hit several towns with no-name potential (all having a Jesus-statue somewhere in the mix).
Somewhere around 9 PM, we finally got back to Dubrovnik. Easily ranked as one of the ten most worthless day-trips of my life.....I easily fell asleep that night and filed around twenty photos of the trip without any real notes. What you can generally say from the day's journey....there seems to be just an awful lot of fairly religious people in this region, and they seem to spend a lot of time discussing religious matters.
I would easily rank this like a weekend trip to Demopolis, Alabama and eating at a local bar-and-grill, with a dozen dogs sleeping around the picnic table out front.
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