Emerging from the train station in Mostar is a pretty humbling experience as the sun shines down on the glossy newly painted buildings standing right alongside buildings that are still bombed out and vacant even ten years later.
Sarajevo has some spectacularly pretty areas of town and much of the war damage has been repaired. Mostar is different though; the rebuilding process has taken longer. The stark differences between the war-torn past and the peaceful present is visible in the jux ta position between the pristine modern buildings and the crumbling …

A gentle summer breeze, a cool, water-misting fan and one creamy ice cream cone or ice-cold beer is all it takes to fit in throughout the Western Balkan States. The sidewalk café culture is alive and rampant in Bosnia and the locals and tourist alike spend hours people-watching or being people-watched.
The social activity in the late afternoon and early evenings is a surprisingly huge part of the Balkan culture; even in Croatia the café culture is prominent and towns come alive around 6pm as couples, friends, and even singletons …

I love Bosnia. Completely and with the whole of my heart this country is just a gem. With the help of my couch surfing host it didn’t take long to see the charm of Sarajevo. I’m rarely a fan of capital cities…not often my style. But, after reaching Furkan’s flat he offered up some refreshing home-made Turkish tea (he brings it back from his visits home because he loves it so much!) and then his roomies and whole gang of us headed to the city center to explore.
A sticky situation …

The whirring sounds and motion of the overnight train to Bosnia did little to cover the noise of constant intrusions into my train compartment; I was doing a late night border crossing into Bosnia from Croatia and the customs officers have absolutely no mercy. The officer who came through the train on the Croatia side to check my passports and issue an exit stamp was as unsmiling and humorless as so many of the other Croats I’ve met. I hate to make a generalization about the Croats, but while the …

Having Jenn join us for this leg of the trip has really given me a bit of perspective about the months spent traveling in developing world. For me, after five months of backpacking I really lost track of the delineation between my developing world experiences and life back home in the states.
Jenn though had no such confusion when she arrived with shiny-clean clothes and a backpack that smelled distinctly better than mine (what is that funk!?!). Jenn knew two things about herself when deciding to join a leg of …

Plitvice Lakes National Park  is one of those places that absolutely and totally lives up to it’s hype – it is stunning. Just. stunning.
The Croatia Lonely Planet has a picture of the UNESCO World Heritage listed Plitvice Lakes National Park as one of the main images and reasons to go to Croatia – and the picture was spectacular enough for me to add this country and national park onto my RTW route.
The bus from Krka dropped us off in the middle of dense and verdant forest – what a change …

Umm…can we pull over for a sec? I have to go to the bathroom…
That auspicious start to a 20 kilometer round trip bike ride then turned into a little personal torment by the presence of my old friend from the developing world, travelers’ diarrhea. We visited Krka, Croatia yesterday and noticed that the only other thing you can possibly do to pass time in Skradin is biking out to, Bribirska Glavica, a site with really old archeological ruins that sits up on a 300 meter high plateau. That sounded great …

I woke up to a spectacularly sunny day with huge puffy white clouds in the sky- it looked  like it was going to be perfect weather for a hike through the Krka National Park. I am one of those freaky earlier risers lately–my internal clock is set to 7:00am precisely (it was set to 5:30 in Nepal which pissed Helen off to no end…but we didn’t have any window curtains, so what could I do?). Anyway, while Helen and Jenn continued sleeping I decided to get in …