Day 18 -- Mostar, Herzegovina

Charlotte: Today we made a day trip to Mostar (pronounced MOW-star) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Security at the border was more lax than what I thought. Basically a BiH boarder officer loaded our bus and checked the passports of only a few people and hardly glanced and others and then we were free to enter the country and did not even have to show passports upon reentry of Croatia.

Once in Mostar we had a tour guide show us the city. We saw the street that was front line in the war in 1993, saw the famous bridge that was destroyed during the war and later rebuilt, visited a traditional Bosniak mosque, and saw an authentic Turkish house. We were then given free time to explore the city and do some shopping in the beautiful cultural markets.

Colin: Mostar is still a divided city in many respects. After the initial assault in Croatia by the Serbian controlled Yugoslav Army in 1991 wound down and a stalemate ensued, the Yugoslav Army moved into BiH to "protect" the rights of ethnic Serbs living there, and helped them to establish the semi-autonomous "Republika Srpska" (pronounced Serb-skuh) which was opposed by an ethnic Croat and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) alliance. This alliance broke down and fighting broke out between these groups over who would control the remainder of BiH. Mostar, a traditionally Croat & Bosniak multi-ethnic city, was one of the centers of this fighting which lasted a year. The current city government is a Croat-Muslim coalition that is held together by a combination of EU and UN support and pressure. This apparently is true of much of BiH which we found has a currency, the Convertible Mark (abbreviated KM), that is fixed at 2-to-1 to the Euro (based on the 2002 exchange rate between the German Mark and the Euro before their adoption of the Euro), making it artificially stronger than the Croatian Kuna (abbreviated Kn), which is a free-floating currency. This meant that some of the savvy shoppers in our group were able to get some very good deals when negotiating prices between U.S. dollars, Euros, Kuna and KM since many of the merchants in the local bazaar took all four in exchange!