A Train Too Far

SARAJEVO: Another day, another post. Hopefully I'll finish this one. We started the day in Mostar and then hopped onto a train at 7:50. The train station in Mostar is perhaps the most dilapidated I have ever seen. Only three or four trains pass through it every day. When we emerged on the wrong platform a station offical directed us to the correct one. When we tried to walk back down the stairs the correct way he dismissed us with: "Just walk across the tracks, it's okay." I mean this train station is so useless that, in a town that was so utterly devastated by the Balkan conflicts neither the Serbs, Croats or Muslims saw any point in blowing it up.

The train itself comes highly recommended in the LP. It starts out winding along beside an emerald river, dramatic, semi-barren hills threatening to dwarf it on either side. Every so often you pass a mixture of semi-rustic houses, abandoned cars, bombed out buildings and entire abandoned towns that really give some meaning to the term ethnic cleansing.

Rising towards the snow capped mountains in the distance, the train then winds it way up, around and through various mountains towards the capital. The villages grow ever more rural while occasionally the train thunders across a viaduct and all the ground seems to disappear from beneath you. Farmers tend to their work, while various animals graze in their fields. We even saw a cow skinned, trussed up and being gutted by a group of men in a field. The whole thing seems like an impoverished Switzerland. (Not that I've ever visited!)

Finally a vast, impromptu second hand car market, various abandoned factories and the endless procession of bullet marked buildings and bombed in rooves signals your arrival in Sarajevo. And after all that, the train station is almost as bad as the one in Mostar.