I´m sitting in a pub, it´s 11:30 pm, I am here in Sevilla Spain for the same reason that all the other tourists are here...to see the grand Christian monument that is the Sevilla cathedral. I´ll be there soon enough, for now, I am trying to beat the midnight heat with a little drink and some tapas that come at only 1,50 Euros. It´s quite a deal. Tapas are these mini kind of sampler dishes that basically put together whatever the chef feels like putting on the menu that day. For a lesson on Spanish cuisine, check out another blog, or ask me if you really actually do want to know. What I am struck with, more than anything, is the irony of what my senses presently are taking in. American music, and therefore English music, pipes out of the bar´s speakers at a rather catchy volume, I am ordering whatever tapa sounds like a cool name because I don´t speak an ounce of Spanish and the bar tender certainly speaks even less English. So far I´ve been lucky. My head is buried in a book called ¨The British Empire¨ by Nial Ferguson who is going to great lengths to demostrate the many precarious ways in which it just so happened to turn out that the lingua franca of the world ended up being english. And then I here the clop clop of yet another horse drawn carriage whisk by. The lighting in the bar is reminiscent of an old tavern travellers pub which this place could very easily be on some of the trading roads I´ve been riding my bike along the ancient trade roads that linked the Moors empire between Cordoba, Granada, and Malaga. And that´s where I find my imagination taken back to...even amidst the reality that I am sitting in a pub, sipping on a drink, probably made in England or China thanks to the effects of globalization, listening to modern day American pop that my bar tender hums along to without knowing what any of it means...hearing the trot of horses that take the wealthiest visitors from the cathedral who probably not too long earlier arrived by airplane...all the while as I read a book written by a modern day scholar (perhaps even British but he could be American!) intent on disiminating the knowledge required to tell future generations why it is that I am listening to this music at midnight in a pub a block away from the largest Christian cathedral in the world. It is as ridiculous as are the flying butresses that jet out of the Cordoba cathedral! Take one of the largest mosques in the old world and convert it into a cathedral. You wont fool too many. Somehow the mezquita stand or is supposed to stand somehow triumphant as the gem of the Christian reconquest of the 15th century when the Moors were pushed further South and eventually off of the Iberian peninsula. Such is the history of Spain, of Empires, of defending and invading, of a world we have still not shaken.
Recent Posts
July 03, 2007
July 24, 2006
The Tinder Box
Finally…it’s Done…welcome to…the Balkans
...
The Gun that started the 20th Century
A Tinder Box Land of Contradictions: Religion, Genocide, and Inexplicable Beauty July 2006
Bu-dapest --> Ljublja-na (slo-venia) --> Zag-reb (croa-tia) --> Sp-lit --> Sara-jevo (Bos-nia/Her-zegovina) --> Bel-grade (Ser-bia/Mont-enegro)
Again...assume I am not retarded...the hyphens are a computer glitch
Inching away from our “Let’s Go” guide book map of Western Eu-rope—a 
zoomed out deficient map whose scale is about as deficient as the Harvard Students who created it (no joke)—Faizel and I have finally found ourselves staring down the throat of the Balkan region from a little gem town that has now become the capital of a country: Lju-bljana, Slo-venia.
The Balkans have been given many names throughout the last century; the “powder keg”, or the “tinder box”, were among some of its first as historians tried desperately to write its history during the peaceful interlude that preceded the Second World War. It started to gain such caricatures as it became famously known as the place which sparked the First World War and a constant boon to Eu-rope as it was known for its volatility. It was here that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro Hungarian or, the Habsburg throne, was assassinated by Serbian nationalists. 
This action led to Aus-tria’s declaration of war on Ser-bia, which in turn led to the “Great War” or as it is now known, the First World War. Part of the dwindling Hapsburg Empire and part of the remnants of the Otto-man Empire, the Balkans sent soldiers to the battle field front lines representing a multiplicity of ethic races and languages. Who could tell, then, the tumultuous events that this region would suffer through towards the end of that same century? Perhaps none, perhaps many depending on whose version of history you want to read. Radovan Karadzic, president of the illegitimate Bos-nian Se-rb Republic had once told a group of journalists, "Serbs and Muslims are like cats and dogs. They cannot live together in peace. It is impossible." This statement appeared almost a self fulfilling prophecy by the last decade of that century. The Balkans are as much a region of contradictions now as they were during the long reign of President Tito. The Former Yugo-slav (Southern Slavs) Republic is made up of what today are considered six separate countries and regions. We await the fate of Kosovo which is still considered part of Serbia but pressing for its independence. For a Great introduction to the War link to this site http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Genocide/bosnia_genocide.htm
1) Slo-venia-->capital city Lju-bljana.
2) Croa-tia-->capital city Za-greb
3) Bos-nia/Her-zegovina-->capital city Sara-jevo 
4) Ser-bia-->capital city Bel-grade
5) Ma-cedonia-->capital city Skop-je
6) and…as of just this past month…Monte-negro-->capital city Pod-gorica
SLO-VENIA
L
ju-bljana, the capital of Slo-venia is a wealthy little town nestled into a prosperous small country that is already part of the EU. It is preparing now to incorporate the Euro as its national currency next year. We barely had time to drop by the little city but felt we needed to see it as it was so close to our route anyways. Besides, who’s been to Slovenia before? Honouring our vow (well actually it was Faizel’s vow, what attachment he had with this place I still didn’t know as we rolled in) to visit the city was rewarded in kind. Not since Scandinavia had we seen mountains; so…to our utter surprise…when we ploughed into a hedge row of mountain ranges—their version of the Alps—it threw us for quite a surprise. They were not massive mountains by any stretch but they were rocks jutting out of the ground that were taller than a hundred feet…something the hills of Hungary, and other surrounding countries struggle to do.
Having arrived late in the town, as it was almost dark now, we decided to eat something near the town square before finding a place to sleep. Dazed and confused and practically falling off the bike we were promptly startled when we saw two white shirted black badge wearing Mormon missionaries strolling through the town square on their way home. Who knew Mormons had Slo-venia anywhere near their proselyting map. It was admittedly refreshing for us, and I think them too, to speak our North American dialect (English!) for a change…To have the opportunity to talk to two fellow North Americans, after having for such a long time been forced to speak a broken half simplified English dialect that any traveler to these regions quickly acquires, is like finding a ripe peach bearing tree in the middle of a sandy dessert after having eaten nothing in the blistering sun all day except for eggs fried up for you by Bedouins. (I actually know what this feels like!!) Phrases like "you have not to do this” or “you will stay for the next two days ago”, all said in a variety of accents, start to become part of your own broken vocabulary before you know it. I wouldn’t say that English, per se, is the universal language of the world but rather an extremely entertaining always evolving hybrid referred to as English, is the Fran`ca lingo of the World and the EU today. As I write this very moment, two Spanish travelers are painstakingly trying to say the word train station in English to a Slovenian receptionist who has his own difficulties with the language and the accent. Both are using grand arm gestures and both fall back on sound affects when all else fails. Without a great deal of patience they both would have given up on the endeavor of understanding one another but incredibly, in just a few moments they understand one another perfectly even though both of their extremely thick accents would be difficult for any native English speaker to comprehend. More on this language called English a little later.
For now, we had arrived in the capital, found some native English speakers and were more than well pleased to hear of their first hand experiences in the country of Slo-venia. The missionaries tell us that there is a service in the morning at ten but we are in grubs and have little that is Sunday “appropriate” to wear. Faizel has not been to a Khana for months, well since he left home I guess and I have only been to a proper church once since I left. A white twenty something Christian and a brown twenty something Muslim riding on a motorcycle through Eastern Orthodox countryside always brings us a few interrogating stares. We find that we have much in common though and have no problem sharing religious perspectives and insights. Maybe it’s the so-called Canadian in us that sees no contradictions or problems in living different faiths harmoniously or maybe it’s just the fact that we’re both tolerant people with or without the teachings of our faiths. In any case, our trip through the Balkans was about to shake our faith in humanity more than our faith in religion. With Faizel and I, there is, at least, always religion to talk about at the end of the long days of riding.
These discussions would take a back seat, however, as we tried to digest the horrors of the mass graves that dotted the countryside as we made our way through towns like Mostar on route to Sara`jevo and finally Srebrenica. The tragic flaw of man’s inhumanity towards man seems to always be able to surface itself with the excuses and elements of what separates us, this can be skin colour, this can be race, and this can be religion. Here, in the torn Balkan region we found white skinned blue eyed nominal Christians who massacred white skinned blue eyed Muslims. So it was definitely more than skin colour that made for the fractious divide.
The missionaries invite us to the service in the morning and explain in detail the route to the “pub” so we don’t get lost. Eu-ropean cities were built as mazes centuries ago so that one day in the future their economies would flourish and be fueled primarily by tourists who would come visit and spend millions of dollars on ice cream and Fanta orange as they spent hours and hours lost, trying to find their way out of the hedgerows of twisting apartment blocks and oxidized green church roofs. We speak a little to the attendant before we go to bed and learn about life in the former Yugo`slav Republic under Tito. This was the place to be if you had to live behind the Iron curtain apparently. Yugo`slavians were able to visit Trieste (Ita`ly) and purchase all the western clothing they could afford. Tito, a WWII general for the Nazi resistance army and larger than life hero had a unique relationship with Mos`cow and Washing`ton as he was always able to play the two superpowers against one another for the betterment of the Yugo`slavian people. In so doing he managed to secure the Yugo`slav union some sort of autonomy and thus acquire it some special privileges that all other USSR puppet states were forbidden. Slovenia saw a minimal amount of violence from the war with only a matter of 64 deaths; it was not a place that interested Slobodan Milosevic as it had hardly any ethnic minority Serbs.
We attend the Sunday service and are surprised to be fitted with translation headphones as soon as we walk in. The translator is surprisingly good and we can tell after having just spent two months using the services of the EU translators in the Parliament, Commission, Council of Eu-rope etc…. There are all of maybe 60-70 people in the service and they meet atop a pub in, considering the circumstances, a rather pleasant little hall. We meet a Quebecer missionary at the end of the service and so have a refreshing opportunity to speak a little French again.
CROA-TIA
If you have ever driven a car up the side of a cliff it won’t take all that vivid of an imagination to picture the same route attempt but on a bike. You feel that much closer with the edge of the cliff so running the corners at 50 and 60 km’s an hour starts to feel like you are making deals with the devil to keep your life. His elixir is adrenaline and there is plenty to be had on this route. After having pushed the open highway to limits that I dared not push further, this was a welcome change. Back on the motorway that connects Sarajevo to the Croatian coastline, I started to take a little more time to smell the sea water air as I drove when 170km/h was starting to feel slow. Honestly, it’s not that fast when German and Swedish cars (Audis, Saabs, BMWs, Mercedes, and the like) are passing you at 230 and 240km/h. This is what they are used to on the Autobahn so you can’t blame them for doing what their cars allow. My BMW boxer engine pushed 195km/h only once, full throttled and getting a little shaky and fishtaily at those speeds, I decided to bring it down for a cool off. You must know your motorcycle’s limits before you can feel like you control it. The wag in the back end gave me some hesitation though so 140-150 km/h it was for the remainder of the open highway. It can do that quite comfortably believe it or not…Germany ingenuity!
Getting back to the cliff though…, it’s only on a bike that you get to feel like you’re about to go over the edge without actually doing it. We are on a switch back rocky cut line route, through the Dalmatian coast’s mountain range that juts its way down most of the Croatian Coastline on the Adriatic Sea. We wanted to try a slightly less frequented route to get to Sara`jevo and were amply rewarded for our decision. The photos don’t do it justice but I can only promise that they never do. It was a perfect introduction to a country still attempting to recover itself from the ravages of war. We left the stunning beaches of Croatia 
and on the same day we rolled into Mostar; a city which saw some of the worst ethnic fighting in the 1992-1996 war that ravaged this region. A river divides two religious cultures here and it would be the defining line that demarcated a battle zone separating Catholic Croats on the West and Bosnian Muslims on the East during the later part of the war. They actually fought side by side against the Serbs before the Croats turned on the Muslims or so a local tells us...it's hard to judge which version of history is accurate around here. Here is an account of the city about 6 years back… http://www.stoessel.ch/bosnia/mostar.htm things have changed quite a bit since then. We can now cross the bridge without incident. 
Before we got to this town we had to pass through a border crossing which experience spoke volumes of the current situation in the country. If you have ever been through a mountain top border crossing you know of what I speak. Hardly the makings of what one imagines a border to look like will be found at such a crossing. Try instead to picture a pole that drapes across the road which can only be negotiated by the massive border guards they recruit for these far out enclaves. This pole is blue, but I think they come in red and white as well, depending on the country and the cheapness of the paint. We pull up and two border guards jump out of their chairs to check our documents. I think they haven’t seen two travelers like this…ever. One is a woman, the other a man. The woman cannot be older than her late twenties and the man perhaps the same age. The woman is thick boned, thick jawed and has a disturbing grin that says “I could break your little tooth pick wrists if I wanted to you punk”. The man is more interested in the bike and so takes a few minutes to admire it, his fascination knows no bounds. He does not know how the paperwork is supposed to look and asks for the green paper, a sort of Eu-ropean registration that is supposed to be universal but clearly is not. He cannot read English or speak it but cannot find the plate number on the paper. It is not supposed to be there but he continues to say that this is a “bheeg phkrobleem”, “bheeg bheeg phkrobleem”. You have to make a sort of Russian German guttural rolling “r” sound if you want to sound those words out. He insists that it is his colleague that is more strict than he and it is her who will not allow us to pass the blue gate. I decide to test my luck and ask to take a photo instead. The glare I receive from the woman after motioning for a photo is enough to force me back onto my bike in a haphazard hurried and awkward manner, tale between legs and unsure of my manhood and abilities to ride this monster. “Other barckdar croasceane chu tree hundred kilometers”. That was supposed to tell us that there was another border crossing 20 or 30 kms down a side of the mountain we were supposed to go to in the first place. We figure he wants us trek back to the major border crossing along the Southern tip of this mountain. “Bheeg mahane bochrkder” (big main border) and he is now waiving with his arms and fingers profusely so we take it as our gesture to get the hell outta dodge and find another way into the country. Clearly this one will not work so we boot it up the road to look for something else. The GPS shows us already in the country of Bos-nia Her-zegovina and once again we are pretty sure the coordinates the city planners submitted to this GPS Company are quite out of sync with the reality of this far out terrain and region. According to most of the Yugo`slavian portion of the trip we have been driving either through oceans, lakes, or solid rock mountains. Up the road we find another mountain border crossing not ten minutes from the first one and decide to try our luck here instead. It is the same blue bar but this time it is completely up and stuck there not moving and not having looked as though it had been moved since the beginning of these guards shift. Pulling out the passports and papers for the bike and getting ready to explain a long story about German documents and the rest we slow down to a sluggish drift as we approach the guards. Two men glance their heads to the right and then up for a moment; their arms are folded and their long legs fully extended. They are crossed in a “you don’t actually think I’m about to stand up for you” fashion. We continue to drift at an even slower pace, not quite sure what to expect or what is going on but if I am to continue any slower the bike will fall over. It seems now for certain that these guards are definitely not going to get up. Hmmm…this is weird. We can think of only one possibility; we must be at a Croatian exiting border. We roll passed the guards trying not to look too surprised and even pull over a few meters down for a second…pretending like we want to buy a drink, in case they come running after us after they saw the back of the plate. Nothing happens, in fact the only thing they felt they needed to turn their heads leftwards as we gently rolled by was to get a better look at the bike. Quickly coming to my senses I change my mind and decide to drive through to the Bosnian/Herze-govina and not buy a drink. After having driven a few miles we start to think that perhaps we are in Bos-nia/Herze-govina after all when we start to see definite signs that we could indeed be in no other country. The license plates are different, the signs, and house styles to. We have to stop to consult with one another making sure what just happened actually…happened. One border and we get sent away because we didn’t bring proper documents. Another border 5 miles down the road and they don’t bother getting up to even ask us where we’re from. We were supposed to have some sort of permit that is impossible to get, and only the big border crossing gives them out if you want to bring your bike into Bos-nia Herze-govina. But at the second crossing…no papers, no guards stopping us, nothing. We were in Bos-nia/Herze-govina just like that. Border consistency here is not what gives the EU confidence in these brand new countries. In time though, these things improve, typically hand in hand with an improving economy and a reduced amount of corruption coming from the leadership of a country.
BOS-NIA HER-ZEGOVINA
http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Genocide/bosnia_genocide.htm
Things appeared relatively normal, or as normal as things can appear when you’re biking through these parts. Stepping into Bosnia Canada
Have a look at the photo of an advertisement for a hair salon painted onto the façade of a cement retaining wall. Look closely. It is the famous Old Testament story of Samson getting his hair cut off by Delila. If you know this story it will make the advertisement all the more startling. Basically Samson has the strength of God for several reasons but one, most importantly, is because he has been promised that so long as he never cuts his hair, he will have the strength of God to protect him. Samson falls victim to the wiles of a very enticing Mrs. Delila (she, quite possibly, could have been from Eu-ropean descent as such girls tend to have these inexplicable magical powers over men) and soon she cuts his hair off. The details are a bit hazy as I am trying to recall this story in a nasty motel off a freeway stop in the middle of Ser-bia so forgive me if it’s a bit off. His end is tragic and deserves the attention of a Greek audience to fully appreciate the element of hubris that determines his life’s end but there is more going on. Samson pulls inward the two supporting columns that he is chained to, which hold up the roof to a massive structure under which he and a mob are exchanging what would be their final words. He has had his eyes burnt out by the laughing mob but blind as he is, he gets the strength of God one last time to perform one last heroic act of power which is to illustrate the power of Samson’s God to all who mocked. Everyone dies underneath the crushing wait of the roof, including Samson; the image is vivid and one of compelling persuasion. Doubt and worse yet, mock the God of Israel and it would not go unnoticed. The analogy is riveting and strings mostly around Samson’s Herculean strength, which he tragically loses as he forsakes his oaths to his God. Often I have stumbled across this story in political science writings referring to states and how they can cave inwards from perhaps an ideology or market trend that at first seems extremely powerful and positive but which, in the end, results in the demise of the state. That is the story of Samson but to imagine he would one day find his way onto a retaining wall in rural Bos-nia/Herze-govina, advertising a hair salon I think would surprise even him. This place, clearly, was religion from a whole new dimension.
I was starting to wonder what things like this meant for a country as a whole when we began our descent into a beautiful and lush valley whose river divided an oasis city called Mostar. The sun was beginning to fade the sky into a purplish haze; after having pushed Apollo all day Westward it was about to crawl down the mountain range through which we had rode most our day. Within minutes of entering the town we noticed a strange lack of sound. Almost a as though we had entered a serene ghost town which offered little noise or bustle, oddly though, there was plenty of movement. We felt like we had stepped onto the plane of a threshold who’s harvesting some seasons back had gone horribly amiss. The silence was haunting and had a strange sort of artificial distilled flavour to it. We began to notice with more intensity the shattered buildings and pock marked roads the closer we got to the river which separates the town in halves. I was about eight o’clock in the evening and we could smell smoke rising from a nearby blaze as it wafted its campfire smell and ashes down the river bank. We parked the bike on the sidewalk of the local bus station thinking nothing of it and got off to buy some water from a nearby news stand. We needed a moment to digest the devastation we had just ridden through.
As we quickly absorbed the history in a piecemeal city by city fashion, stitching together the events leading up to the genocide and thereafter, the devastation started to fit the landscape more appropriately. We would find this trend stretching from the Western most parts of the country right through to the tiny border town in the East that we visited last: Srebrenica. It was here that more than 40, 000 Muslims were massacred and this particular genocide was the one for which Slobodan Milosevic had been indicted. It was only last year that I attended his trial in the Hague, he had just left the building when I arrived late on a summer afternoon and I was left hearing the arguments (which continue today) pressuring the Serbian government to extradite General Mladic to the Hague. I figured I could always return to hear the verdict against Slobodan the following year. To almost everyone’s surprise, he passed away earlier this year, escaping the bonds of justice at least in this life. It was a great tragedy for the cause of justice and this weeks TIME article interviewing Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal, gives a better accounting of what was lost when Slobodan died. Everything that could have given us a clearer and more explicit picture of what really happened in Srebrenica is now unable to be published. Having not been found guilty before he died, he gets to escape the findings of the court.
In Mostar we are drinking a can of Fanta at a local newspaper stand a few meters from the bus station. I parked my bike on the sidewalk close to a bank machine. To park the bike tucked away on the sidewalk was standard procedure in Eu-rope; this helped keep the bike out of the spotlight of unwanted attention. We heard a noise over head and quickly looked up. Here was yet another patrol helicopter doing its random scan of the hazy sky before dark. A red light would flash from this Hipachee looking chopper as it zigzagging left and right. An army jeep would drive by every few minutes transporting European soldiers to and from bases. This was everyday life in Bos-nia Herz-egovina. We had spoken to Belgian peace keeping soldiers an hour or so earlier who were busy on the road side paying tribute to a fallen comrade. The Belgian troops had erected a plaque for him. I stopped the bike and quickly ran up to the soldiers cutting across the pathway from the road in a diagonal, perhaps 5 meter variation from the path. After exchanging formalities we were quickly briefed and plainly warned of the dangers of doing exactly what we had just done. Something seemingly so simple and innocent in these parts can have dire consequences. If it does not cause death then at least you have a life time ahead to look forward to after suffering certain impalement. Land mines were laced every where around the memorial and had not yet been cleared, in fact the whole mountain side around and behind the plaque were laced with mines. The skull and cross bone signs have been removed by the locals as a sort of house decorative and it’s mainly tourists who tally the land mine victim toll in this country. The no go zones look like this. Another great reason to get on board with the land mine ban treaty which Canada
The two officers were part of the mission conducted by EUFOR, an acronym standing for the Eu-ropean military force which replaced the UN mission in the early part of this decade. My sister Liz had been here on the UN mission in the late 90’s and had told me a little about the devastated landscape which she encountered. Nothing had prepared me for this though. Before I get to the horrific sites you are seeing in the photos, let me tell you about my first time having to bribe police officers. Of course such things I had only heard about or read about in books but never had I imagined the day when I would personally find myself reading between the lines of a situation, giving the awkward glance here and there and proper head nods and language indicating that I had the cash they were fishing for to resolve the issue. I had parked the bike on a sidewalk, apparently a major offence in the Republic of Bos-nia Herze-govina! Or so these officers wanted us to believe. I was not in any way flustered and kind of wanted to see if the bribing thing worked in this former Communist country. I was eager to pull out the silver tongue as it hadn’t been tested in sometime. We had left the bike for perhaps 20 minutes and these officers, seeing the German license plate, saw an easy opportunity for some quick cash waited there for our return. There is no way they would have left a ticket and knew they would only get their cash if they waited the situation out. When we returned (we should have waited longer as a call on the radio sped up the situation halfway through our discussion) the junior officer started to give me the whole painstaking lecture on why the act of parking on this sidewalk was such a gruesome felony that came with a severe penalty. I could tell they had done this act many a time so I decided I would break out some tricks of my own. After having delved into some sensitive issues about the recovery process in their country and upon learning that one officer was a Croat and the other a Muslim, I began to give our own backgrounds…slightly embellished…I am not sure what Faizel was thinking but I went to town straight away. “I am so sorry about that, we just arrived from BRUSSELS and as we work for the EU-ROPEAN UNION, Faizel here in the PARLIAMENT and myself for a NON GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION (though I think they only heard government organization) we were just getting ready to do our RESEARCH in regards to the PROGRESS which YOUR COUNTRY has been making since our troops had been deployed in the region.” I could see his head quickly scattering to do new calculations as the Euro bills were hastily dropping into lower and lower denominations with every emphasized buzzword I would mention. It went from being a “very expensive” ticket to a “special price for us” ticket because “we are doing so much to help out his country”. 10 or 15 Euros later and little hassle to worry about from law enforcement after having paid our bribe, they were personally escorting us to a hotel for the night. It was quite a picture!
But getting onto Sara-jevo… This capital city is one that deserves perhaps more time than any of the others I have thus far talked about. We arrived late at sunset and were aghast at the beauty the city is surrounded by. Everywhere are gently drifting valleys which taper down until you get to the heartland of the city. It is green all around and diverse in hills, mountains, and streams. The Turks found this place enchanting as did the Byzantines and the Habsburgs. Strolling down the boulevard which kicked off the First World War—barely even finding a marking indicating the significance of the place in which we stood—changes and shapes your world view in real time like no text book can ever do. Just outside the assassination spot is a poorly marked building with a sleepy teenager manning the tiny museum which holds the actual gun that killed the heir to the throne and gave us the subsequent First World War.
Here you find a city that truly is emblematic of multiculturalism. It was forced to be both before and during the 4 year long siege of the city. It’s nearly half a decade long barrage marks the longest siege of a city in modern day history. Today, it is becoming more and more difficult to find remnants of the war here as this capital city has been one of the fastest to rebuild its infrastructure. …But feat not…they are still pretty easy to find. One thing you come across are these crater filled flower like formations on random sidewalks. It is an artistic reminder of the city’s grim past. They are called Sara`jevo roses which are really just bomb craters which have been filled with red paint everywhere more than a handful of civilians were killed in a blast.
All within ear shot of the old town center can be found a Synagogue, a mosque, a Catholic Cathedral and an Orthodox church. Diversity mingling like this I promise you will never see anywhere else in the world. No where else do these four cultures meet as they do in Sara`jevo. For now it appears as though all co-exist in peace and perhaps, one hopes this appearance will soon become the true nature of the relationship. My Montenegrin friend Ida reminds me that things aren’t always as they seem in that country. Unfortunately what remained of the Jewish community has now dwindled to less than a few families since the war. You get the picture though. It’s a place that feels like circumstances have forced these cultures to work together…for now at least. Our tour guide, who is an inspiration to both Faizel and I, does a great job of making things seem like they really are on a recovery course. She takes us to her favorite Muslim boutique where we buy some pens that have been carved from the tons of bullet shells fired throughout the war. The pens are quite the striking exercise in irony! No where else in the world do you have a rotating presidency that switches from Muslim, to Catholic, to Orthodox in a term besides Bos-nia Herze-govina. You have to wonder what the God of this place thinks of his creation…He truly must hold a special regard for his children of this part of the earth who seem all to have such great difficulty agreeing on his name alone! This is the one thing about monotheistic religion that boggles my mind and which I will digress into in more detail when I write the section in the holy land. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity…they all share the same roots and revere the same founding fathers for their faiths. Yet three millennia can pass since our story involving Abraham and we are killing each other over whose interpretation of his monotheism is the correct one. It’s one massive exercise in self destructive insanity! What men are willing to do because they think their version of the after life is more correct then another’s. No there must be a better plan worked out for humanity or two thirds of this world are on their way to some medieval hell like that I find depicted in the Venetian 12th century paintings you find in the old palace of the Doge. A scary place indeed! Faizel agrees, I think, wholeheartedly with this statement!
The money is there as is the will to rebuild. The same cannot be said for some of the rest of the country however. As we left the capital, chance would have it that the GPS, yet once again, took us on an incredibly different and less direct route than the locals would otherwise have taken. It was for the best though as the road we did find in the end, on our way to Srebrenica, was more inspiring than our imaginations could ever have attempted to contrive. Taking the road less traveled we started to notice a reduction in traffic first down to a trickle until eventually there was none. Eventually we ended up on a forest road that far from civilization that had, for some bizarre reason still unclear to us, been fully paved but apparently never ever used. It was one lane wide and gave us the feeling of Kings on our own highway. There were landmines in the forest to each side but the road was free and clear. Every now and then the pavement would give way to gravel and we found ourselves in the middle of ominous caves that were roughly carved through the bellies of these mountains. It was then that we stumbled across some of the most bizarre places we had ever seen. We found entire cities complete with house, train tracks, trains, stores, schools, mills, and every other town amenity one could imagine…completely abandoned and empty. Whole industries were left to rot on the outskirts of these ghost towns. I doubt any outsider has ever been to these places as we had to get seriously lost just to find them. Milosevic had an army that obviously knew where these roads were. It felt like I could almost hear the grinding metal of tanks ripping their awful weight into the road below; piercing forward here a little and there maybe too as they roll down their tracks; stopping…cocking, and firing. Their front end teeters up a little and their back end claws its way into the terrain from the jolting kickback. The barrel is burning hot and it is a summer day much like today. The sun gives no relief to the officers who encourage the young recruits to rape and pillage the screaming women who are fleeing from their ransacked homes. It is a gruesome place ten years before I find my motorcycle drifting down these country roads. Stopping here and there for some target practice the tanks you can practically trace their route of obliteration. The destruction was scattered and strange. This was not war. This was massacre and utter destruction. Nothing, absolutely nothing on earth could have called for such a thorough butchering of a landscape and its people. This was the work of young ignorant army recruits following the orders of generals devoid of all respect for the sanctity of civility and respect for human decency. They valued no religion that was not their own and whatever dignity they were supposed to have learned from their own faith, clearly, they had failed to grasp. Barbed wire still finds its way laced through many of these towns, there is a photo of some and one can only imagine which of its remnants was used for the concentration camps. Bright red signs mark entire forest belts to our left and to our right. The whole bloody landscape is rattled with rusting metal bombs that sometimes wreak their havoc on wandering children.
Getting past all of this, one has to look beyond it to see what it was people were fighting over. This land is preciously beautiful. I just won’t be able to describe its beauty with any accuracy so I will dare not try. Getting through the ghost towns we come across life and small towns who are trying to rebuild. Wherever we see a new house we try to see beyond its new façade to envisage what it just was. It is the houses we have just ridden through in the ghost towns we had just seen. The new houses are provided with new mortar and bricks from willing donors. There are signs indicating an American donor or a Swedish or Italian donor. Always an EU sign shows the locals that Eu-rope is backing their reconstruction efforts both with money and with morale. It is giving them an incentive to strive towards. EU membership is still a dream but Eu-rope cannot afford for this region ever to lapse into the chaos of the 90’s so it makes a concerted effort to actually do what it takes to bring this land under the domain of Brussels
SREBRENICA
And then, towards the end of our ride through Bos-nia Herze-govina, in the North Eastern section of the country, on the border dividing it from Serbia, we stumble into a quiet little place as the haze of dusk sets in. We ask a police man where the main site to see is. He doesn’t speak any English. We, quite ignorantly, say big war with hand gestures. He says, with a smile…no War. Srebrenica is a little town with nothing remarkable setting it apart from any of the other towns. We had actually passed the main cemetery on the way in and expected to find something else in the heart of the town. We had a hard time believing we had found the heart when we got there. There is nothing here. It’s a sad and quiet town. Not the peaceful kind of quiet but rather the haunting kind. We are clearly the site to behold as we trek in so we decide to satisfy the local interest and unsaddle to grab an ice cream. The lady who sells it to us is full of smiles and laughs and is very embarrassed that she can only say a few words in English. In truth she was like an English Lit graduate compared to the police man. We sit their…on the tile floor of an old house whose walls were long since blown to scattered pieces around us. The store keepers banter back and forth in their language talking about us knowing full well we can’t understand a word they say. We assume they are probably making fun of our strange machine and know it can only be in good humour as you cannot but help literally feel their friendly vibes. This is the town. It has one attraction. A grave yard holding the corpses of eight thousand massacred Muslims. In years to come, I presume this place will turn into the attraction that one finds in Cambodia
July 17, 2006
July 02, 2006
VANCOUV-ER à GER-MANY à PO-LAND via moto
The Test Run…
April-May 2006
Crossing the border from Ger-many to Po-land on a 1200cc German BMW motorcycle equipped with German plates and German logos feels a little strange at the best of times when you consider the implications. The fact that it was BMW 1200cc motorcycles that were among the myriad of bikes which couriered messages to the Polish front 65 years ago from Hitler’s bunker in Ber-lin, to his freezing troops in the East somehow leaves me dumbfounded. And here I am, a Canadian, crossing the same border on a rather updated version of a BMW that still uses the same style boxer engine as was used since this bikes’ beginnings. My navy blue passport firmly gripped between my upper and bottom front teeth, prohibited me from releasing my customary smile to break some of the uncomfortable border tension that exists at any border crossing these days.
I’m on a bike. That means I need two hands to control the machine…one on the clutch, the other on the gas for those of you that don’t ride the two wheeled machines. So no smile, no hands and a document in mouth…never mind the fact that my license and the bike’s papers had already been scanned once earlier that day by an ever so diligent Ber-lin’ officer who caught me doing an illegal left hand turn not too far from Ber-lin’s repugnant—and to some (including myself thanx to its new world cup soccer ball design) beautiful—TV tower built back in the hay days of the Soviet era. 
It was only a few hours earlier that I was stuttering to the officer as the autobahn enables faster than normal speeds to reach far away borders that connect the ancient lands of the Habsburgs and Bohemians with those of the Eastern most part of the Holy Roman Empire. How I talked my way out of that ticket I will leave to divine providence, which will have to catch up with me some day, based on the sheer number of times it has bailed me out of sticky situations. Not only was I not carrying my insurance papers with me, a mortal sin in Ger-many’ worthy of seemingly the death penalty, but also, I couldn’t even find my license. You don’t have to flex your imagination that far to picture the ridiculousness of this scene. Here I am, an overdressed English lad (as my UK license is the only thing valid I can ride on here) driving a rather large bike, which in Ger-many takes years to acquire a license to drive, with no ownership papers and no license and completely unable to communicate with the stern officer. Such an unfortunate reality can place a foreigner in a jail cell for a few hours at least as it is illegal to even walk around anywhere in €urope without your passport. Usually the least you can expect is a hefty fine and the impoundment of your vehicle when you finally get through the nightmare of explaining your identity to a officer who speaks broken English.
I had actually just misplaced my UK’ license and was not prompt enough in finding it for the likes of this rather balding, middle-aged slightly overweight “polezie” man. His bulging eyes, like those of a bug or a Shit-zu were brown and glossy and anything but sociable. He stared down at me rather indignantly through his 4mm thick glasses, as Germans are an uncharacteristically tall people, just to make me fully aware of my foolishness for thinking I was still in Cana-da. After many pathetic pleas in English and German he finally felt sorry enough for me that I knew this wasn’t going to end too too badly. He started to hint at letting me off as I clearly fell under the retarded tourist category of the criminal code and not the Gone in 60 seconds (a movie about car thieves) type that they have such a problem with throughout Ber-lin’.
Organized crime from the Eastern newly admitted EU countries has been a thorn in the Commission’s side. Before letting me go though, he felt it necessary to put a little German fear of the law down my spine so he began making an unmistakable gesture. There is a certain action that is meant to send shivers through the skin of the foreigner, which involves the officer crossing his two arms together in a rather awkward way at the wrists. It is rather humorous to watch from a foreigners point of view but it is the universal sign for cuffs in Ger-many’ and “you’re going to prison”. I thought he ripped it off from a back street boys move though.
I had to quickly fumble my way through trying to remember the name of the owner of the bike, my new German friend Sven, whose last name I could not remember for the life of me, and even if I could, I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce. But alas after much heart pounding and garbled speech, I finally found my UK license tucked away in a back pocket, and a scrap piece of paper with it that had Sven’s name and address on it. He punched in the information and, thankfully, it all checked out. Such were the foreboding circumstances that surrounded the beginnings of my little motorcycle odyssey. He let me go with some stern words in German and insisted that I bid him farewell in the customary “choues” bidding and not the North American “good bye” fashion…Only this would appease him!
But getting back to the border guards, they usually see a lot of bikes come through from Ger-many’ but not so much the German bikes that come with Canadian tourists riding them not registered in their name. They were rightly suspicious as my 21 year old clean shaven face didn’t exactly give off the appearance that everything is as it should be. “your friend…he leant you his brand new motorcycle”… clearly they were confused, but as my friend Svitozar might remind me, they were Polish. I resent this as there might be some Polish influence somewhere in my grab bag blood line. Once again, luckily, the language barrier saved my hide from tanning and he let me off as there weren’t too many more English words we had in common. And there I was, in another country…beautiful long-mistreated land of the Poles.
When you cross over from one European Union country to the next you always kind of expect the next one to be just as wealthy and Westernized as the one from which you are crossing over from. This is how it is anywhere in the West. As for Po.land though, well, Po-land’…I think…has had a tough time recovering from a few setbacks. Take for instance their First World War defeat; it was devastation for which they had no recourse. The Second World War only added insult to injury as they were trying to fight German tanks with cavalry on one side and Stalin’s Red Army with poorly equipped foot soldiers on the other. They were blind sided on two sides and were pitilessly massacred by both the German and Russian soldiers. This is all to say…that the roads in Po-land’ can be a little less smooth than those of the famous German Autobahn as the money still does not flow as easily through this country as it does in Ger-many. It is such a sad fact that those who are geographically unfortunately located can suffer the most under the bonds of war and are often the nations which take longest to recover. The Soviet era was no step in the right direction and it has only been since the 90’s that the Polish economy has started to recover, 40 years after its pillaging.
I crossed over in the North Western Part of the German border and came in to Po-land’ from their North Eastern region. The destination was a large Port town known as G-Dansk’ and the fact that it doesn’t read very well phonetically should also partly explain the reason why I didn’t make it there that night. Speaking the Slavic languages is not the easiest part of a foreigner’s journey through these countries. But that’s another story for which this small entry has no time. Let me first try and give you a mental picture of Po-land… Imagine a futuristic 21st century world whose city planners for the last 60 years have been Lego designers. You are correct if you are imagining the remnants of Soviet projects whose long and thin rectangular cement apartments jet up indiscriminately here and there in urban sprawls that were set up to feed the Soviet machine back in Moscow. Some of the fancier Lego blocked pre-fabricated buildings may even have colored bricks added to them as they were to house Communist party nomenclature officials. These are found in the larger cities but not so much in the neglected smaller cities of the North. Thank the powers that be that these city planners did not spend too much time in the rural parts of the country side. Here you will find an entirely different country, separate and disconnected from that of the former industrial cities. Here you find farms and farmers living in what seems to be some earlier more innocent part of the 20th century. I had to purposely get very lost to find these places and stay lost to enjoy them. Only a motorcycle with some off road capabilities can even get to them. I am certain that the residents’ of these places prefer it this way.
As I slowed the bike down at one ever slight bend in the road, to take a picture of some swans swimming in a lake, I found myself the object of some intense curiosity. A young girl, perhaps 18 or 19 years of age, was hunched over less than ten feet away from me behind a fence. I know I know…give me a break…maybe it wasn’t all that intense! She was weeding, being careful to keep her gaze down at the weeds and not upwards at the space machine. She was wearing a long dirty dress and had her hair tied back in a scarf as is the customary fashion for many women in the rural Polish countryside. It was a strange couple of minutes of exchanging eye contact that made me want to figure out what was actually going on. Here she was, too shy to say hi, yet curious enough to want to break out of her conventional reluctance to at least smile at a stranger. I was trying to get a photo of the lake but couldn’t find the right position for the camera to take the shot. Every time I turned around to reposition myself, without fail, I would always catch her eyes, which would quickly look back down almost as though she was ashamed and in trouble for having been caught staring. It was as if there was rural etiquette and propriety law that she was clearly overstepping and I wasn’t sure why. I thought there had to be something else going on in this encounter and decided to make a full three sixty turn to look at the girls small house to see if someone else was watching her. Sure enough, leaning on the corner of the far side of the house, there was what had to be her father. He had the “I’ll break your neck if you so much as say hi to my daughter” kind of look that I have found many rural country side fathers to possess even in far away Cana-da. He was tall and lanky and had an extremely thick five o’clock shadow with some sort of long stem protruding out of his mouth; it was a weird looking pipe. His arms were folded as were his legs, glaring at me when they weren’t staring at his daughter, who was continually glancing back at her father to see when she would be able to sneak another peek at the stranger and his strange machine. I wish I were exaggerating but this was a pretty far out and removed place from anything like stores or proper roads.
Clearly I was not a welcome guest for dinner as the sun had just set and it was getting dark. You have to remember that I am decked out in such a suit of armour so as to give anybody the impression now days that I am a participant in a 21st century jousting match. Not to mention the horse I am riding is a breed or model never before seen or released until this year. It is loud, shiny, and huge! People stare to the point where it gets uncomfortable, as though you are the “lucky” one to come from the wealthy west and you want to rub it in. I am predicting far worse receptions when I arrive in the some of the countries I will be traveling to.
Anyways, after I was certain there would be no invitations for tea or small talk with either the Dad or his daughter, I decided it was time to get back on my horse and find a place to sleep that night. Just before I pulled my helmet down over my face though, I flashed a quick smile at the girl who returned it just as hastily, slightly blushing. I turned the bike around and saw her Dad walking towards his daughter. Off I sped but I only hope I wasn’t the cause of her having to deal with a stern lecture from her father that night. Heaven help the beautiful Polish countryside.
Another incredible feature of these back country side roads are their evergreens which line and shade them. They are trees that must be close to eighty or a hundred years old. I’ve left a picture here to give you an idea but it is really something to see in the flesh. I don’t know by what decree some king way back in the early 20th century must have made but all roads in the countryside seem to be lined with these old trees; they are such a site to behold.
I finally arrived in Utska a small port town on the black sea about an hour from the main port town G-Dansk. I met Artur, the young owner of a hotel built in 1789. It still has 300 year old furniture to line its halls and rooms. He was the kindest most generous guy who brought me straight away to the best fish stop in town. Here they have been smoking fish for hundreds of years using the same methods and recipes as have their grandfathers ten generations back. The fish melts in your mouth like freshly cut butter melting over hot carrots. Here, in Utska, town population of over 5000 and home to the famous Otto Von Bismarck’s summer cottage, the biggest news event of the day involved a kite surfer getting stuck out in the sea on his Kite board. He somehow managed to call the port lookout from a cell phone that miraculously still worked a mile out from sea, (how do you know you are only a stone throw away from one of the biggest cell phone distributors in the world: Finland). The dramatic rescue involved a fishing vessel not usually equipped for rescuing kite surfers having to heroically sail out one mile to sea, otherwise not scheduled to do so, to save the young man and his kite board. It was an event to talk of for weeks. Weeks I do not have unfortunately so off I'll have to be to Scandanavia for now...
