Dogs of Peru

Like South Africa, dogs are everywhere in Peru and very much a part of the landscape here. Somebody told me there are around 2 million stray dogs in Peru and that may be true but I am not sure how anybody would really be able to tell as it is quite normal to let your dog run free here. In that case the dogs are not strays just roamers and nobody uses a collar on their dogs so you can’t really tell when this is the case. There are some pretty sad looking dogs that I'm sure are strays, but then there are also a bunch that may look dirty but seem to be eating enough.

There are a surprising number of breeds here in Peru that I did not expect. I’ve seen Golden Retrievers, Cocker Spaniels, Dalmatians, Chows, German Shepard’, and so on in addition to what are mixed breads. They tend to wander around and mind their own business and unlike dogs in the U.S. that often get attention from people, they rather ignore you. Instead they would much rather root through the piles of trash sometimes left on the side of the road.

Sometimes they don’t take a liking to you and let you know by barking. There was one little dog that got all up in my face while at the Pisak ruins and acted like he was going to bite me. But after I got pissed and yelled at it a bit, then he was my best friend and followed me around for around 30 minutes, go figure. Pedestrians they typically just bark at but cars and bikes they sometimes like to chase. One day I saw what looked like a Golden Retriever chasing a car through traffic in Cusco. Which car I have no idea as there was three lanes of traffic and the street was full at the time but this dog ran with them all the way down the block and out of site.

Here are some of the picts of the dogs I saw while in Peru.

It is spring time in Peru

 

Hanging out under the table in Machu Picchu

 

Dressed up for something

Chilling in the middle of the street

 

The War in Yugoslavia

I have been wanting to go to Sarajevo since the war in 1992. I can also clearly remember the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo and they were the games where I first really got interested in the Olympics. I can’t really explain why I’ve wanted to see the place but the war occurred when I was around 22-years-old and it outraged me then just like it still outrages me today. At the time in '93 I did have a desire to go and do something after I got out of college. I just did not know exactly what and I am sure my parents are quite happy that I did not understand how others had gone over as freelance journalists. Having just graduated and a keen interest in reporting I may have tried it had I understood how others were making their way over.

The city has always been in the back of my mind over the years and while the passion of the time may have faded some, my interest in the city and area never really has gone away. So when I decided to take this trip one of the places I guaranteed myself I would go was Sarajevo and I am glad that I came.

 

Seeing the area first hand just reinforces my disgust for the Bosnian Serb  soldiers who simply killed and destroyed everything they came across. From what I have seen and heard, it was as horrible as reported and probably even worse. There is no real justification for the way the acted during the war and it even makes less sense when you consider that they wanted Bosnia and prized the city for a “greater Serbia” and eventually annex into Serbia itself. But they went about it in a way similar to Sherman’s march to the sea through South Carolina, in that they killed and terrorized everybody and left almost nothing standing. But I don’t think even Sherman’s march through South Carolina was as brutal and senseless as what the Bosnian Serbs did to the local population. It is even worse when you consider that they were friends and neighbors of the people they killed only a year before the war. Sherman was not friends with the people whose homes he burned and he did not indiscriminately kill men, women and children. Some of my southern friends may take issue with that but this is about Bosnia, not Sherman.

Building in the Old Town section of Sarajevo. It is still possible to find buildings like this in the main business district.

Bosnia has never fully recovered from the war and is behind the other countries in the region. Croatia has done a good job fixing the damage and moving on but their war only lasted for around 1 year before they pushed the Serbs out, probably mostly into Bosnia. My guide, Samer, told me that Bosnia used to be the industrial capital of the former Yugoslavia and they made furniture, cars, airplanes, and all sorts of things here before the war. But all of that collapsed and was destroyed by the war and even today they have no real industry. There are also large areas of the country that are largely empty of people, either because they were either driven or killed off or that any opportunities there have been completely destroyed. The north is particularly this way and from what Samer told me, Croatia has similar issues in the northern part of the country.

Mostar about a year after the war ended.

The area is also largely forgotten by the world community today as there are new wars to deal with, so there is no more money to continue reconstruction. In Sarajevo and Mostar, just about every building was damaged and the money to repair them has often come from outside the country. For example Qatar built a big library for Sarajevo in the Old Town. For that matter all of the Trams in Sarajevo were destroyed and what you see today were donated by other cities from their old and rusting trains.

 

The historical buildings need to be rebuilt in the same way as before the war, which is not cheap, and the money to do this is largely gone so the buildings still damaged stay that way. Also once you get out of the old parts of the city the damage is even more prevalent. Sarajevo is in better shape than other communities, for example Mostar still has bombed out buildings mixed in with the repaired ones at a rate greater than Sarajevo. But even Mostar is a big city and the smaller ones in the country sometimes sit largely abandoned.

The peace agreement in Bosnia left in place that anybody could return indefinitely to their former property. This is good but at the same time creates other problems as there is property where the residents are gone so it sits abandoned and bombed out indefinitely too.

 

The grave yards are all full here too with new white grave markers packed in. While stuck in the traffic jam while trying to exit Sarajevo one of the large cemeteries was off to my right. I was struck by just how many gleaming white headstones covered the hillside, compared to the old stones, and how tightly packed in they were. There are ever present reminders of the war that you can’t escape.

Pre and post war sections of one cemetery in Sarajevo

The war in Bosnia was particularly brutal and it is hard for me to comprehend how a population could turn on itself so quickly and brutally. It is very reminiscent of how the Nazi’s and Germans turned on the Jewish population in the 1930’s and how it extended beyond just the politicians but was tolerated and participated in by the community as a whole. The violence here was particularly brutal and I would say was full of personal vendetta. It was not simply a war with killing, it was ethnic cleansing at its worst and has left indelible scars on both the landscape and the people that will likely take another generation to fully heal.

The people I have met here don’t really talk much about the war, if anything I get the impression that everybody just wants to forget. For example the 50 something guy I met one night at a restaurant that talked about how he lived in L.A. for 10 years, starting in 1993, but not explaining why he moved there. He returned to Sarajevo for “sentimental reasons.” Also from what Samer told me about how the people of Sarajevo would not go up into the forests around the city until very recently out of the memory of what the Bosnian Serbs did up there.

Not that I can blame them, it is almost like post traumatic syndrome where people just want to black it all out, not so easy to do when you have buildings with bullet holes or totally bombed out and still have land mine warning signs.

I have also notices that I don’t really see many locals my own age here, everybody seems to be 35 or younger or 55 and older. In that respect it seems almost that an entire generation of Bosnia has either been killed or moved away and never returned. Gen X here does not really exist and I suspect that once they left most have never returned. On my way into the city I talked with one guy around my age who now lives in Zurich but “is a Bosnian at heart”. He did not tell me but I pieced together that he left Sarajevo during the war, I’m sure as a refugee in his 20's. He does business in Sarajevo but does not live there any more.

But as sad as some things are, there are other things that are hopeful too. For instance there seems to be a large population 35 and under that were children at the time of the war or born afterwards. In fact I would say there are a lot of people here in their 20’s, possibly Bosnia’s own Baby Boomer generation. There also has been a lot of reconstruction here. When you see pictures of Sarajevo or Mostar in 1995, everything had been devastated and it is amazing to see how much change has occurred in 20 years. While there are still a lot of reminders, there has been a lot of reconstruction and new construction as well. Buildings still show the scars but they are back in use for the most part, amazing given the condition most were in. The tourist population has also slowly started to increase too as Bosnia slowly gets back onto the radar of Europeans. However, as Samer told me, there is still the concern of safety in the region that has been Green Visions biggest challenge in getting people to come in to visit.

I have also heard stories about Bosnian Serbs who would not take part in all the killing that occurred and actually fought back alongside the Bosnians to try and repel them. This must have put a big price on their heads and I am sure the Bosnian Serbs looked on them as traitors. This is not something I really knew about and it is good to hear that even in the darkest times some people do the right thing in the face of it all.

What I have found here is a city and nation that is slowly on the mend. There are still deep scars that may never heal as long as there are people who were alive at the same time, but there is also a new generation of Bosnians who have little or no recollection of the war and things are moving forward giving hope for the future.

The people of Sarajevo also seem to be slowly reclaiming their city and taking back the places that they once enjoyed before the war but have stayed away from since.

I leave with some mixed feelings. I still have a resentment for Bosnian Serbs and the Serb government and the horrendous things they did here. Watching video of the war at the museums is horrifying and stirs old feelings. At the same time I have less of a resentment to Bosnian Serbs and have to remember to look at them as individuals and not stereotype them all. How to understand the roots of something like this are important to ensure it does not repeat itself in the future but I also recognize that people have been trying to understand this kind of thing since WWII and likely long before that. The war seemed to be based in nationalistic ambitions and petty grievances that the conflict allowed individuals to take advantage of.

All of the mosques were destroyed but have since been rebuilt. The destruction was indiscriminant and all the Christian and Jewish churches were targeted and destroyed too.

I can't find any before pictures but the Gazi Husrev Beg's Mosque in Old Town was heavily damaged during the war but has been fully rebuilt today.

I don’t really understand it any better than before but recognize that not everybody acts this way and that given the right set of circumstances, the United States would not be above this. I would like to think that there is no way this could happen in America but it does seem that this type of thing has a habit of repeating itself and that the people who perpetrate this are not so easy to identify as criminals but are normal people who get caught up in the conflict and loose themselves and their sense of right and wrong. Perhaps this can help explain why when there is rioting in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York, South Carolina, and so on, there is this group think that happens and people who would never riot get caught up in everything. 

Before the war here everybody lived together very well and turned on themselves overnight. The same can probably be said about Germans during WWII and one can possibly say the same about the average Japanese too. I am not so sure that Americans are that different and it seems that the right set of circumstances can set off the worst in humanity. Something to remember as we practice or politics of discourse with each other.

It is hard to see in the photo but Sarajevo from a distance looks like most any other city today, you don't see the scars until you get up close.

Thursday, October 1 - Long Drive out of Sarajevo to Prague

So Thursday was a long travel day with 1060 kilometers or 660 miles between Sarajevo and Prague. Google Maps pegged it at just under 12 hours, but when you figure in stops I figure that would be closer to 13 hours. Not exactly fun but manageable. However the time quickly started to build as an old man from Azerbaijan parked his Mercedes about 12” off my driver side. How do I know it was an old man you may ask? I saw him trying to park the day before and he was having a lot of trouble doing it so I figured I would let it go and simply crawl across from the passenger side.

What I did not count on was the fact that I did not have enough room to back up and make the turn due to a chain. With his car is 12” off my left and a high curb 6” off my right and at 6:30 in the morning after about 30 minutes of moving forward and back in inches, putting scratches in the old man’s bumper and my rental car, and scratching the paint on the back hatch of my VW on the chain that I had to rub against, and I finally managed to back the car out of the space. Good thing I took out the full insurance on the car.

As for the old man’s car, to hell with him I did not leave a note, he is lucky a few bumper scratches are all he got from me given what he made me do. I was not happy about it, even with the rental insurance, but a little after 7:00 am I’m on my way.

At least that is what I thought until about 20 minutes later I got stuck in a huge traffic jam that took me over an hour to move 1/2 kilometer! There was an accident on the only road out of town and my GPS did not know enough to route me around it. Somebody crossed the center line and collided head on with another car, not surprising given how they drive in Bosnia, and they had a busy road shut down to one lane for both directions. You would have thought the police would have pushed the car out of the way once the people were removed, I saw the ambulance after about 15 minutes of being stopped so they had time. Nope, they just stood there waving cars around the wreck not a tow truck in site after what must have been over 1.5 hours after they got there. Jack asses!

I am always amazed by the police and their lack of help in accidents like this at home and abroad. I know it is not exactly a glamorous part of your job but it is a part of your job to help manage traffic. Suck it up and deal with it instead of letting traffic fall into total chaos. I actually saw people walk past me, only to walk past in the opposite direction 30 minutes later. I literally only moved about 3 city blocks in the first half your of being stuck.

The roads out of Sarajevo are winding two lanes through the mountains with speed limits typically around 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph). But it is a really cool drive with a lot of switch back turns and traveling through a lot of ravines with rock walls on either side. After being stuck in Sarajevo for so long going nowhere it was a nice way to get into the drive.

After about 100 kilometers the hills start to flatten out a bit as you get closer to Tuzla and the country opens up into more industrial areas with mines and farms. One would think that the roads would get a little faster but nope, they speed limit average stays about the same with just as many blind corners but now you drive through a lot more urban areas so the limits drop to 50 kilometers per hour (31 mph) and you have things like horse drawn buggies now to deal with too. I did not expect to see this and had to pass several of them. I saw this in Bostwana but that is a 3^rd world country, Bosnia is not exactly 1^st world but it is a lot farther than Botswana.

Horse and home built buggy in Tusla Bosnia

It was like this all the way to the border with Croatia, than other than about 30 minutes on major highway, all of Croatia was two lane roads through towns too. Cross the border into Hungry and more of the same. Now I am starting to freak out a bit because I have been traveling for 5 hours already and at the rate I am going it will be midnight before I get into Prague. I can’t believe the only way to cross 1060 kilometers is through every little town along the way.

Road just across the border in Hungry

Finally I get onto major highways in Hungry where the limit is 130 kilometers per hour (80 mph) but even that does not last more than an hour as my GPS takes me off the roads again and starts running me through small towns. Then without warning I am in Bratislava Slovakia, which is a big city and now I am going right through the center of town.

There probably was some warning but I have no idea what any of the road signs are saying so I have to take it as it comes. It is somewhat a cool way to drive across Eastern Europe but I’m getting rather concerned about how much distance I have to go. At 6:00 pm I still had 300 kilometers and the GPS has me on streets with stop lights and 50 kilometer limits. I have been wondering what the deal with the thing was for several hours and when I see the D2 highway running off to my left and my GPS did not route me on it I finally knew for sure something was wrong.

I still don’t know what it was doing but I figured out how to re-route myself on the D2 which was major highway with 130 k/h speeds all the way to Prague. I have to wonder how many hours I farted away with the stupid thing as it took 16 hours by the time I pulled into Prague. I am just happy I managed to get onto major highways before it became totally dark.

Couple of things I found interesting on the drive;

The highways in Bosnia and much of Croatia and Hungry are small and just two lanes, one each direction, and must be what it was like traveling Route 66 before the interstates were built in the U.S.

This is not exactly right but it is more or less the route I took. I crossed Croatia closer to Serbia and followed the river up to Budapest before taking the route with the red dots to Prague.

Bosnia has all these weird looking hay stacks that dot the landscape. I did not see these south of Sarajevo so they are only north and I did not see them anywhere else. They literally stopped as soon as I crossed the border with Croatia.

Weird looking haystacks of northern Bosnia

Croatia seems to have the tightest border controls of anybody in the area and they were fairly religious about stamping my passport whereas Bosnia and Hungry did not worry as much about it. Just about every stop I made at the Croatian border took time too, up to 30 minutes between Bosnia and Croatia. After entering Hungry the borders are all open so I have not even had to stop at the borders.

The Croatians have strung a lot of barbed wire along their borders. That and they have all sorts of gates you need to traverse and it reminded me of the border crossings you used to see on TV before the Soviet Union broke up. They have guards with guns, dogs, coiled barbed wire, big steel gates, and so on. No other border I have crossed has this.

Barbed wire rolled out along the Croatian border with Hungry

Hungry is a lot like Wisconsin, rolling hills with farmland and cows, some forests on the southern border, and quaint little towns.

Bratislava Slovakia is a much bigger city than I would have expected. It is the capital but I did not expect such an urban setting with modern buildings and bridges.

I drove right across this bridge in Bratislava

Monday September 28 to Wednesday September 30 - Mostar & Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

I got into Mostar in the evening on Sunday and my GPS in the rental car could not figure out exactly where the hotel was so after driving around a bit I pulled into a gas station because they usually know where things are. They did, called the hotel for me, which dispatched a taxi for me to follow on over to the hotel. Awesome!

Mostar's Stari Most at night

After getting situated I walked around the old city a little bit. It was about 8:30 at night and the town was abandoned except for a very few people wandering around. It was very quiet and I more or less had the place to myself. Even my hotel seemed to be abandoned other than me. There was a rainy mist and that may be a part of it but compared to Dubrovnik or Sarajevo in the evening, this place is a ghost town.

Market place for the tourists and the Gypsies, the locals don't shop here

Stari Most, the lighter part is where they had to rebuild the bridge after the Bosnian Serb's shelled it in 1993

The next morning there were more people, I am not sure where they came from but by around 11:00 the buses must have arrived because the streets became full, the shops were open and even the Gypsies had returned asking for money. I have to say they, the Gypsies, were a little hard to deal with at first because were very passively but consistently asking for money, the kids in particular would follow you down the street. Too bad for them Chicago has made me rather cold to panhandling and I did not hand out any money, and once I heard somebody say the word Gypsy I was even less likely. If anything I got a bit annoyed that they would be using their kids to beg for money. I am not immune to people in need but my problem is I don’t know them and know what they really want to use the money for. It may be for food but as I have learned in Chicago, it also may be for booze or drugs as much as it may be to get a place to stay or something to eat. Sadly addition and homelessness often go hand in hand. There is the possibility they were not Gypsies but they were more persistent then my experience of somebody who is begging because they are hungry, usually they are more passive about it. Lets just say they seemed to have the routine down and that was a put off for me.

 

 

Mostar is known for the Stari Most or Old Bridge and people jumping off of it into the river below. At first I thought it was too late in the season for this but just as I was getting ready to head out to Sarajevo, a guy was getting ready to jump. There was some usual fanfare from the crowd and guys from the local diving club that work the crowd and hopefully get them to hand over a few Bosnian Marks or Euros. The guy who jumped had a British accent so apparently you don’t have to be a part of the dive club to do this and the thought crossed my mind to do it myself. Perhaps at a younger time in my life when I don’t have to worry about insurance so much, but that time is past and despite the desire I kept my shirt and shoes on.

There is also a photo exhibition of Mostar during the war at the Stari Most from a photographer named Wade Goddard. Wad is born the same year as me and came to Bosnia from New Zealand on his own. I know the feeling as just having graduated with a journalism degree in 1993 I felt like doing the same thing at the time. I just did not have the guts or smarts to figure it out but I have heard of several stories of guys who had no journalism experience who up and left for Bosnia during the war to take photographs or write stories.

This is in sight of the bridge and you walk past it to get down to the river

A whole city block is like this right off the shopping district

All of his photos were of the year he spent in Mostar and while walking around I recognized several of the structures photographed. Many had been fixed but there were still plenty more that were in the same state they were left in in at the end of the war in 1995. In fact probably about 8-10% of the buildings in the old town area are still bombed out. From the pictures I saw the entire city was left in ruins and in some ways it is a miracle to me that many of the buildings have been rebuilt. For example the old bridge was blown up by the Serbs in 1993 but they cut new stones and rebuilt it the same way as it was before being destroyed.

The Stari Most after being destroyed.

In the afternoon I drove into Sarajevo and I have to say that I am enjoying driving again and the roads through Bosnia wind up and down the mountains and along the rivers which is rather enjoyable. But it is a bit of a challenge to get around the slower moving buses or trucks and Bosnians are a bit like Michigan drivers, in that they don’t slow down for much. So one always has to keep an eye open for that car in the opposite direction passing around a corner. You also only average around 80 kilometers per hour, or 50 miles per hour, so it takes a while.

Old Olympic bobsled run in the hills above Sarajevo

 

The next day in Sarajevo, Tuesday, I guess you could call my war tour day and I had booked a guide from Green Visions to take me around to some of the former Olympic sites. Samer is from Sarajevo and was around 6 at the time of the 1984 Olympics and can remember going to a few of the events. The weather is not ver good as we drive out of the city into the mountains that are obscured by clouds. It is only about a 30 minute drive from the heart of the city to get to the cross country skiing, downhill skiing, ski jumping and bobsled sites. The cross country and downhill sites don’t have anything left to them but are both active sites today. The cross country site has become a walking and biking trail in the summer and is still used for cross country in the winter and the downhill site is still an active skiing hill. The downhill site is largely inactive but there are some kids’ camp activities and a restaurant at the base during the summer months. The structures are still there and the jumps themselves as well as the media house still stand. The UN took over the area during the war and they actually dismantled most of the upper structures to use the materials for other things and the media house still has “UN” painted on it. In the cases of the skiing sites, they were inside the territory held but the Bosnian Serbs so for the most part they were not damaged by the war. The bobsled site is on a different hill and was directly on the front lines but is surprisingly still intact and Samer told me has been used recently for some in-line skating and skateboard events. It is also a favorite spot for graffiti artists.

Bottom of the ski jump with the media building that still says UN on it

Up until a few years ago Samer told me the area in the mountains was largely abandoned and that people would not go into the forests here. In part because it was on the front lines, the land mine situation was not clearly known for a long time, at one point I did see a landmine side while driving along the road to the downhill site. But Samer also told me that too many people have bad memories of the place and it holds a lot of ghosts for anybody older than 35. There are spots in the bobsled run were holes were cut so the Serbs could shoot at Bosnians trying to advance on them and the entire area was used to shell the city and had sniper nests. We stopped at one on the way down and you could see most of Sarajevo from there and I had to admit, it was a little unsettling to think of how many people were shot and killed in the streets below by somebody hiding were I was standing.

Hole cut into the bobsled run so the Bosnian Serbs could shoot at people trying to go up the hill

View of Sarajevo from one of the 100s of sniper positions on the mountain overlooking the city

But in the last few years Samer more and more people have started to venture into the area, which is good because it is really nice and while I understand the felling of ghosts, at the same time it is good for the place to be reclaimed by Sarajevo. By leaving it empty for so long, in a way that is like the Serb’s still having the city under siege, so it is good to see it being taken back mentally.

The forests are thick and very pretty and the area reminds me of the North Woods of Wisconsin or Michigan but they are only 30 minutes away. There has been some development on the top where there are a few restaurants for day trippers, cabins that you can spend the night in, lots of hiking and biking trails, and even paint ball. The place is also full of wildlife, which includes wolves and bears.

After lunch on the mountain we head to the Olympic Hall where they house the remaining artifacts from the 1984 Olympics. Most were destroyed with the Bosnian Serbs shelled the former museum and it is sad to see how little remains of what was probably the best thing to happen to Sarajevo in the 20^th Century.

Afterwards I head on over to the airport area where the Tunnel of Hope is located. When the Bosnian Serbs had surrounded Sarajevo the airport was in the control of the UN and provided a very small corridor that connected Sarajevo to other areas still held by the Bosnian military. However, the UN had an agreement with the Serbs, who were right next to the ends of the airport, that they would not allow anybody to cross the territory. As such any time somebody tried to escape the city this way they were usually picked up by the UN and turned back or machine gunned by the Bosnian Serbs. That is until the tunnel was built in 1993. The tunnel ran between two houses that flanked the runway and was about 800 meters long. It provided a means for people to escape the city as well as fighters and supplies to enter. Most of the tunnel is either filled in or closed but a small section still remains on the far side of the airport in a home riddled with bullet holes.

 

The tunnel had a homemade set of railroad tracks that carts could be run across and from the pictures, it looked like it often flooded. It was dig by hand and only about 3 feet wide and 5 feet tall and in the short 20 meter section still open, it is hard to imagine crossing under the entire runway in this thing.

1984 Olympic city map of Sarajevo with the front lines added to it, red area is the Bosnian Serbs. The airport is the small slot in the top and the tunnel was here, under the runway.

Wednesday is my last day in Sarajevo and I mostly just hang out around the old town, doing a little shopping before I go and relaxing. I don’t really need anything but figure I will likely never get back to Sarajevo, so I pick up a Bosnian coffee set, it is very similar to Turkish coffee and I figure a good souvenir of the city for me, and a North Face coat. I have a rain coat but this is a bit warmer and may be handier up north where it is colder, and at $50 US dollars it is hard to resist since I will pay probably 3x more in the states.

Bridge where Franz Ferdinand and his wife was assassinated and WWI started

The largest mosque in Sarajevo in the Old City section, there are probably 5-6 mosques close to the old city and it is like they are in competition with each other during calls to prayers.

I also hang out at a funky place called Zlatna Ribica, which I read about on Trip Advisor. They serve coffee and alcohol and it is decorated with all sorts of funky things and plays music from the 50’s and early 60’s. It is a little off the touristy area and from the sound of everybody talking around me, pretty much a local place.

 

In the evening I don’t stay out late as I have a long drive to Prague in the morning. It is around 650 miles and I am not really looking forward to it as it will be an all day trip, but the alternative is taking a bus or train that will be easily two times longer to get there. The train was marked out as taking about 24 hours.