An exciting visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina
After a week in Croatia, the team agreed that renting a car and heading into Bosnia AND HERZEGOVINA (more on that later) for the day sounded like fun.
The interests were slightly different.
I liked the idea of seeing Mostar, which is one of those places that manages to be both beautiful and historically complicated. The Stari Most, the famous Ottoman bridge across the Neretva, is the obvious centerpiece, but Mostar also sits right in the middle of some of the ugliest history from the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Anne, meanwhile, had become a waterfall enthusiast. We had already done Plitvice and were interested in Krka, but Bosnia offered an important upgrade: waterfalls you could actually swim under.
And then there was lunch.
I had done only slightly more research than "there appears to be a pretty river and grilled trout," but Blagaj looked promising.
So we picked up a rental car in Split. The process was surprisingly painless, and I developed an immediate affection for our SEAT’s premium line - Cupra SUV. It was a fun, peppy, well thought-out five-person car with responsive steering and enough personality that I spent more time thinking about it than was strictly necessary.
The drive south was easy. Croatia's main roads are fantastic, probably the country's most conspicuously impressive infrastructure. Once you leave the coast, the landscape starts to feel different, although crossing into Bosnia is a useful reminder that political borders do not necessarily correspond to geographic ones. The interior of Croatia and the beginning of Herzegovina look, unsurprisingly, like the same place.
One difference was immediately obvious, though: prices.
Several Croatians had complained to us about food inflation since the move to the euro, particularly bread and other staples. Whatever the precise cause, our croatian hosts had strong opinions, Bosnia felt dramatically cheaper. Meals and cafe prices were often 50 or 60 percent below what we had been seeing along the Croatian coast.
We had also learned, through a few ChatGPT searches, that Croatian and Bosnian are mutually understandable enough that our collection of terrible Croatian phrases would travel just fine. In reality, the widespread good English made this largely unnecessary, but I still managed to "Dobar dan" my share of Bosnians.
Our first stop was Kravica Waterfall.
It was fantastic.
There are restaurants, changing areas and a fair amount of infrastructure around the falls, so it is not exactly some undiscovered swimming hole. But it is hard to complain too much about commercialization while standing in a spectacular turquoise pool underneath a huge curtain of waterfalls.
The swim was one of the highlights of the entire trip.
We headed off to lunch in blagaj, which was great until trying to get the last ½ mile from the parking attendant to the restaurant. Getting in was slightly nerve-racking. At one point I found myself reversing down a narrow one-lane road with shops and stalls seemingly inches from both sides of the car. This is precisely the sort of thing that feels like a terrible idea while it is happening and becomes a fun travel story approximately 15 minutes later
Then we sat down beside the Buna River and immediately forgot about the parking.
Lunch in Blagaj was special. We ate grilled red trout and Cevapi beside water so clear and cold that it almost looked artificial, with enormous cliffs rising directly above us. Tucked beneath those cliffs is the famous Blagaj Tekke, a centuries-old Dervish retreat built beside the source of the Buna.
It was also where the name "Herzegovina" started making much more sense to us.
The region's name ultimately comes from Stjepan Kosaca, a powerful 15th-century nobleman who adopted the title herceg, derived from the German ‘Herzog’ - duke. Seems that the people started calling his territory after his title and gradually became known as Herzegovina.
It is one of those little pieces of history that turns a word on a map into something real.
We walked around Blagaj for a while, looked up at the cliffs and ruins, and then continued on to Mostar.
Mostar itself was interesting in a different way.
The old city is beautiful, particularly around the Stari Most. The reconstructed bridge looks almost impossibly elegant as it rises over the Neretva, and knowing that the original survived for centuries before being destroyed during the Bosnian War gives it a weight that photographs do not quite convey.
I think we expected the war to be more visibly present.
There are still damaged buildings and reminders if you look for them, and the political and ethnic divisions did not disappear simply because buildings were rebuilt. But the overwhelming impression was not of a place trapped in the 1990s.
It was of a city continuing.
People were drinking coffee. Kids were eating ice cream. Tourists were taking too many pictures from the bridge. Shopkeepers were selling souvenirs. Life had absorbed history and kept going.
That may have been the most useful part of the day for all of us.
When you read about the Balkans from far away, the story tends to arrive as a sequence of empires, wars and ethnic conflicts. Romans. Ottomans. Austria/Hungary. Yugoslavia. World wars. Tito. Fracturing. The Bosnian War.
All of that matters.
But then you spend a day swimming under a waterfall, eating trout beside a river, learning why Herzegovina is called Herzegovina, and walking across a bridge that people once destroyed and then decided to build again.
The history becomes less abstract.
A couple of hours later we were driving back toward Split, tired, slightly sunburned and considerably more knowledgeable about a neighboring country than we had been that morning.
It was not some grand expedition. It was just a really good day trip.
But increasingly I think those are the days that justify this strange year we are doing. The kids swam, hiked, crossed a border, heard another language, ate something new and picked up a little piece of Balkan history without anybody announcing that school was now in session.
A great little visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
