Edd's Travels: Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina

Sarajevo is of course the place where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914. If you get up crowd-dodgingly early on a morning, you can walk down to that riverside street corner and stand alone in quiet contemplation on the spot where it happened, and reflect that it pretty much all began here: both World Wars, the Cold War, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, the EU, Brexit, the whole lot. Though obviously the 20th century probably wouldn't have been trouble-free even if Gavrilo Princip had slept through his alarm clock that day.

Each morning here my own alarm clock is the day's first Islamic call to prayer. It arrives en masse: dozens of muezzins, thin reedy amplified voices echoing out across the hillsides surrounding the city, and the effect when they combine is really quite eerie, especially at dawn or at dusk, with city lights flickering under a crescent moon - of course! - and a hazy pink sky.

You can see the whole city from the top of the cable car, but the view from the top is partly obscured by trees and anyway one can't do it any kind of photographic justice without a wide-angle lens. Nonetheless the cable car is worth doing just for the ride itself. It's over a mile in length, so for most of the journey you're sufficiently far from either of the engine rooms that you're effectively gliding in silence.

Much of the old town is given over to tourist tat shops, which are harmless enough, and perhaps the Islamic influence shows in that there aren't too many places there serving alcohol. But you only need to keep going for a few blocks to find some really good bars. Once again I observe that our continental cousins seem to have mastered the art of drinking all evening to the accompaniment of nothing but conversation and laughter. Growing up in England, you assume that fighting, vomiting and yelling are the universal fruits of alcohol worldwide. Nope. It's just us. In fairness the Yanks and Aussies can be just as bad; but then where did they learn it from?

On the whole Sarajevo gets a huge thumbs-up from me, as did Mostar. Indeed it's an overall gold star for Bosnia & Herzegovina, or Benson & Hedges as I am wont to call it after one too many. The bar has been raised for the next country and they'd better not get complacent.