Travel to Bosnia

After driving for over two hours on a bus that stank of stale cigarettes and which had no bathroom, if one excluded the plastic bucket behind the driver’s seat, Tony Martin’s bladder was crying for relief. Some people who have quit smoking are so repulsed by the smell of cigarettes that they can get physically ill. Luckily he wasn’t one of them, because the vast majority of the men, women and children he’d met so far in Bosnia all smelled of cigarettes. He’d been a smoker himself earlier in life, but he never left the house without mints or breath spray. Years of smoking had shortened his breath noticeably and today he was really feeling it. The day before, he’d played soccer with some kids he’d met in Mostar, probably the first time he’d done so in twenty years. Consequently, his entire body was full of tiny aches and pains.

He glanced out the window at a slate gray sky and ominous clouds. He knew the Bosnian word for rooms was Sobe, so when they passed the hand-painted sign by the side of the road reading: “Sobe, 5 k” he knew relief was in sight. The past two hours had been among the most challenging of the entire trip. This bunch was harder to get through to than any of the others, and that included those paranoid old ladies in Tuzla who looked at him like he was some kind of serial killer. But like most cases, the greater the effort the greater the reward and this group of “pilgrims” as he called them, was absolutely priceless in both its ethnic and its religious make-up; it was like a microcosm of the entire former Yugoslavia on one bus. That is, of course, assuming his assumptions regarding their nationalities were correct. The rest stop ahead should be an ideal spot to test his guesses about them. It wo...

... middle of paper ...

... and never quite allowed him to completely relax. As a child, his grandmother had told him stories about Eastern Europe during WWII, saying that land where much blood had been spilt gave off an aura, a palpable sensation of its own. He now understood precisely what she meant. Make no mistake though, these folks were made from strong stuff. First they managed to successfully fight off Hitler during World War II then for half a century, Tito kept his Yugoslavia the most independent of all the Communist block countries. Tito was a real piece of work and a damn cheeky bastard! He famously told Joseph Stalin to back off in a letter:

From Tito to Stalin -

“Please stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them. If you don’t stop sending assassins, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I promise you I won’t have to send a second.”

—Josip Broz Tito