Anatomy of a Perfect Travel Day: New Years in Mostar, Herzegovina

I have let my feelings known regarding off season travel (I love it), and nowhere has reinforced my opinion of this more than Mostar, Herzegovina.  Walking through Mostar’s Stari Grad, it’s clear why the place is known to become such a hot tourist mess in the Summer.  The combination of the medieval atmosphere with cheap prices and great food has doomed many places once off the beaten path (looking at you, all of Croatia), and Herzegovina’s largest city is no different.  Day tour buses come in droves from Dubrovnik or Split from Spring to Fall – allowing tourists to spend a couple of hours in Mostar before returning to greater relative comfort  and development on the Adriatic.

I’ve been captivated by the city and it’s most famous landmark, the Stari Most (or Old Bridge) for as long as I’ve known of its existence.  It graces the cover of just about every book on the Balkans ever written, from Rebecca West’s pioneering work of travel nonfiction, “Black Lamb, Grey Falcon”, to the latest edition of the Lonely Planet’s guide to Southeastern Europe.  But this captivation is not unique to me, especially in recent years.  More and more tourists flock to the area, morphing it into a less urban, more Slavic version of Istanbul during the high season.

When I was planning our trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina, I feared we would be too late for Mostar.  That the tourists had come, leaving only an artifice of what Mostar had been (not unlike the Dzveli Tbilisi neighborhood of Georgia’s capital).  Luckily for us, we were there on New Years Eve, and not a single other soul was there to join us.

True, some things were closed due to the holiday.  But those that were still open for business were all the more eager to interact with us.  Maybe what I needed from Mostar was real human interaction, rather than another 2 Euro to climb yet another medieval tower.  We got that human interaction all around Mostar – from the Adele-loving Muslim woman who was so curious about life in Seattle (we think she was savvy to the fact that we weren’t brothers or traveling as friends), to the two burly, very well-dressed gentlemen wanting us to drink with them to ring in the New Year (who most definitely thought we were traveling just as friends).  

There was a genuine friendliness to the people in this still very segregated city, and I felt truly privileged to be able to explore it at my own leisure, without throngs of day trippers from the Adriatic coast.

Something felt very organic about waking up in Mostar at 6am on New Years Day.  We trundled ourselves out of the our hotel, and ambled the short distance to the Stari Most.  The Stari Grad was truly at its most hypnotic, under a stillness uncharacteristic of the fiery Balkans.

Our day and a half in the city was one of those magical travel eclipses when everything just feels like perfection, is easy, maybe even normal.  Everything goes to plan, or what doesn’t go to plan ends up better than original.  It re-affirms our love for travel (which was needed, seeing as later in the day our bus would break down and we’d have to hitchhike half the way back to Sarajevo).

So, I guess this post is less about Mostar than about those serendipitous instances of alignment of perfect travel conditions.  And it is because of these days that we continue to travel – it’s just the best damn drug there is.

So yeah, Mostar is great, too.  For more logistical information (as opposed to my waxing poetic about travel) about traveling in the area, you can read my post about it here.

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