We’re Not In Kansas anymore
Dogs managing the afternoon commute in the Republika Srbska, Bosnia and Hercegovina
Up to this point, we’ve been walking a well-trod path. Even the adventures have been strange roads or unknown alleys in countries where we basically know and trust the rules and feel confident we can navigate the systems.
This was the first week where that was different. There are journal entries that might become blog posts about how it felt to return to the Balkans, to stumble through the language I spent so many hours trying to master, and to eat foods I once loved and have lived on the edge of my memory.
This is not that post.
This is about the first times I have been scared on this trip - the first times I realized that I’m not an invincible single 20 year old, but a 40 something with my wife and kids.
A beautiful place to snap one’s ankle and fall to one’s death
We left the comfortable touristy embrace of Dubrovnik and its surroundings for the rural island of Sipan (pronounced shi-pan). We took the ferry to its second-largest village, where we stayed at a converted olive mill on top of a massive hill. Exploring the nooks and crannies of the village and the making our way to the surrounding hilltop churches was a fine way to spend a few days. On one, not particularly difficult path, I stumbled and twisted my ankle.
It wasn’t bad, and I barely limped for a few minutes. But it made me aware of how far I was from a medical system I understood. My cell phone wasn’t working there, and I recognized how long it would be to hobble/be carried back to a place where it would work. And I remembered that I was no longer sure who even to call.
We hiked down to the valley and up to that church. Seriously.
When I planned out the Dubrovnik to Sarajevo part of the trip, I was worried about COVID tests and rental cars across borders. I did not spend a single moment thinking about the actual drive, having made the trip dozens of times. What I did not do is look at a map.
The seven-passenger van I rented was not going to carry the seven of us and our stuff (a deliberate experiment when there was a backup option to see what we needed later in the trip), so we ended up in a stick-shift nine-seater. To say that it was ill-suited to the small and windy roads we took is an understatement. Even getting gas was an minor adventure (it was a diesel, you have to open the driver’s door to get the gas cap open, and the gas stations are all one-way, don’t take cards at the pump, blah, blah).
We have a potential addition to our crew after a stop
All of that was par for the course - a potentially irritating and embaressing set of mix-ups that just make us Americans abroad.
It wasn’t until we got on the road to Sarajevo, and I saw the cyrillic letters at the border that I realized the route google had chosen for us was through very rural Republika Srbska. Rather than go through the history of the 1990s Yugoslav war, let’s just say as an American it would be like travelling through very rural Mississippi as a Yankee in the 1960s. I live in Kentucky, so seeing the Serbian flags waving, registered to me, but approximately on the level that seeing a Confederate flag does - I think about it, am irritated, and move on.
It wasn’t until we pulled off the road into a small town in search of a bathroom and I saw the celebratory pictures of convicted war criminal Mladko Radic that I really thought I might have made a mistake. Americans are…not entirely welcome. The spike of fear I felt but did not express when I saw a police car on the corner pull out behind us was intense. Almost bottoming out the van on a particularly steep hill did not improve my state of mind.
GPS sent us where my judgement would not have
I’m the first to recognize that the very absence of this kind of threat in my daily life or that of my family is a privilege beyond price. As is usually the case, the people we met at the gas station we perfectly nice, if slightly less amused with my attempts at their language than I was used to.
My relief at seeing the much changed but still familiar landscape of Sarajevo several hours later was profound.
The radar to anticipate and respond to such things is a muscle I’m going to have to redevelop as we go.
My family in my former home
