It is a comfortable and quite scenic train ride through the mountains south from Sarajevo. The stations are grotty but the coach is fine. Seven dollars. If you take it sit on the left side.

The town of Mostar strings along both sides of a little fast moving river just to the south of the high mountains. CAMarchand tells me that the word “Balkan” comes from the Ottoman word for mountain.

The old town is 100 percent of why someone would come here. It covers a surprisingly large pedestrian only area and it is clean and attractive. The closer you get to the famous old Ottoman bridge the more it is given over to tourist trinkets and venues.

There is not much charm outside of the old town. Plenty of dreary communist housing, crumble and grit. Everyone smokes cigarettes constantly and so the populace look old and weather beaten and tired.

Mostar, like Sarajevo was besieged and seriously damaged during the Bosnian war of the 1990’s. The old bridge dating from the early 1500’s was destroyed but has been rebuilt with international money. Unfortunately, after the war Mostar fell into a political/administrative limbo delaying their recovery. There are still plenty of war damaged buildings.

Besides the damaged buildings still sitting around there is something else wrong with this city. There are many sites where the construction of some building has been started and then abandoned. Including a very large Marriott hotel, half-finished and derelict.

If for some reason you would ever come here, like me you might be surprised to find that there are some (very few) high-quality hotels and restaurants that are amazingly cheap.

One of the hardest things I have to do travelling around as I do is to stay beyond arm’s length of things like this.

Well, this and my last few posts concludes my look into the war and the recovery in Bosinia. Overall, this is still a poor, fragmented country. And the deep divisions and the ongoing animosities look like they may take decades more to fade away.

My next destination is for a real vacation down on the Adriatic coast just south of Split. I’ll check in from there.