Wednesday, September 26th.  We left Korcula on a ferry that was big enough to hold our bus.  It was about a half hour ride but we sat in the bus the entire time.  I can't imagine the US ferries letting that happen but since we were on a bus and it needed to get off the ferry as soon as possible, we weren't allowed out of it.  That was okay but we had absolutely no view and when the driver, Petar, shut the bus off, we had no air circulation either.  He opened both doors but it didn't help much.  Especially in the back of the bus where we'd been sitting.  We survived it, though, and set off for Mostar, Bosnia.

Three border crossings today, from Croatia into Bosnia, then back to Croatia and then back to Bosnia.  The third border crossing took about a half hour.  Imagine an area about the size of the Nature Center parking lot, or one smaller than a grocery store parking lot, for people who don't know what the Nature Center lot looks like.  Anyway, an area that size with about 8 or 9 tour busses and 6-7 tanker trucks.  The border crossing buildings were adjacent to a distribution area for the tankers.  It was wall to wall vehicles.  We were wrapped up in watching the border guards have a dog search one of the other busses but we didn't get to see if it found anything because we were underway again.  Bosnia is very dry, mountainous.  I don't know how to describe it actually.  The "hills" as we'd call them, do not have a lot of vegetation on them.  Mainly shrubs, not many tall trees.  The closer we got to Mostar, the more war damage we saw.  We decided that we could only take so many pictures of bombed out buildings.  It's very sad to see the bullet holes and shrapnel holes and gutted structures.  There is a very large cross on top of the hill overlooking the city.  It's much bigger than the one on Table Rock.  Our guide told us that there was a fortress there that has since been destroyed and that is where the tanks were that shelled the city.  The local guide called it a sniper's nest.  The cross was built to commemorate the lives lost in the war.

Mostar had a bridge that was built in 1566, I think it was, and it was the first thing bombed in the war. It's been rebuilt and looks exactly like the original one.  We walked across it.  It's very steep and the limestone steps are smooth like marble.  It's about 65 feet to the river below it and sometimes young men will jump from it if tourists will pay them to do it.  We went to a small military cemetery on our city walk.  It was sad to see all the tombstones with the dates ending in 1993.  A few in 1995, but not many.  Some of the buildings have been repaired on the outside but they have no money to fix the inside so they are vacant.

We had a great dinner in a restaurant right on the river.  The day was very warm but a breeze came up and it was nice walking back to the hotel.

But! Beverly and some others went to the local McDonald's this morning (Thursday) to get coffee and said it had much better pastries than any McD's here in the US.

It was back on the bus this morning to drive to Dubrovnik, Croatia.  We stopped at a small town to see the headstones from the 1600's,  They are very large white structures and have carvings in them of warriors using bows and arrows.  We thought they looked like something that the Romans might have built but it was the Ottoman empire here during that time (the Turks).  We had a walking tour of the town and then ate lunch at a restaurant here where the woman chef had laid out a huge buffet of Bosnian dishes that she had made from scratch this morning.  It was excellent, probably the best food we've had on the trip.  And the baklava dessert was to die for. 

Back on the bus.  It took us about an hour and a half to reach the Bosnia-Croatia border to cross back into Croatia, and 45 minutes to make it through both checkpoints.  After crossing another steep set of mountains, we saw the Adriatic Sea again.  Quite a number of islands off the coast.  We're staying at the Aquarius hotel tonight and tomorrow night here in Dubrovnik.

More tomorrow.