Day 8: Mostar

The weather forecast was not looking very bright for today, but the morning was forecast to be slightly drier than the afternoon. We set the alarm for 8 so we could make a relatively prompt start to the day and hopefully avoid the worst of the storms.

The apartment we're staying in is in a residential area, on the eastern side of the river Neretva which flows through the city. Mostar is effectively divided by the river, with the area on the western side of the river being predominantly inhabited by Croats, while the eastern side is predominantly Bosnian Muslim. Our first task was to navigate our way down out of our suburb, towards the river and the old town.

We followed what felt like a rabbit warren of steep streets and eventually made it down to a larger, flatter road.

We passed the cemetery of a mosque and caught sight of a church just behind it; a reminder of how multicultural Bosnia is.

Mostar was one of the towns in Bosnia which suffered most during the Bosnian war of the 1990s and we soon realised that evidence of that is still very visible today.

We passed plenty of buildings which haven't been restored and rebuilt, along with signs warning people to keep out in case they collapsed.

Of course, lots of the town has been rebuilt and restored and we did encounter many beautiful buildings...

...it's just that sometimes the beautiful buildings are only a street away from the damaged ones.

We strolled down towards the historic Ottoman market area.

It wasn't too busy on a damp Saturday morning in October, but I can imagine that it would be jam-packed during the main summer season!

It's a shame I didn't feel like a drink because there were cafes on this side of the river advertising Aperol Spritz for 7km (£3!).

From here it was only a matter of minutes before we reached what I'd come to Mostar to see: the famous bridge  

The old bridge in Mostar was built by the Ottomans in the 16th century. Its high arch made it an architectural masterpiece at the time. 

The original bridge was destroyed during the war in 1993, but has since been completely rebuilt. 

I hadn't appreciated until we started walking over the bridge quite how enormous the arch of it is. It's really quite steep to walk up, though there are rails to hold on to which definitely help

The river Neretva itself wasn't looking its best today after all the rain. This is the river which has been responsible for all the flooding further north.

Fortunately, it looks like Mostar will escape without flooding.

Once we'd crossed the river we soon spotted another, much smaller bridge.

This is the so-called Kriva Ćuprija (crooked bridge), which is the oldest bridge in Mostar. 

We walked along the western side of the river for a while, before crossing back over on a more modern bridge.

The advantage of this was that we could admire the old bridge from a distance.

And it really was a very beautiful view

We could feel it was starting to spot with rain by this point, so we started making our way back up through little streets towards the apartment.

We may not have had perfect weather in Mostar but I'm very glad that we made it here and saw the bridge