Day 9: Trebinje

The plan for today was to visit Trebinje, a small town around 75 miles south of Mostar. As one of the southernmost towns in Bosnia - being only 20 miles east of Dubrovnik - Trebinje is supposed to be one of the sunniest places in the country. Of course, when we looked at the weather forecast last night we saw that it was due to rain today

Never mind, we set off anyway to make the best of it! As we left Mostar this morning the weather didn't actually look too bad, but after a while we could see that clouds were starting to gather in the distance.

Trebinje is in the Republika Srpska part of Bosnia, so after driving south for a while we crossed the entity border again and began to see a few more Orthodox churches. The quality of the roads also seemed to get a little worse.

The scenery was gorgeous though.

The mountains seemed to be become increasingly rocky the further south we got...

...and despite the cloud, it didn't actually seem to be raining.

We arrived in Trebinje around midday and parked in the centre of town. We walked out into a park, where there was a WW2 monument.

I was excited to find a Trebinje sign in the park too

At the far end of the park there was an Orthodox church...

...and then as we rounded the corner into the old town, we found our first mosque.

The old town in Trebinje is small, but scenic.

I particularly loved this mosque with a tiny minaret.

We were trying to make our way towards a bridge over the river Trebišnjica, which flows through the town.

Our first attempt took us down to a viewpoint which was a dead end, so we had to walk back into the old town and try again.

Eventually we succeeded and crossed the river via a modern bridge.

Although the river level looked a bit high, there didn't seem to have been the same amount of rainfall here as there has been elsewhere in Bosnia this week. The colour of the water was quite clear compared to the murky brown colour of the Neretva in Mostar.

We followed a pleasant footpath along the far side of the river.

We passed a number of waterwheels along the riverbank.

And then we got our first view of Trebinje's most famous sight, the Arslanagić Bridge.

The bridge was built by the Ottomans in the 16th century, because Trebinje was in a strategic location on the route between Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and Constantinople (Istanbul).

The bridge wasn't actually originally built where it stands today, but at another location around 5km away. It was moved during the 1960s, when a hydroelectrical power project on the river meant that it was otherwise going to be submerged.

Looking at the bridge today, you really wouldn't know that it hadn't always stood here.

It's hard in the photos to convey just how big the bridge is. It felt very steep when we were crossing it. You could see that there would once have been stepped ridges in the stone to make it easier to cross - as there are on the newly rebuilt bridge in Mostar - but that with time they had been worn away.

You can maybe get an idea of the size from this photo if you can make out a group of people crossing it (walking above the second big arch).

Once we'd finished admiring the bridge we walked back towards the old town...

...and got a final view of the bridge from a distance.

Then we chose a restaurant in the old town for our first meal out since being ill. We found one that looked nice but the second we walked in we could smell that it was full of people smoking. I asked the waiter if there was a non-smoking area we could sit and he just laughed, saying "everyone smokes everywhere here". I do remember it being the same when we visited Serbia 10 years ago

We made the best of it and enjoyed the food anyway. I had spaghetti bolognese...

...while Tim had goulash.

We both had a drink and a coffee after the meal too, plus some extra bread, and the total bill came to 43 KM... which works out as £18.40 That may be the cheapest meal we've had in the whole of Bosnia.

Afterwards we just had time for a final stroll around town before getting back in the car for the 2-hour drive back to Mostar.

On the way to Trebinje we'd made a point of following road signs rather than necessary sticking to the route suggested by my maps app. On the way back I forgot about that and followed the app directions for the shortest route, which resulted in us ending up on a road which was somewhat narrower than I expected.

To clarify - this was marked and labelled as a main road on the map - we've already learned to avoid any roads not marked as "main", which have a nasty habit of running out of tarmac after the first few kilometres. This one was at least surfaced the whole way, just narrow.