I’ve decided to give in to my mother’s nagging and start a travel blog for my Balkans backpacking trip this summer. Currently, I’m working for a month in Zenica, Bosnia, with other Swarthmore students at a summer program for kids; our group blog can be found at swatbosniaproject.blogspot.com. I’ll return to this blog when I start traveling on my own in two weeks, for now, a brief account of my 1-night trip to Tuzla (sort of) is below.
At the Zenica bus station I purchased a return ticket to Tuzla and was told to board at gate 3. So, seeing that gate 3’s sign included the Zenica-Tuzla 16:40 bus, I got on board the bus and happily napped and stared out the window until it arrived in its final destination of…Odzak. Oops.
Odzak is a small town near the Croatian border with not much going on, quite a ways off from the Zenica-Tuzla route and certainly not Bosnia’s 3rd largest city. It was now 7pm and there were no more buses out of Odzak until the next morning at 8am. Of course, to convey this to me as I stood there embarrassed at my dumb mistake of not having confirmed the bus’s destination with the driver before boarding, the driver had to find a kid who spoke English. The kid’s friend called his mother who said the hotel had rooms for 30 marks (I had arranged a room in Tuzla for 25, so that was doable) and they brought me to the hotel, where they wanted 56 marks. The very nice kid persuaded them to give me the (real?) price of 30 marks and I had air conditioning for the first time since arriving in Bosnia. I went out to find some fruit to eat and ended up chatting in broken German with some people at the Hell Bar (next to Shadow Bar). The people I talked to considered themselves more Croatian than Bosnian, from what I gathered, and I picked up on a little hostility towards Bosnian Muslims. Then there was a fabulous rain storm and lightening show, I think the same storm system that disrupted the Eurocup coverage 2 days earlier in Austria.
The next morning I got on the 8am bus to Gradacac where I could get a bus to Tuzla, and was in Tuzla by 10:30am. The ride was through beautiful countryside and I ended up not minding my detour at all (though if it had been more expensive I surely would have). In Tuzla I proceeded as planned to explore the old town, which is much larger than Zenica’s, and headed for the man-made naturally salty lake that the mayor engineered a few years ago to increase tourism to Tuzla. It was kind of strange, with a rocky “beach” around the pair of concrete-bordered “lakes.” I proceeded to spend 4 hours getting fabulously and unevenly sunburned (I think I missed my knees with the sunscreen, and I could have used a higher SPF at that). I wandered a little more and tried Tuzla’s take on cevapi. The cevapi themselves were better than Zenica’s, which in turn are better than my memory of Sarajevo’s, but the bread was a little too greasy compared to the perfect amount of grease found on Zenica’s cevapi bread.
At the Tuzla bus station I made sure to ask multiple people about the bus to Zenica.
