Travels with David: Asia, Africa and The Balkans

Bosnia's short coastline

Even for the Balkans, a region with more than its fair share of crazy national borders, it’s an oddity—a twelve-mile stretch of Bosnia on the Adriatic coast separating Croatia’s top tourist destination, Dubrovnik, from the rest of the country.
As with most territorial issues in the Balkans, Bosnia’s short coastline is a quirk of history, the outcome of conflicts between the Ottoman, Habsburg and Venetian empires, and Venice’s main trading rival, the Republic of Dubrovnik.
Bosnia is hardly a maritime nation. It has no navy or merchant fleet. But since it gained independence in 1995, it has enticed travelers on the coast road to Dubrovnik to stop, shop, eat and sleep at its only port, Neum, population 3,000.
That commercial advantage ended in 2023, when Croatia completed construction of the 1.5-mile Pelješac Bridge. It spans the channel from the mainland to the Pelješac peninsula, where new access roads and tunnels connect with the Dubrovnik road. It adds a few miles to the trip, but travelers avoid two border crossings.  

Bosnia: A work in progress

After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnia was torn apart by ethnic conflict, a three-way war between Serbs (mostly Eastern Orthodox), Croats (Roman Catholic) and Muslim Bosniaks. It was not until the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men at Srebrenica and TV coverage of the siege of Sarajevo horrified the world that NATO stepped in, bombed Bosnian Serb positions, and forced their leadership to the negotiating table. Because many were driven from their homes in mixed communities, the Dayton Accord created two Bosnias—the Serb-majority north and east (Republika Srpska) and the central and southern regions, with a Bosniak majority and Croat minority (the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina).
The chair of the country’s presidency rotates between the three ethnic groups. The currency uses both the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, and bills feature the figureheads of both Bosniaks and Serbs.  Depending on where you are, the name of a town or village on a roadside sign is first in Roman or Cyrillic. License plates use only letters that are in both alphabets.
Such well-intentioned changes are largely symbolic because the past looms large. A bloody civil war still lives in the memories of almost everyone over the age of 30.  Communities that were once ethnically mixed are now dominated by one group. Two governments compete for power and resources. As a country, Bosnia is very much a work-in-progress.

Croatia: Cheese hunting on Pag Island

The long, skinny island of Pag on Croatia’s Adriatic coast, historically a center of the salt industry, is famous for its sheep’s milk cheese.
Salt has been produced in the region for more than one thousand years, but the industry could be even older, dating from Roman times.  The basic process of salt extraction has not changed much. Sea water is channeled into shallow pools which are closed off. Over time, exposed to the sun and wind, the water evaporates, and the salt begins to crystallize and settle.
Salt was valued not only as a seasoning but because if its ability to preserve food.  From the 12th to the 14th centuries, the Venetian Empire and the rulers of Croatia and Hungary fought for control of Pag and other islands. At the height of the industry, Pag had nine salt warehouses. One of the remaining ones houses the salt museum. 
After the tour, Stephanie and I went in search of the cheese. It owes its distinctive flavor to the topography and climate. In winter, a strong, cool, dry wind from the coastal mountain range picks up salt water and scatters a white salty dust across the rocky hills. Pag's sheep graze freely, giving their milk a distinctive salty taste that is preserved in the cheese.
Just around the corner from the museum, we found Teresa who invited us into her kitchen where she makes the cheese.

Albania's bunker mentality

One of the legacies of Albania’s communist era are concrete bunkers. Around 175,000 were constructed all over the country. They range in size from small, shallow bunkers for a couple of soldiers to massive underground complexes with rooms, corridors and heating, electrical and water systems. Although the regime sometimes put out the line that the Americans or NATO were planning to invade, it was likely more scared of the Soviet Union. Albania broke with Moscow in the 1960s and allied with China. Its leader Enver Hoxha refused to reimburse Moscow for all the military hardware sent since the end of World War II. I guess he feared that the Soviets would send in the repo squad. The bunkers would be the first line of defense. But no one ever bothered to invade.

Albania: No hippies, please

For half a century after World War II, Albania was ruled by a communist regime so paranoid that its leaders believed that even the Soviet Union and China had sold out to capitalism. Albania zealously guarded its borders to stop anyone from leaving the socialist paradise, and to closely control anyone crazy enough to want to visit. Among those who were not welcome were, to quote Albania’s leader Enver Hoxha, “enemies, spies, hippie tourists and other vagabonds.” The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Europe, the bible for cheap travel, offered guidance on entry regulations for Eastern Bloc countries. For Albania, it had just two words, “Forget it.”

Upscale beef language

After Turkish investors backed out, the first international hotel in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek officially became a “Joint Kyrgyz-Malaysian Venture.” Because English is widely spoken in Malaysia, you’d expect the new foreign partner to have tidied up the English grammar and spelling on the hotel’s printed materials. No way. The room service menu featured stewen rice, humburger and domestics pie.  Or you could go downstairs to the restaurant for “beef language.”

This is how Russians live?

As the train pulled out of Kazakhstan’s capital Astana, Valery opened the first bottle of cognac and was figuring out how much alcohol our compartment would need for the 15-hour overnight trip.  It was only 4:30 p.m. and, with several hours of daylight left, I wanted to look out of the window, not drink.  But to be sociable, I agreed to a couple of shots.  As the evening wore on and the alcohol took its toll, the conversation became more animated and difficult to follow. The next morning, as the train neared Kostanai, Valery opened a bottle of beer and offered me another. “Now you know kak russkiye zhivut (how Russians live),” he said, with a smile.  I wanted to say I hoped not all Russians lived that way but recognized the sincerity of the hospitality.  It was another warm memory of a cold winter in Kazakhstan.  

Soviet gerrymandering

Before the Soviet era, there were no national borders between the peoples of Centra Asia, and identity was defined by religion, family, clan and place. The Soviets attempted to counter pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic tendencies by constructing nationalities, giving each a defined territory with national borders, along with a ready-made history, language, culture and ethnic profile.  Your loyalty was no longer to your tribe, village or faith, but to your nationality as a Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen or Uzbek and to its Soviet Socialist Republic or SSR. For three quarters of a century, internal borders between the SSRs made little difference in the daily lives of people. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when each SSR became an independent country, that the notional boundaries became national borders. In border regions, nomadic families were no longer free to move their herds between winter and summer pastures; some arable farmers could not reach their wells or found their irrigation ditches cut. Buses stopped at the border and people could no longer travel easily to visit relatives or trade or shop on the market.

Lost in Stanland

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 gave us fourteen new countries (plus Russia) including the five “stans” of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. We can be grateful the Soviet Union did not break up any further, or we would have to deal with Bashkortostan, Dagestan, and Tatarstan, all now Russian republics. From the mid-1990s, I faced the challenge of explaining my travels in Central Asia to colleagues, students, and friends. You would have thought the conflict in Afghanistan would have focused the attention of Westerners on the countries next door, but unfortunately it hasn’t. Just as medieval European maps tagged vast regions of Africa and Asia as terra incognita, unknown land, the five Central Asian republics are often a geographical blank between Afghanistan and Pakistan to the west and China to the east. To many, my travels might as well have been on another planet. I had simply been in “Stanland.”

From southern Kyrgyzstan to suburban Maryland

On Christmas Eve 1995, my wife, Stephanie, picked me up at Washington’s Dulles airport. After almost a month in Central Asia, I looked forward to returning to the United States. Instead, I experienced, for the first time in my life, reverse culture shock. One of the blessings—but also one of the curses—of international air travel is that in the space of a few hours (or, in my case, about forty hours) you are transported from one world to another. The place you leave and the place where you arrive differ not only in the predictable ways—the skin color and features of the people, the landscape, architecture, language, food, and money. More fundamentally, the everyday concerns of people are usually completely different. My first experience working in a developing country made a deep impression.