The time has arrived to go home, and I am ready. Last night I did watch the football although it was crap game and a terrible advert for ‘soccer’. Argentina had zero shots in 90 minutes and Spain eventually won it in extra time.
I went to investigate the buses to the airport to be prepared for the journey in the morning. Pointless exercise as none of it runs to plan, much like the trains. Thankfully the owner of the hostel gives me a tip about the trolley bus that goes close to the airport for half the price. It works!
The last night in the hostel was such a crap night of sleep that my Fitbit doesn’t even recognise it as sleep. One guy laid in bed watching his phone without any headphones while eating crisps. Another entered at 5.15am and made loads of noise. It was pointless going back to bed.
If I have one observation from this trip, it is that I am too old to be sharing dorm rooms or couchettes. I don’t get the sleep I need to feel healthy the next day.
At the airport, my boarding card doesn’t work because of an unwritten process where I must go to the flight desk to get my passport ‘approved’. The boarding card still doesn’t work so the lad waves me through. Like the trains and buses, this is just chaos. It leads to so much uncertainty that you have to have to turn up ridiculously early to make sure you cope with the curve balls.
Have I enjoyed Bosnia? Not particularly. Interesting place but not somewhere I am keen to return to in a hurry. It is so beautiful but so messed up. Perhaps I am just terminally tired and it suffers from being the final place that I visited. My favourite parts of this trip were probably Warsaw and Munich. Both were really interesting experiences and places. Bratislava was a maybe a bit boring, Ljubljana and Zagreb were interesting but not really somewhere I feel I need to quickly return to. Serbia was edgy, and so big in Belgrade to know much about it.
Overall, I’m glad I made the trip. It feels like a mad two weeks and I am ready to go home and rest.
