Author: 2suitcasesfor2years

Tashkent, Uzbekistan: Historic and Cosmopolitan or Surprisingly Fascinating & Wonderful

| 2suitcasesfor2years

Uzbekistan is having its moment after years of slowly simmering interest; it’s exploding into a full-fledged tourist boom. It is exponentially growing from 1 million tourists in 2016 to almost 13 million in 2026, and with a modern infrastructure that includes the newly operating “Jaloliddin Manguberdi,” a high-speed electric train that will whisk passengers 1,020km (630 mi) across the country from Tashkent to Khiva in 7.5 hours with stops in Samarkand, Bukhara, and Urgench. The country is quickly becoming Central Asia’s most intriguing Silk Road destination, and with the recent opening of the state-of-the-art Islamic Civilization Center, Islom Sivilizatsiyasi Markazi, in March 2026, Tashkent will be of particular interest for tourists from the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The ATMs at TAS, Tashkent’s International Airport, were conveniently located next to the baggage carousels in the arrivals area, as were signs for YandexGo, the most popular ride-share service in Uzbekistan. Walking away from the ATM with about 2,400,000 Uzbekistani Som, roughly $200.00 at the rate of 1 USD = 12,000 UZS, we felt like newly minted millionaires. We were not able to link a credit card to the YandexGo App, but soon realized a twenty-minute ride across Tashkent to the Hotel Uzbekistanwould only cost 21,000 UZS. Outside the terminal we navigated our way through a gauntlet of taxi hawkers to a sea of ubiquitous white cars. In and of itself, white cars are not unusual in any region where you can cook an egg on a rock during the summer, but the fact that they were mostly American branded Chevrolets, not the ever so popular Japanese cars, was very remarkable. They are the result of a thirty-year-old joint venture between GMC and the Uzbekistan government-owned UzAuto Motors, and steep import tariffs on foreign cars, which has led to Chevrolet producing  95% of the country’s new vehicles.

The Hotel Uzbekistan opened in 1974 when Uzbekistan was still part of the Soviet Union, eight years after a April 1966 earthquake destroyed many of Tashkent’s centuries old historic neighborhoods where the one and two-story homes were made of adobe brick. The catastrophic event left 300,000 people homeless.

The Soviet Union used this crisis to transform Tashkent into a “model Soviet city” with wonderfully wide boulevards, open plazas, and earthquake-resistant buildings, deploying architects and laborers from across its republics to build a “showcase of socialist modernism and multicultural “people’s friendship.” The revival of the city mushroomed after Uzbekistan’s independence in 1991, and continues with a building boom that peppers the city’s modern skyline with construction cranes.

The style of the city’s new buildings constructed right after the earthquake is often referred to as Soviet Brutalist, an architectural style which features the love of concrete, and functionality over grace. And Hotel Uzbekistan was designed to be the centerpiece of the Soviet Union’s vision. For many years the building, with an open book profile designed to resist seismic activity, stood as the country’s tallest building, and was the premier hotel for international delegations to stay and hold conferences.

At the time its seventeenth-floor restaurant overlooked Lenin Square until the colossal statue of the Soviet leader was sent to the scrap yard in 1991 when Uzbekistan regained its independence, and replaced him with an equestrian statue of Amir Temur, an enlightened ruler who united the independent kingdoms of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Urgench during Uzbekistan’s 14th century renaissance, as the country seeks to reclaim its cultural history.

A thumping bass reverberated through the hotel, preventing any attempt of catching an early shuteye. Dressed again, we never intended to be Uzbeki party crashers, but we got caught up in the spirit of a couple’s anniversary celebration and enjoyed watching the band perform for a while. The hotel would be our base for three days to explore Tashkent before joining a group tour to Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand.

By 1970 Uzbekistan’s capital city was mostly rebuilt, and construction of Central Asia’s first subway system, a series of beautiful stations that were also designed to be utilized as bomb shelters in case of emergencies during the Cold War era, was underway.  The next morning, we set out after an early breakfast and worked our way against the morning crush of young professional ascending from the depths of the Amir Temur Hiyoboni station, just a block from our hotel.

The underground tunnel leading to the turnstile offered perfect acoustics for a young Uzbeki busker who played for the commuters. The Tashkent Metro now has four lines, and 50 stations along 70km (44 mi) of track. Rides at the time of our visit cost 1,700 Uzbeki Som (about $0.14 USD), and were easily payable at the turnstile with a tap of our credit cards.

We spent a good part of the morning riding between the stations that encircle central Tashkent, hopping on and off to photograph some stations that were noteworthy for their striking architectural beauty, that often resembled a formal waiting chamber in an elegant palace, before transferring to another line.

We eventually worked our way to the Kosmonavtlar Station, where the walls are beautifully embellished with tile portraits of early Soviet astronauts. Surprisingly, because of their dual use as bomb shelters, photography in the subway stations was banned until 2018.

We also visited the plaza above the station where we viewed another interesting monument to the Soviet Union’s space program, before we made a short excursion to Tashkent’s Museum of Applied Arts, only a few blocks away. Founded in 1937, the museum is housed in the former mansion of an Emperial Russia diplomat and has a rotating collection of over 4,000 Uzbeki decorative handicrafts, with examples of traditional wood carving called O‘ymakorlik, ceramics, embroidery, gold weaving, jewelry and musical instruments. In the museum’s traditional courtyard was a very atmospheric café where we enjoyed coffee.

Before descending back underground we detoured slightly to see a modern interpretation of Islamic architecture represented in the 1970s era facade of the Central Exhibition Hall of the Academy of Arts.

The 1930s built Alisher Navoi Grand Theatre, survivor of the earthquake, features a blend of classic European architecture with traditional Uzbek ornamental styles. Along our route we walked through many of the parks and green spaces that give the city a wonderful ambiance.

Back on the subway we continued on to the Chorsu Station, only a short walk away from the Chorsu Bazaar, Tashkent’s historical central market, whose history goes back 2000 plus years to the founding of Tashkent. The main hall’s futuristic dome, where meats, poultry and dairy products are for sale, dates from the reconstruction of the city after the 1966 earthquake.

After wandering through the rows of clothing merchants, where nothing has a price tag so bargaining is expected, we were enticed by the aroma of slowly grilling kebabs over an outside fire at Especialidad Pinchos. A smile goes a long way when you don’t understand the language and we were quickly seated outside and served a delightful lemon tea. The restaurant was the perfect place to relax and people watch. It felt as if we were in the audience of an old TV sit-com where good-natured chiding was going on, from the quips flying across the open-air restaurant. We mentally supplied the dialog: “Yasmina we are so busy, can you clear the tables faster?” “Now Zarina you might be the golden one and Bobur’s squeeze, but don’t you go telling me how to take care of my side of the cafe!” And so it went, their familiar back and forth continuing the whole time we were there as the women busily tended the day’s lunch crowd.

Wheel barrel vendors selling round, flat disk-shaped non coursed through the shoppers. These loaves of dough are traditionally decorated with a stamping tool called a chekich, before baking. We’ve read many rave reviews about Uzbekistan’s non but have found it’s best enjoyed when fresh out of an oven, as in our opinion it becomes a disappointing “eh” later. It’s definitely worth spending the time to find the central bakers in the market to watch them form the dough and then lean into the tall brick ovens to throw it against the side walls to bake. The result is heavenly.

Stairs rose from the market’s lower level to the gastronomical equivalent of Aladdin’s “Cave of Wonders.” Literally it was like a culinary temple, with vendors freely offering samples, it had us wishing we had rented an apartment with a full kitchen. The quality, variety, and abundance of the foodstuffs were amazing. It was difficult for the cooks in us to resist the temptation to buy a cart full of groceries, but we did and only purchased some dried fruit and pomegranate juice for a snack later.

After leaving the market we crossed the street into the Hastimom Mahalla neighborhood, in the Almazar District and walked along Zarkaynar Street. The lane was recently renovated as part of an effort to revitalize the maze of narrow lanes in the ancient quarter that lies between the Chorsu market and the magnificent new Islamic Civilization Center.

The street was pristine with new historical murals and buildings shining with their new facelifts, but it lost much of its authenticity in the process and felt a little too touristy.  Young boys were enthusiastically kicking a soccer ball back and forth down the lane until a neighborhood buvi, grandmother, put a stop to their raucous play.

Fortunately, as we walked deeper in the mahalla, smaller alleys led to traditional homes still made of adobe brick that share a communal courtyard called a sheriklikli hovli. It was down one off these lanes that we hoped to find Tandyr Samsa V Dome, a small family run bakery in a hovli that is acclaimed for their samsas, a savory pastry filled with meat, chicken or potato, and then baked in a traditional wood-fired clay oven called a tandir. We had a very difficult time finding it. In this labyrinth our mapping app got us close, but eventually we just had to try different lanes until we discovered the right one. Unfortunately, by the time we found the right hovli, baking for the day was over and the family encouraged us to come back earlier on another day. It was very late in the afternoon when we stopped at a small nondescript restaurant, with a plastic pullback sheet as a door, and one low table and cushions on the floor. The owner was delighted we stopped and shared his experience about working the United States for a short time, while serving his many neighborhood customers who came in to get their takeaway orders. Our meal was very simple, just kebabs and non, but it was delicious and memorable.

Afterwards we headed to the Hazrati Imam Complex, an ensemble of buildings around a large plaza that include the16th  century madrasah Barak-Khan, that is now a crafts center, the 19th century Muyi Muborak Madrasah, which now exhibits a collection of ancient Islamic manuscripts, and the Hazrati Imam Mosque completed in 2007.

They were built around the Mausoleum of Hazrat Imam, which had become a pilgrimage site. Hazrati was a brilliant 10th-century polyglot and local locksmith who went by the name of Kaffal al-Shashi before pursuing his religious studies in Baghdad, Mecca and Medina. Upon returning to Tashkent he became one of the town’s first local imams and received the title Hazrat Imam. Beloved, he came to be regarded as the chief spiritual protector and patron of Tashkent.

The complex is one of the few large open spaces in the Almazar District, and it’s a popular spot for local families to bring their children to learn how to ride bikes and fly kites.

Next to the Hazrati Imam Complex is the Islamic Civilization Center, a newly opened museum, “conceived under the vision and leadership of Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev in 2017. The Islamic Civilization Center was envisioned to be more than just a museum, but function as an international hub for science, culture and learning, combining the richest treasures of pre‑Islamic and Islamic heritage of Uzbekistan with modern digital technologies and academic research.” The center’s striking design took inspiration from the architectural masterpieces constructed by the Timurid Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The ICC was not on our radar when we planned our trip to Uzbekistan, but we were delighted to find that the center stays open until 10pm every day, and seeing that the queue for entrance into the museum was very short we spontaneously purchased tickets. Upon entering the building folks were divided into small tour groups determined by the language they spoke and then led through the exhibits with a bilingual guide.

It’s a huge building with over 2,000 historical items, manuscripts, and cultural artifacts on display, 743 of which have been repatriated from international collections, and a 45,000-book research library. It was a fascinating tour that lasted about two hours and ended in the Quran Hall with a dramatic multimedia event where sacred verses of the Quran were projected onto a digitally created night sky in the 65m (213ft) tall dome, directly over the treasured 7th-century Uthman Quran, and a holographic beam of light descends from the heavens to spotlight the manuscript, representing divine revelation.

Though the constitution of Uzbekistan defines the country as a secular state, there are some concerns about how heavily religious freedoms and activities are restricted and monitored by the government in Uzbekistan. The Islamic Civilization Center is part of Uzbekistan’s efforts to reclaim its history and Islamic heritage for the next generation, information which was repressed during the 67 years the country was under the Soviets Union’s control.

Exiting the building just before sunset, we had the opportunity to take some night photos of the dramatically illuminated building before enjoying dinner several blocks away at the Khan Ahmat, an upscale eatery.

The next day we set out to see the landmarks next to our hotel before exploring farther afield – the Palace of International Forums Uzbekistan, is a modern conference hall opened in 2009, marking the 2,200th anniversary of Tashkent, and the 18th anniversary of the country’s independence; the circular shaped State Museum of the Temurids, which houses a collection of artifacts relating to the 14th century ruler Tamerlane; the Yuridik Instituti (the Tashkent State University of Law) housed in a late 19thcentury building. It is one of the few examples in Tashkent of Tzarist Russia Emperial architecture to survive the 1966 earthquake.

Turning the corner past the school we entered Sailgokh Street, a wide, treelined 1km (6/10mi) long, pedestrian-only boulevard that links Amir Timur and Independence Squares, that’s locally known as Broadway. Sunlight reflected through party lights strung across the street that was lined with food stalls and outdoor seating. Behind them students from the university were challenging their professors to games of ping-pong at numerous tables along the sidewalk. Caricature artists whiled away the time waiting for customers to sit in front of their easels as parents watched their young children scoot about in electric toy cars. It’s a popular destination to grab an inexpensive meal or dine at one of the fancier restaurants along the walkway.

Surprisingly on this street in 1928 Tashkent was on the cutting edge of technology, when a crowd had gathered to watch the first-ever telecast showing a moving tram, made with a device called a Telephot, created and patented by Boris Grabovsky, a student at Tashkent University, and the son of the famous Ukrainian poet, Viktor Popov. Unfortunately, by 1930 he was forced by Soviet officials to stop working on television technology.

Farther along was a very attractive small royal palace built in the late-19th century and early Art Nouveau style in 1891.  It was the home of Grand Duke Nicholas Constantinovich who was permanently exiled to Tashkent by the Russian royal family for stealing valuable diamonds from an icon belonging to his mother, so he could lavish extravagant gifts upon his American mistress! Let’s talk about the punishment fitting the crime here. The entrances are flanked by bronze sculptures of deer and hunting dogs, a reflection of the Grand Duke’s passion for hunting. He was by no means a pauper during his punishment, and received a gracious royal stipend which he invested in cotton mills, a soap factory, and the city’s first cinema. To furnish his prison palace he was allowed to bring his collection of Russian and European artworks from St. Petersburg with him into exile. Using profits from his local business ventures he continued to acquire new pieces of European art, rare books, and priceless artifacts. Before his death in 1918, he graciously bequeathed his art collection and palace to the city of Tashkent, to become the foundation for the State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan collection. During the early Soviet era the palace was used as a museum to display his collection but later was transitioned into an after-school activity center for young Soviet Pioneers. Sadly, the palace was closed for renovation when we visited.

Crossing under Sharaf Rashidov Avenue we reached the large reflecting pool of the Mustakillik Fountain in front of the building housing the offices of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, all the fountains we passed in Tashkent in mid-April were off. We can only speculate how stunning they must be when they are shooting water skyward.

A short walk away was Independence Square where more dry waterworks paralleled the Arch of Ezgulik, a 150m (492ft) long archway held aloft by 16 white marble columns and crowned with a beautiful sculpture of three giant storks circling a globe as they soar skyward. Storks are a prominent theme on the top of many important buildings in Uzbekistan, and in Uzbek folklore they symbolize humanism, peace and prosperity.

Beyond the arch, down a narrow evergreen-lined walkway, was the Monument of Independence, a tall obelisk with a globe atop it, the map of Uzbekistan chiseled into its center. At the base of the monument is a statue of an Uzbek woman cradling a baby, called the Happy Mother that “symbolizes the Motherland, national rebirth, and hope for a prosperous future for the next generation.”

Continuing on we entered Memorial Square where an elegant, long, open-sided wooden building stood, surrounded by traditional Navoi-style carved wooden pillars, called the Memory Corridor. It holds Memory Books which contain the names, inscribed in gold lettering, of over 400,000 Uzbek soldiers who died during World War II.

Across from it was a large statue called the Grieving Mother that overlooked an eternal flame. It was a very somber memorial and hardly a whisper could be heard from the observers.

Progressing along Sharaf Rashidov Avenue toward the Monument to “Courage,” we passed the Turkistan Concert Hall, where a stylized statue of a majestic stork is perched on top of a tall column.

Along the way we noticed that everywhere we walked there was a definite sense of “pride in ownership.” The city was immaculately clean. Street sweepers with traditional brooms called supurgi, made with bundles of twigs tied to a wooden handle, were always out and about, as were the city’s landscapers who seemed to be everywhere planting decorative flower beds and pruning. When they were done in one area, they packed up their tools and brooms and hopped onto a city bus to go to the next location needing tending.

The Monument to “Courage” is a gigantic statue of a family, erected in 1976 on the tenth anniversary of the April 1966 earthquake that commemorates the victims, as well as collective efforts of Tashkent’s survivors and the thousands of workers who arrived from across the Soviet Union to rebuild the city from the rubble. At the foot of the sculpture is a recreated fissure in the earth’s crust that is believed to be directly above the epicenter of the 5.2 magnitude earthquake that rattled the earth for 11 seconds and had nearly 1,000 aftershocks. Behind the statue is a wall of 14 stelae with stylized bronze bas-relief sculptures depicting the reconstruction efforts of the workers and volunteers who rebuilt Tashkent, from literally the ground up. 

A sidewalk next to the stelae leads to Museum of Olympic Glory and crosses over a bridge above the scenic Anchor Canal as it weaves through a quiet woodland before the museum.

Walking from Independence Square along Sharaf Rashidov Avenue to the Monument of Courage, and then following Navoi Avenue, and Mustaqillik Ave back to our hotel, the new design of this “model Soviet city” was particularly apparent with the wide treelined streets, and tall apartment buildings well-spaced apart.

On our last full day in Tashkent we took advantage of multiple inexpensive YandexGo rides and zipped across the city to various destinations. Our first stop, which we had passed earlier in the week, was Magic City Park, an open-air shopping and entertainment complex, that as the name suggests borrows heavily from the mouse kingdom, and seemed very out-of-place in downtown Tashkent. Mid-morning, we had the place almost entirely to ourselves, except for a girl’s dance group practicing their routine in traditional dress.

It was a quiet morning, and we enjoyed walking down a colorful painted and umbrella- covered street, making folks smile as we hammed it up in the mouth of Jaws!

Behind Magic City is Milliy Bog, a large open area national park with statues of important Uzbeks along lanes that lead to the Tashkent Museum of State History; the 19th century Abul-kasim Sheikh Madrasah, which once held a sacred relic of the Prophet Muhammad; the Legislative Chamber of the Oliy Majlis; the Friendship of the Nations concert hall; and the Shomakhmudovs Monument, erected in 1982, as a symbol of wartime generosity and unity.

The monument commemorates a local blacksmith, Shaakhmed Shamakhmudov, and his wife, Bahri Akramova, who during World War II adopted 15 orphaned children of various ethnicities. They were only a small portion of the over one million refugees evacuated from the Soviet Union to Uzbekistan to receive food and shelter, an event that caused many to call it “the city of bread.”

From there we traveled far across Tashkent to a beautiful park across from the Tashkent Television Tower that hosts the Museum of Victims of Political Repression. Along our route we passed many examples of older apartment buildings designed with that harsh “Soviet Brutalism” ethos, and only softened by Uzbek tile murals at both ends.

Life in Uzbekistan during Russian times was not easy and the museum documents the hardships and atrocities committed against the Uzbek people, starting with Imperial Russia’s colonization of the country, where the best farmland was given to Russian settlers, through the communist Soviet Union era. Many exhibits draw on information culled from the former KGB archives.

The blue domes of the museum purposely resemble an ancient mausoleum as the building is constructed over the site where the Soviets executed “enemies of the people” during the 1930s. Across the country over 100,000 people were arrested, and over 13,000 of them were shot. Trees in the park symbolically come from the gulags around the country where folks were imprisoned. During World War II ethnic groups that allegedly collaborated with the Soviet Union’s enemies were deported en mass to Siberia.

Outside, the man-made river that runs through the park is symbolically shaped like a Greek meander, to symbolize the eternal flow of life. Under the park’s tall rotunda is a nephrite tomb with the inscription in Arabic, English and Uzbek: “The memory of those who died for their country will live forever.”

Across the busy road was the Tashkent Television Tower, the tallest freestanding tower with a height of 375m (1,230ft) in Central Asia since its opening in 1985. To get to the elevators that take you up to an observation deck and revolving panoramic restaurant at 104m (341ft) above the ground we had to walk along a long corridor lined with models of other significantly tall television towers around the world, a display of archaic boom boxes, an abstract tile mosaic mural and the wax museum likeness of Michael Jackson and maybe the doubleganger of Melania Trump? The restaurant was enjoyable, though expensive for cake and coffee.

However, the views from the observation deck out over metropolitan Tashkent were fantastic, especially where we would see the shadow of the tower cast across the landscape.

We ended our evening and last day in Tashkent with a short walk to Besh Qozon, a tremendously popular, large, fun restaurant that is known for its Plov, Uzbekistan’s celebrated rice dish. The dish is traditionally prepared by men, and at Besh Qozon visitors are allowed to walk through open kitchen and watch the cooking of several different variations of the recipe being stirred in huge caldrons, and the continuous baking of fresh non.

The first known settlers in Uzbekistan were Persian nomads who settled around the oases in the vast Kyzylkum Desert during the in the 8th–6th centuries BC. The desert covers most of central Uzbekistan, stretching from Khiva in the western part of the country to Samarkand in the east. Many of these oases became crucial caravanserais, fortified waystations, to protect the camel caravans along the Silk Road. Others like Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva grew into rich influential regional seats of power called khanates.

 In 329 BC Alexander the Great spent two years marching across Uzbekistan in an exhausting campaign to defeat a Persian rebellion, and only left after what legend claims was a love at first sight romance with a local princess named Roxane led to a strategic alliance with her father. The legend of Roxane remains alive in Uzbekistan, with many distinguished families in the region still claiming their lineage from the marriage of Alexander to Roxane, before he set off to conquer India.

In the west we often associate the history of the Silk Road, a 6,400km (4,000mi) camel tract, with the travels of Marco Pollo across central Asia to China in the 13th century. But its history started much earlier in the 2nd century BC, when a Chinese emperor of the Han dynasty sent imperial envoys across Central Asia to establish formal trade routes and military alliances against the Huns. These agreements of safe passage resulted in silk and porcelain from China reaching the eastern-most regions of the Roman empire by 25 BC. On their return journey caravans took glassware, linen, wool and cotton to the Far East.

The Huns never invaded China, but did conquer much of Central Asia, and established a stronghold in southern Uzbekistan during the 4th and 5th centuries. Trade along the Silk Road ebbed and flowed through invasions and peace. Arab conquests swept through Central Asia, bringing the Arabic language and Islamic religion to oasis cities like Bukhara and Samarkand in the 7th–8th Century AD. The Mongol armies of Genghis Khan brought massive destruction to the region in the early 1200s.

By the late 14th century, the region was the central hub of trade and ideas at the crossroads of the known world at the time, and experiencing a renaissance of art, science, and Islamic architecture under the enlightened rule of Emir Timur. By the 16th century the successive invasions of Turkic and Mongol nomadic tribes had ended. The invaders from 92 tribes, as legend believes, had settled and intermingled with the local folk and established what eventually would be recognized as the Uzbek identity.

By the 16th century Spanish and Portuguese Navigators were mapping maritime trade routes across the Indian Ocean to India, Southeast Asia, the East Indies, and China. These nautical routes from Asia to Europe were significantly faster and safer than transporting goods via the Silk Road and trade on the overland route slowly diminished. Regional caravans still plied the deserts of Central Asia, taking supplies to isolated settlements well into the 1930s, but stopped when a growing road network ended the camel caravan era.

Without this international trade flowing both ways through Uzbekistan the armies of the Tashkent, Bukhara, and Khiva Khanates fell in succession from 1865 to 1873 to the technologically superior firepower amassed against them by Czarist Russian Empire in a drive to secure the region’s natural resources, mostly cotton, for the Russian economy. The Khanates retained figurehead monarchs, but all political and economic decisions were controlled by Moscow, which developed Tashkent as its administrative center. Czarist rule quickly forced all viable agricultural lands to be planted with cotton. This valuable crop, often called “white gold,” was then exported from Uzbekistan to the mills of the Russian homeland on the newly built Trans-Caspian Railway that connected Tashkent to the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea. Train ferries then shuttled the freight cars across the water to Baku, Azerbaijan for the last leg of journey. Trains returned to Uzbekistan with colonizers from Ukraine, Belarus, and regions around St. Petersburg and Moscow, who displaced Uzbeks and were given the best agricultural lands. Until this cotton monoculture was forced upon the farmers in Uzbekistan the country was agriculturally self-sufficient but soon relied on imported grains from other regions in the Russian Empire.

After Russia’s communist revolution ended in 1922, Uzbekistan was incorporated into the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Communist authoritative rule expanded the cotton monoculture with extensive irrigation systems using water diverted from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, the source waters of the inland Aral Sea. This environmental mismanagement caused the sea, once an important fisheries resource, to lose over 90% of its volume and transformed the vital waterbody into the new Aralkum Desert within five decades.

Life in Uzbekistan during the Soviet communist era was harsh. While basic housing, medical and education needs were met, there was rampant underemployment, widespread poverty, lack of foodstuffs in the markets, and political and religious repression. During the yearly cotton harvests Uzbeks, including children, were forced to spend 15 – 60 days in the fields picking the “white gold.” Schools and universities across the country were closed, and even teachers, doctors and nurses were not exempt from participating. Refusal could result in the loss of your job or expulsion from higher education.

Over one-hundred years of combined Russian Empire and Soviet rule ended in 1991 when Uzbekistan proudly declared its independence as the Soviet Union was dissolving.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

Gran Canaria: Sunny, Volcanic & Diverse

| 2suitcasesfor2years

The cone-shaped summit of Mount Teide poked through hazy blue clouds. At 3,715m (12,000ft), it is Spain’s highest mountain, it’s not on the Iberian Peninsula, but on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. For centuries, the iconic landmark was the first sight of land for sailors returning from the newly discovered Americas.  Now tourists get the pleasure of seeing this majestic peak after flying 2,170 km (1,350 mi) south over the Atlantic Ocean from Barcelona to Gran Canaria Island, 280 kilometers (175 mi) off the coast of southern Morocco.  

Our desire to flee the hot and humid weather of the southern United States, which usually lasts until beginning of December, coupled with a reasonable airfare, was the catalyst for the trip. And escape we did, initially to Andorra, that beautiful small, isolated microstate in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. Our day had started hours earlier in the chilly mountain predawn as we fled the cold Andorran mountains, that the week before received an early November covering of snow, to Gran Canaria. The Canary Islands’ third largest landmass in the eight-island archipelago, is often referred to as the “land of eternal Spring.”

Driving south along the GC-1 from the airport toward Maspalomas, the island’s Montañas Sagradas mountain range dominated the inland view. Though Pico de las Nieves, the tallest peak in the range, is only half the height of Mount Teide, the mountain range’s sheer austere ruggedness was beautiful, and so close.

Our destination for nine days: Taurito, on the island’s southwest coast, one town over from Puerto de Mogán, and Club Cala Blanca,  a stunning apartment-style hillside resort, with views of the ocean and a black sand beach, folks in the pool, and not a snowball in sight. This would be a very liberal interpretation of a staycation for us, something unheard of until now in our travel vocabulary.  Usually, our lengthiest stay in any one place is four days, but we used this opportunity to also get some dental work done while enjoying a region blessed with over 320 sunny days per year, and weeks of cloudless skies. The island chain’s perfect year-round weather is the consequence of the aptly named Canary Current bringing cooler water from the North Atlantic Ocean south around the islands. This moderates the hot winds, known as the Calima, that blow west from the Saharah Desert. This perfect meteorological balance provides Gran Canaria spring-like conditions year-round, while refreshing trade winds that blow storms in from the Atlantic Ocean get blocked by the mountains and keep the northern part of the island wetter and greener with forests, than the southern part of the island.

With favorable weather year-round, Gran Canaria’s high seasons are geared to Northern Europe’s holiday and school vacation schedules, rather than seasonal weather changes. The island’s shoulder seasons run in the Spring from March to May and in Autumnfrom September to November. We were delighted there were fewer tourists about during our visit, as it made finding parking much easier.  The only drawback was that some of the restaurants were only open on weekends.

Ironically, on our first full day on the island we headed off early to see the dentists at the Clinica Margarita in Maspalomas, where, over the course of three visits during our stay on the island we had an extraction, fillings, and a crown replacement. We gave ourselves enough time that morning to enjoy part of the coastal road, Carr. Mogán, from Taurito to the Playa de Amadores in Puerto Rico. The Playa de Amadores was a beautiful white sand, crescent moon shaped beach that looked so inviting, with plenty of folks enjoying the sea temperatures that still averaged 22C (71.5f) in mid-November.

Heading to the GC-1 highway we passed the Anfi Tauro Golf, a strikingly lush green 18-hole golf course, surrounded by arid hills void of vegetation. It’s one of eight golf courses found across the island, but their presence is often protested by environmental groups because of the amount of irrigation water pulled from the local aquifers to keep the fairways verdant, on an island with limited water resources. The golf industry defends itself by noting that approximately 80% of courses in the Canary Islands use treated, reclaimed wastewater. Still environmentalists argue that producing this reclaimed water is energy-intensive and a better use would be to divert the water for agricultural use.

We embrace dental tourism because visiting the dentist in the United States is outrageously expensive, with dentists wanting to have their patients leave their offices with a set of Hollywood choppers, and the corresponding bill. I’ve often felt that when dentists in the states looked at my teeth, they calculated that they could retire early if I got all the procedures they suggested. We found Clinica Margarita online and were impressed from the start by the initial emails from Rebecca, the patient care specialist, to the services provided to us by Dr. Álvaro Martín Mingorance and Dr. Vibeke Lorentsen, in their state-of-the-art clinic. They have a very professional team, and the cost was much less expensive than having the dentistry done in the United States.

Rebecca was also quite nice in offering tips on local restaurants to try. The first, the Bar Aridañy Montaña Blanca, was right around the corner. It was a small neighborhood restaurant that was bustling with activity at lunchtime, with folks enjoying their meals. The décor was simple, but the waitress was welcoming, the atmosphere perfect, and our tender fried calamari paired with the locally brewed Tropical beer, fabulous!

Afterwards, we headed to the promenade that overlooks the Dunas de Maspalomas, across town, several miles away on the coast. Walking down Av. de Tirajana, we noticed that news crews were setting up to cover an event, that we later learned was the Gay Pride Walk, part of weeklong activities of Winter Pride Maspalomas. It’s a yearly event and one of the major LGBTQ+ autumn festivals on the European calendar.

The dunes, with their origin in the Ice Age, are an amazing vast track of ever shifting sands, shaped by the trade winds, that cover over 404 hectares (1,000-acres), and separate the town from the sea. It was a photographer’s paradise with unlimited compositions. You can even plan your own Laurence of Arabia experience riding camels across the dunes with Camello Safari Duna Oasis.

Staying home the next day, we lounged on our balcony, watching cyclists and rollerskiers pump up the long incline of the coastal road, before driving down into Taurito for lunch.  Four large tourist hotels with clubs and a casino, along with the massive Lago Taurito Water Park,dominate the approach to the beach. Street parking was limited even in the quieter November shoulder season, though the waterpark was still open this time of year, and there was only a handful of tourists enjoying the amenities all to themselves. It looked like a wonderful place for families with children to spend an activity-filled day.

At the head of the beach was a short promenade lined with a few shops and restaurants that only had outdoor seating. We chose one with the most diners, always a good sign when in doubt. The black sand beach under towering cliffs was very beautiful.

From our balcony the next morning we watched the sunrise cast the morning clouds a pastel pink against the soft blue sky. On the calm sea a flock of gulls trailed the wake of a fishing trawler heading back to Puerto de Mogán to offload its catch.

We are not really inclined to sit still for too long, so that Sunday we headed into the mountains to browse the weekly Mercadillo de Teror, 87km (54mi) away on the northern part of the island, slightly over an hour drive. The weather along the coast was very pleasant as we followed the GC-1 past the cosmopolitan city of Las Palmas. With a population of approximately 384,000, it is the largest city in the Canary Islands and is the co-capital (along with Santa Cruz de Tenerife) of the autonomous Spanish archipelago. Las Palmas’ importance dates back centuries to when its harbor, the Puerto de La Luz, was a vital resupply point for maritime expeditions during Spain’s Age of Discovery in late 15th to 17th centuries. Over the course of hundreds of years, the port has become an important shipping hub in the global economy, and today connects the island to 510 ports in 135 countries. This global connectivity has contributed to making modern Las Palmas a vibrant, energetic city with a diverse multicultural population that’s made up of folks from Spain’s former colonies across the globe, northern European expats, and long-established Asian merchants. The sailors, traders, and vacationers that came liked the weather, and stayed if they could. We originally made plans to stay in Las Palmas; however, this idea changed when we decided to devote more days to getting our dental work done. Disappointingly, we did not have time to visit the city properly. But what we’ve heard and read about the city sounds intriguing, and it’s just the right excuse to return to Gran Canaria one day.

The GC-1 is an excellent 4-lane highway that connects towns along the coast, but once we turned off it to head into the island’s mountainous interior our journey slowed on the narrow serpentine roads, with limited opportunities for passing, and we crawled at a snail’s pace when stuck behind a campervan or worse, a pack of cyclist.

Arriving to Teror mid-morning, we were fortunate to find one of the last parking spaces in a grassy lot several blocks downhill from Calle Real de la Plaza. Calle Real is the main lane through the town’s historic center and is lined with traditional brightly colored Canarian homes, that have carved wooden balconies over the street. The calle ends at the plaza around the 18thcentury Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pino, which was built on the site where tradition holds the Virgin Mary appeared in 1481 to a group of shepherds in a pine grove. The town quickly became an important religious site, with an Episcopal Palace, and the Cistercian Monastery to support pilgrimage activities. The octagonal yellow tower on the corner of the basilica represents the architectural style of an earlier church that was on the site.

Across from the church at the far end of Calle de la Diputación, is a stepped cascading waterfall that’s lined with parallel stairways that connect the lower and upper historic quarters of the town. Most importantly they lead to the Cistercian Monastery, where the sequestered nuns sell convent-made truchas de batata (sweet potato pastries), bollos de anís (anise rolls), mazapanes (marzipan), and mantecados (shortbread) through a torno, a revolving wooden turntable built into a wall cabinet, with doors on both sides to keep the nuns hidden from view.

The street market totally encircled the church and was packed with shoppers strolling among cheese makers, food stalls, craft stands, and clothes racks. Cheese is our weakness, and being able to sample a variety of the artisanal cheeses Gran Canaria is famous for landed us in queso heaven. So interesting are the cheeses made on Gran Canaria there’s even an official Cheese Trail that folks can follow, to eleven cheesemakers located in three regions across the island. These artisans produce cheeses from the raw milk of goats and sheep. And to help folks pair a locally vinted wine with the cheeses, there’s an official Gran Canaria Wine Route, theRuta Del Vino de Gran Canaria, that explores the different terroirs of eleven vineyards hidden in the rugged volcanic landscape of the mountains across the wetter northern part of the island. Here the winemakers grow around forty different varieties of grapes, that have adapted well to the island’s 14 distinct microclimates. Twenty-five are local varietals such as the red grapes Listán Negro, Tintilla, Malvasía Rosada, and the white grapes Marmajuelo, and Malvasía Volcánica whose purity and longevity are unique in the world and recognized under the DO Gran Canaria designation. We could have bought a suitcase full of cheese, but we restrained ourselves and only bought a wedge each of goat and sheep cheese, and a bottle of red wine.

Photographs from official Gran Canaria Wine Route, and the Ruta Del Vino de Gran Canaria, courtesy of The Gran Canaria Tourist Board.

By the time we left Teror the sunny morning had vanished as we followed a road that zigged and zagged as we drove higher and farther into the mountains. We had originally planned to go to the mirador atop Pico de las Nieves, but the weather was fickle and changed with each curve around the mountainside. Altering our plans, we continued on to Artenara, an hour’s drive still deeper into the mountains, on a route that took us through the towns of Valleseco, and Lanzarote. Along the way we noticed many cars parked precariously along the side of the narrow road as it passed through woodlands. These cars, it turned out, belonged to families that were foraging in the forests for wild mushrooms and fallen chestnuts; it’s a traditional activity that has been passed down through Canarian generations for centuries. In one town the sale of a fine stallion was being finalized with a test saunter along the side of road.  Unfortunately, that afternoon the clouds were low in the sky, and the views from the miradors we stopped at, while interesting, vanished into the misty horizon. We could only speculate how spectacular the panoramas would be on a sunny day.

Reaching the outskirts of Artenara, the highest village on Gran Canaria at 1,270m (4,170ft) above sea level, we stopped at Mirador De La Atalaya which had a nice view of the old colonial town’s church framed with trees against a mountainous background.

As we crossed the town square a sudden down pour sent us scurrying into the Iglesia de San Matías, where the warm light of the cathedral’s stained-glass window helped take the mountain chill off the day. Initially the temple was a small hermitage built in 1630, but after going through a long period of deterioration and ruin, the current three-nave temple was built in 1870, with the construction of the towers being completed in the mid-twentieth century. The beautiful murals in the church are the last works of the painter José Arencibia Gil, a Gran Canarian who, sadly, died before finishing them.

Up from the church was the Mirador de Unamuno that overlooked the deep volcanic Caldera de Tejeda, a massive basin stretching 28km by 18km (17mi by 11mi), that’s ringed with rugged peaks, steep gulleys, and several of the island’s iconic sacred rock formations, including Bentayga and Nublo Rocks. The mirador is named after the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno (1863-1936), who described the panorama as a “petrified storm of fire and lava”. If only the day had been sunny for us! There were, hopefully, signs the storm would clear.

Volcanic eruptions that started 10 million years ago and lasted to 20BC created the island’s dramatic peak, ridges and ravines.  Before the Spanish arrived in the 1400s the Montañas Sagradas were home to the cave dwelling indigenous Guanches, a Berber people, whose priests conducted seasonal solstice ceremonies in the majestic mountains. The mountains’ Spanish name refers to the importance of the snowcapped peaks as a life source of water on the arid island. This snowy resource was critically important to the island’s early settlers, who shoveled winter snowfall into pits and dams called neveras, an early island infrastructure project that started in 1694 by order of the Catholic Church. These small reservoirs were built on the northern, shady sides of the steep ravines that never got sunshine so the collected snow would melt slowly and be used for drinking and watering crops. “The snow was collected by laborers using wooden shovels and wicker baskets, making real mountains of snow. It was then put into rectangular boxes of wood or cork, stacked in rows in the neveras, then covered with layers of straw.” In Las Palmas ice was delivered in panniers wrapped in straw and covered with blankets, from the Pico de las Nieves snow pit by horseback, a six hour journey across the rugged mountains. The ice was used to lower the patient’s temperatures during epidemics of yellow fever and cholera, as well as “chill the beverages of the upper class.” The need to carry ice down from the mountains lasted until in the early 20th century, when electrical refrigerators were brought to the island.

A short distance from the mirador was the Ethnographic Museum of the “Cave Houses” of Artenara, a cluster of three cave dwellings, that had their origin with the pre-Hispanic troglodytes that originally lived in the rough caves dug into the volcanic rock mountains. Over the centuries the caves were improved, and were occupied until the early 1990s, when they were bought by the town council to become a museum. All things considered these modern caves looked pretty comfortable, if you could ignore the lack of indoor plumbing. Nearer to Las Palmas there are several other troglodyte sites across the island, including Barranco de Guayadeque, Quatro Puertas, and Poblado de Acusa Seca, and Cuevas del Rey, all places to consider visiting if you’re into cave dwellings. Afterwards, we stopped next to the church for lunch at Arte-Gaia Restaurante BioTasca, a small rustic tavern with only a handful of inside tables, but on sunny days their seating spills out onto the plaza. They had a wonderful menu featuring local Canarian dishes and wines.

Past Artenara we started our loop back to the coast on GC-60 which took us by Tejeda, a whitewashed hamlet, that’s considered the prettiest village on Gran Canaria. It’s set dramatically near the towering pinnacle of Roque Bentayga, a 1,404-meter-high volcanic rock formation, that served as a sacred sacrificial site for the island’s ancient Guanche people.

Finally, the clouds broke during our descent along a never-ending set of switch-back curves lined with soaring rockfaces on one side and plunging gorges on the other. The afternoon now offered the first views of how dramatic this violently hewed mountainscape actually was, after spending the earlier part of the day seeing its features softened in clouded light. There were not nearly enough miradors to stop at to soak in the tremendous views that transfixed us.

Rebecca’s tips for where the locals go took us past the luxury resort Lopesan Villa del Conde, that was purposely built to resemble a traditional Canarian village, complete with a façade of a church with belltowers.  Farther on, the Meloneras Golf Club beautifully overlooked the ocean and the wide Playa de las Meloneras beach. Before we reached the El Senador Restaurant & Beach House on west end of the Dunas de Maspalomas promenade, near the Faro de Maspalomas lighthouse. Mid-afternoon tables with views of the beach were open, and we spent a delightful time just sipping our drinks and people watching.

We ended our day with an early dinner at La Tapita Los Jose’s, an upscale neighborhood tapas bar far from the Meloneras beach areas. The food and local wine were very good, the vibe relaxing, another good recommendation.

On the opposite hillside across from our hotel, we could see pedestrians walking along a road that curved up the hill, but we never saw a car. This was part of coastal road (GC-500), a quick route with wonderful views, that used to connect folks in Taurito to Puerto de Mogán, until 2017 when several dangerous rockfalls from the towering coastal cliffs above the road forced the local authorities to block the road permanently with a substantial wall that folks can walk to, but can’t climb over. Recently funds have been approved to excavate a tunnel between the two towns to speed transit.

Deciding to have lunch in Puerto de Mogán we needed to get on the GC-1 for a convoluted route that required us to drive east for several miles before doing an U-turn, and then driving west again past Taurito to the exit for Puerto de Mogán. A trip of twenty minutes that will be reduced to seven with the new tunnel.

Puerto de Mogán started as a poor fishing village, where men pushed their small boats into the surf from a rocky shoreline, until a major redevelopment project in the 1980s constructed new apartment blocks designed to look authentically old, the breakwater, and a marina with over 200 berths.

New hotels and the half-moon shaped Playa de Mogán, constructed with sand imported from the Sahara Desert, soon followed. Today Puerto de Mogán, with its whitewashed homes and lanes shrouded with blossoming bougainvillea, is considered Gran Canaria’s prettiest coastal village. Some folks call the town with its small bridges over several narrow canals, “Canaria’s little Venice,” but it’s more a phrase coined by an over-zealous travel agent, than based on reality. But still, we thoroughly enjoyed wandering along the harbor, and through narrow hillside alleys of the historic quarter to the Mirador de Puerto de Mogán for a fantastic view out over the town and sea. It would be a great spot to see the sunrise.

On Fridays the town hosts Gran Canaria’s largest weekly market, with roughly 250 vendors that sprawl out across the town to the marina, and along the harbor wall. Parking is challenging in the small town, but ferry services to Puerto de Mogán from the coastal towns Arguineguín, Anfi del Mar, and Puerto Rico, are a stress-free option that many tourists utilize.  

On the last day before leaving Gran Canaria we headed to the Mirador del Balcón, on the island’s western coast, 54km (34mi) away. An hour’s drive without stopping, but what is a day without a journey that’s just as nice as the destination? Our route took us west to the end of the GC-1 then north on the GC-200 through a wide dry valley covered with endemic Cardonal cacti and tabaibales shrubs, native plants that tolerate the semi-arid environment well. Clusters of yellow-trumpeted, wild Esperanza also dotted the landscape. Native to the Americas, it found its way to Gran Canaria centuries ago and is now naturalized across the island.

In Mogan, the Molino Quemado, Burnt Mill, a 19th century windmill towered above the road. There used to be nearly 100 windmills across the island that ground toasted grain into “gofio.” Often called the Canary Island’s “superfood,” gofio is a whole-grain, stone-ground product, with a nutty flavor, that retains the nutrients of the entire kernel: it is served like mashed potatoes, in soups as a thickener, or kneaded with honey and nuts into Pella, round dough balls. The mill is used now as a heritage museum, and has a nice café, surrounded by a quirky garden filled with Alice in Wonderland-sized everyday items.

As we drove higher into the mountains a scene with a classic farm windmill reminded us of the American Southwest, and views down the steep ravines revealed oases of greenery, where farms straddled the streambeds.

Farther along intriguing stratum of rainbow-colored rock at the Los Azulejos de Veneguera Nature Preserve called for further investigation and we scrambled a short way up a gully. The colors of the rock were the result of volcanic action millions of years ago when supercharged hot water and gases permeated and altered the minerals within the rocks.

Stopping at the Mirador de San Nicolás provided us with a sweeping view of the La Aldea Valley all the way down to Los Caserones and the sea. Descending into the valley revealed its lower slopes were covered with white-tarped greenhouses. Farmers here mostly grow tomatoes in the rich volcanic soil, but cucumbers, bananas, zucchinis, and tropical fruits are also grown in the fertile valley.

Parking was limited at the Mirador del Balcón, but we only had to wait a few minutes before a space opened up. The dramatic overlook is cantilevered out from the cliff face on a section of the coast with towering cliffs, and spiking peaks nicknamed the “Dragon’s Tail.” If you look over the glass railing, waves crashing against the rocks are a dizzying 350m (1148.29ft) straight down. The views up and down the coast were breathtaking. It was a good way to end our time on this wonderfully engaging island.

In hindsight we should have stayed on the island for a few more days, using Las Palmas as a base to explore the northern inland region and coast.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

Road Tripping Through Andorra: Fall Foliage, Snowy Mountains, Shopping and a Spa

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Ever since grade school, where my history teacher displayed a large rollup chart of Europe unfurled in front of the classroom, I’ve always had an interest in maps. They were proof that a world existed beyond my town. Amid that patchwork of countries were small swatches of color that looked unintentional, like drops of paint that hadn’t been touched up and absorbed into the colors around them. These oddities, it turned out, were Vatican City, Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Malta, and Andorra, the largest splotch of all. They were small medieval-era feudal states that kept their independence through alliances, and existed as protectorates or as dependent territories for a while. Over time, treasuring their independence, they have chosen to remain independent microstates.

That map and watching the television reruns of the pioneering broadcast journalist and explorer Lowell Thomas’s High Adventure program on the weekends sparked within me a curiosity about the world that, thankfully, has never faded.

“You’re going where?” our friends asked. “Andorra. It’s a small, beautiful country in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France.” “We’ve never heard of it!” A fact I imagine Pliny the Elder also expressed with “where in Hades is Andorra?” and could explain why, even though the area of Andorra had Roman military posts since the 2nd century  BC to thwart hostile Northern tribes from crossing the Pyrenees, it was not included in his writings about the Iberian Peninsula in his voluminous Natural History books.

After landing in Barcelona and renting a car, we followed route C-16 north and headed to Llívia, another oddity on the map. It’s a Spanish exclave in the Pyrenees, near Andorra, that is totally surrounded by France, the result of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, signed in 1659, that ended the 24-year Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659). In the treaty, Spain ceded 33 villages in northern Catalonia to France, establishing the Pyrenees Mountain Range as the natural border between the two countries. Llívia, however, was officially granted the status of a town back in 1528 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (aka Carlos I of Spain). With this loophole in the treaty, Llívia was excluded from the treaty’s transfer clause and became a unique Spanish exclave surrounded by France, only 168km (104mi), a 2.5-hour drive from Barcelona.

In early November our ride through the countryside was still graced with autumn colors. Our route plateaued onto the Cerdanya, a wide fertile plain surrounded by mountains that separate Andorra from Llívia, and we got our first glimpse of peaks covered with a light dusting of early snow. It was overcast and colder than we expected. It rained occasionally. The sun came out brilliantly, only to disappear behind storm clouds. It was that type of day.

It was once a small village until the Romans colonized the area in the 1st century BC and named it Llívia of in honor of Livia Drusilla, the influential wife of Emperor Augustus. The outpost’s importance as an administrative and commercial center on the Pyrenees frontier grew when gold was discovered in the Cerdanya valley. On the outskirts of the town, archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of a substantial Roman forum and temple. Unfortunately, time restraints prevented us from climbing to the ruins of the Castell de Llivia, for a panoramic view of the town. The hilltop has been fortified since antiquity. The last castle stood until the French King Louis XI ordered it destroyed in 1479. We consoled ourselves with a hot lunch, and a glass of vermouth, interestingly garnished with olives, by a fireplace at El Jardi, a small tavern.

The shortest route into Andorra, without tolls, was along the N-260 which would have brought us into Andorra through its southern border with Spain and then straight up the Gran Valira valley to Andorra la Vella, the capital and the country’s largest city. But we chose a slightly longer route deeper into France along the N-20 where we hoped to cross the steep mountains along the N-22 and Andorra’s CG-2 into the northern part of the country, but our plans required a U-turn when we reached the exit, and found the road closed with traffic barricades due to a landslide that blocked the route further along in the mountains – a  traffic condition that our map app did not show.

We had hoped to reach our hotel in Andorra la Vella before sunset, but our plans were now akilter and we needed to backtrack to the intersection of N-20 in Ur, France, where a whimsical sculpture of a winged rhinoceros stood atop a small hillock in front of a Carrefour supermarket. Fortunately, the morning’s clouds had given way to a glorious sunny afternoon. Just south of Andorra’s border was La Seu d’Urgell, Spain. Crowned by its hilltop cathedral, the city looked intriguing. Little did we know at the time that the city and its church were an integral part of Andorra’s history.

Surrounded by steep mountains, darkness descends early in the Gran Valira valley that shelters Andorra la Vella. The city, Europe’s highest capital at 1,023m (3,356 ft), straddles the Gran Valira River, and is a convoluted zig zag of one-way streets that hug the mountainside, but we found our hotel, the NH Andorra La Vella, relatively easily. They had a limited number of paid parking spaces, which we found very handy. After dropping our bags in the room, we went out to explore the city that was bustling with nighttime shoppers. Shopping seemed to be the national sport for visiting couples, if the number of folks carrying shopping bags on the street is any measure.

The hotel was conveniently located near Salvador Dali’s the La Noblesse du Temps, The Nobility of Time, a surrealistic sculpture of a melting clock draped over a gnarled tree, that is meant to be interpreted as a “commentary on the fluidity of time, and time’s inescapable mastery over humanity.” The artwork stands in a small plaza at the foot of Avinguda Meritxell, the shopping mile, a pedestrian-only gauntlet of upscale duty-free shopping that starts in the capital and continues into the neighboring town of Escaldes-Engordany.

We followed the flow and window-shopped. The aroma of roasting chestnuts and sweet potatoes filled the air as we wandered. Chestnuts yes, but we hadn’t seen sweet potatoes being offered as street food before during our travels in Spain and Portugal. Their traditional popularity is tied to the autumn Catalan festival of La Castanyada, which is celebrated around All Saints’ Day in early November, when the nutrient-dense tuber was roasted to sustain families through long night vigils and religious services honoring the dead.

With a population of 27,000 in the capital, and 84,000 folks and over 1200 shops countrywide, Andorra has approximately one store for every 70 residents, one of the highest store-to-citizen ratios in the world. The duty-free shopping concept was developed in the 1950s to help Andorra’s burgeoning tourist industry that centered around skiing. This didn’t really take-off until car ownership exploded across France and Spain and folks made road trips into the country to stock up on inexpensive alcohol, cigarettes and luxury goods that were heavily taxed in their countries.

In early November, sunrise was around 07:45 AM, but with Andorra la Vella being located in a narrow valley surrounded by steep mountains, the first rays of sunlight didn’t brighten our hotel room until 10:30 AM.

We had breakfast at Santagloria Coffee & Bakery, where we indulged in wonderful pistachio cream filled croissants; it was extremely budget friendly. We then set out on a pathway along the Gran Valira River to explore the city. We followed it through riverside parks and plazas until we found a sculpture of a colorful large espresso moka pot. You have to love a country like this that embraces whimsical art.

We then circled back and came across an interesting sculpture installation in Plaça Lídia Armengol called the Seven Poets. The artwork created by the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa, consists of seven pale yellow figures, sitting cross-legged on tall, slender poles. The meditative figures represent the unity of Andorra’s seven parishes and are appropriately installed in front of the country’s parliament.

Up a steep sidewalk from there was Plaça del Poble, a massive rooftop plaza built atop a architectural complex that houses government offices, and a multi-level public parking garage. It was a popular place for families to bring their young children with small bikes to pedal around safely. It also had a nice alternative view of the Seven Poets and access across the Rambla Molines bridge to the 11th century. St Esteve of Andorra Church.

Afterwards we looped back down Av. Meritxell, and wandered through the large multi-level Pyrénées Andorra department store. Offering the widest selection of merchandise under one roof, along with a gourmet supermarket on the top floor, it is considered the flagship shopping destination in Andorra.

Later we continued past Dali’s melting clock, and the often-photographed Pont Andorra la Vella bridge, and a modern sculpture centered in a roundabout on the way to the Caldea Spa.

The unique piece of contemporary art is called the Calidea i la Dama del Gel. It’s a collaborative work by the Andorran sculptor Ángel Calvente Gutierrez whose Calidea figure was inspired by myths and legends of water. While the Dama de gel, the Ice Lady, created the Catalan artist Philippe Lavaill depicts a mythological sylph on a horse.

Housed in a slender eighteen story, 80m (262ft) tall glass pyramid finished in 1994, the Caldea Spa is one of Andorra’s most notable landmarks, and the tallest building in the country.

As we neared the tower a dramatic glass walled swimming pool cantilevered out from the building’s side, over the Valira d’Orient River. Funnily, only the swimmers’ bobbing legs as they stood along the glass wall were visible from our perspective on the street. Across the street we glimpsed, through a window, a quartet performing for the residents of a senior’s home. We didn’t want to participate in any spa activities, but we did have lunch in their restaurant that overlooked the lush inviting pool.

Afterward, as we returned to the hotel, we walked around a sports complex where other retirees were enjoying tennis lessons on a beautiful sunny autumn day. For dinner that evening we joined the long queue, a few doors down from our hotel, in front of the Crepería de la Rotonda, a hole-in-the-wall takeaway window. It is popular for its delicious and inexpensive crepes, one of the best values in Andorra, and for the uniquely entertaining customer service style of the owner, who has an Instagram account with 140,000 followers. Think Seinfeld’s soup Nazi character.

Visigoths controlled the area of Andorra after Rome fell in the 2nd century AD, a period in which Christianity continued to spread across the peninsula. Later it was under the control of the Kingdom of Toledo, then the Catalan Diocese of Urgell. In the 700s Moors crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco and conquered a significant part of the Iberian Peninsula. North across the Pyrenees Mountains, Charlemagne, Charles the Great, ruled as King of the Franks, and united most of western Europe into the Carolingian Empire.

Tradition believes Charlemagne granted a charter to the Andorran people as reward for fighting with his troops against the Moors near what is now Cerdanya, the wide fertile plain surrounded by mountains just to the east of Andorra in modern-day Spain. With this charter the area of Andorra fell under the rule of the Catalonian Counts of Urgell, and became a territory in the Frankish Marca Hispanica, a military buffer zone established after the failed Moor invasion of France. Andorra was one of twelve Marca Hispanicas created in the Pyrennes Mountains by Charlemagne, but the only one that wasn’t eventually absorbed into France or Spain but survived as an independent country through crafty political machinations. In 988 the Counts of Urgell traded their Andorra territory to the Bishops of Urgell for land in Cerdanya. All was peaceful for 100 years until the Counts wanted to reclaim the territory. Seeking to avoid a war with the Counts, the Bishop of Urgell asked the Lord of Caboet for protection, to which he agreed in return for co-sovereignty of Andorra in 1095, establishing the country as a feudal protectorate with the signing of two treaties called Pareatges. Through various Royal marriages over the centuries this side of the co-sovereignty and feudal protectorate survived various wars, revolutions, and changes in government and is now held by the current President of France. The co-sovereign of Andorra has been a ceremonial title since 1993 when the country’s first democratic constitution was ratified.

Andorra pretty much survived through the centuries as an isolated, subsistence farming community by growing grain crops (only 2% of the mountainous terrain is arable), trading wool or cheese with nearby Catalan towns, and smuggling goods between Spain and France. Many of those ancient smuggling routes through the mountains have now been mapped and incorporated into a 275 km (170 mi) long network of popular hiking trails, that draws tourists to Andorra in the summer. These trails were especially useful during WW2 when they were used to smuggle weapons to the French resistance, and help downed Allied airmen and Jewish refugees escape Nazi-occupied Vichy France into neutral Spain.

During the early 1930s Andorra’s population was estimated to be under 10,000 as waves of emigrants fled the country to pursue better opportunities abroad. This population crisis threatened the existence of the country. It was a pivotal decade for the country, but things improved substantially when the FHASA (Forces Hidroelèctriques d’Andorra) hydroelectric plant project was conceived as a catalyst for modernizing the country and spurring Andorra’s economic growth. It was a massive infrastructure project that electrified the country both physically and metaphorically. The surplus power was exported via high-voltage lines to Spain and France, establishing a crucial, steady stream of foreign currency revenue for the tiny Andorran economy. The dam’s construction also brought the first paved roads to a country that until then relied solely on walking and pack animals to navigate the steep terrain, providing a vital connection for the isolated country that’s too mountainous for an airport or train connections to the outside world. Workers that came from Spain and France brought new ideas with them, which resulted in the Revolution of 1933, led by the Young Andorrans, a trade union that called for political reforms and the right to vote for all Andorrans. The country’s new banking sector grew with this influx of wage earners and also benefited substantially from the surge of refugees, from both sides of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, that sought shelter in the country. The unregulated banking sector grew for decades and was recognized as tax haven for wealthy individuals to hide accounts. This continued until 2015 when a large Andorran bank was accused of being used primarily for money laundering, and international pressure forced immediate reforms and regulations to the country’s financial institutions.

The country’s new roads ended the centuries of isolation and now allowed it to promote itself as a unique tourist destination in the Pyrenees Mountains that offered duty-free shopping, as well as skiing. And a flourishing counter-culture that allowed access to cinematic films and literature banned in Spain during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, only a short drive away from Barcelona and Madrid. Andorra’s first ski resort, the Pas de la Casa–Grau Roig, opened in 1957. Today there are four modern ski resorts in the country with over 303km (187mi) of slopes, that can be reached by ski lifts that can swiftly transport up to 156,000 skiers per hour to their summits.

Surprisingly, Andorra only has 270km (167mi) of road of which 198km (123mi) are paved, and 8.2km (5mi) of tunnels to connect its communities in the steep mountain valleys. This includes the Envalira Tunnel which connects northern Andorra to France. With an elevation of 2,052m (6,732 feet) it is the highest toll tunnel in Europe.

During our short time in Andorra we tried our best to see as much of the country as possible. For our first day trip from the capital, we followed the CG-2 north through the towns of Encamp and Meritxell in the spectacular Valira d’Orient river valley to Canillo, where we found the Petit Mercat, a small café still open in the off-season. Their coffee was good and they had a nice selection of premade sandwiches. From the parking lot across the street, we could see the terrifying height of the cantilevered observation deck of the Mirador Roc Del Quer jutting out over the valley, our ultimate destination.

But first we wanted to see the Pont Tibetà Canillo, a modern steel, Tibet-style footbridge that is over 600m (1970ft) long, and is suspended 150m (490ft) above the Vall del Riu. We knew the bridge was closed this time of year, but we wanted to see it as the views of the mountainside along the long walk to the bridge were very nice. During the warmer months there is a shuttle bus from Canillo for hikers, as there is very limited parking along the shoulder of the road.

Farther up the mountainside there was free parking a short walk away from the Mirador Roc Del Quer;the shuttle bus only goes to Pont Tibetà Canillo. Here a 12m (40ft) long glass observation deck seems to float dizzyingly in the air 500m (1640ft) above the town of Canillo and the river valley below. The views up and down the valley were fabulous.

At the far end of the mirador is a sculpture of a fearless man contemplating casually on the edge the abyss. Perhaps the figure is contemplating his ancestors, nomadic hunter-gatherers, who first entered Andorra’s valleys as the glaciers retreated at the end of the Ice Age. It’s called El Pensador, The Ponderer, and was created by the Argentinian sculptor Miguel Ángel González in 2016.

There was still enough snow on the ground from an earlier winter storm for Donna and I to make snowballs and playfully throw them at each other. The afternoon was sunny and delightfully warm enough to eat outside at the site’s restaurant, that doubled as the ticket office.

Continuing in the car we drove over the mountaintop, a beautiful drive through autumn colors, that descended into Ordino, and the Valira del Nord river valley.

The next day we returned to Ordino and drove along the CG-3 until we took a spur road into the Parc Natural de la Vall de Sorteny. We had hoped to visit the Mini Jardí Botànic, an alpine garden that features over 300 species of Pyrenean flora, including medicinal, edible, and endangered endemic plants. Unfortunately, it was too late in the season and the road to it was gated. But nearby we could hear animal bells echoing in the crisp mountain air and we spotted horses grazing in a frost-covered meadow.

Returning to the main road we ventured past the small village of El Serrat to the Ordino Arcalís Ski Resort where preparations were under way to open the slopes later in the month. With its north facing slopes that peak at 2,625m (8,612 ft) the resort has the longest ski season in Andorra and is popular with freeriders – those who enjoy the adventure of skiing in the resort’s backcountry powder. The views from the resort were pretty impressive too.

The big disadvantage of traveling in the shoulder season is many sites, restaurants and  hotels are closed, as was the case with the high mountain road past the Ordino Arcalís Ski Resort that ends at the trail head to the Mirador Solar de Tristaina, a massive circular, suspended metal ring built atop the Peyreguils peak on Andorra’s border with France, that servers as a sundial. With an altitude of 2,701 meters (8,861 feet) the mirador offers panoramic views of the three Tristaina glacial lakes and the Ordino valley. During the warmer months it can be reached via the resort’s Tristaina Gondola.

On our last full day in Andorra, we headed north along the CG-2 again. Past Canillo the road rose steadily above the valley floor through El Tarter, and the Grandvalira Ski Resortto Soldeu, the northernmost town on the CG-2 in the Valira d’Orient before the highway splits to the CG-2A, the entrance of the Túnel d’Envalira that leads to France, and the old serpentine CG-2 that winds through the mountains.

This route crests the highest road pass in the Pyreenes at 2.408m (7900ft) above sea level, a vertical ascent from Andorra la Vella of 1,294m (4245ft) in 25km (15mi) before reaching the small, isolated town of Port d’Envalira, on Andorra’s frontier, where the Pas de la Casa, part of the Grandvalira Ski Resortthat connects the mountains slopes from Canillo to Port d’Envalira with a huge interconnected network of ski lifts, The resort is popular with beginning and intermediate level skiers for its gentler slopes.

Heading back through Soldeu, the views looking down at the valley surrounded by steep mountains covered with a light snowfall were amazing and we stopped frequently to take photos as we headed to the Vall d’Incles, a tranquil valley with rolling meadows.

The valley is also the primary gateway for the Andorran Camí de la Transhumància, the traditional moving of livestock up into high-altitude mountain pastures in the spring and then back down to the valley floors in the autumn. The seasonal herding of livestock here is a UNESCO-recognized heritage practice that preserves mountain biodiversity and ancestral shepherding traditions. The valley was also an important transfer point for Andorran smugglers to offload the contraband they had carried from France across the Port d’Ingles mountain pass.

After parking the car at the far end of the valley, we had hoped to do a short hike a little farther up the valley to the Pont del Travenc, an old stone bridge across a mountain stream. Unfortunately, melting snow rendered the track a muddy mess and we contented ourselves with a picnic in the parking lot.

The next morning we were on the road, back to Barcelona before sunrise to catch our flight to Gran Canaria Island to relax in warmer temperatures that hovered around 22C (72F) during the day.

We had a wonderful time exploring Andorra in the November shoulder season. It was slightly colder than we expected, but we had sunny days, and there were surprisingly few cars on the road outside of Andorra la Vella. Though the country is only 2.5 hours from Barcelona, it often gets overlooked as a destination, but there is plenty to do, beyond shopping, if you like hiking and skiing. The concentration of so much gorgeous scenery in one small country is amazing, and inspiration enough to plan a visit.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

P.S. Andorra has excellent international bus service to the airports and train stations in Barcelona, Spain and Toulouse, France. As well as a reliable local bus service with 7 routes that connect all the towns and ski resorts in the country.

Cambodia: Life Along the Mekong & Tonle Sap Rivers or A Beautiful Country Full of Surprises

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In the golden morning twilight, the skyscrapers of Phnom Penh gleamed like a set of gold capped teeth revealed by the broad smile of a person awakening to a spectacular new day. It was the consequence of a torrential monsoon storm, with I swear horizontal rain, the evening, before that abruptly shortened an otherwise delightful happy hour on the sun deck of the RV Mekong Pandaw. Overnight as we sailed to Phnom Penh the storm cleared the sky for a beautiful sunrise. Our cruise had departed Ho Chi Minh City three days earlier during the last week of September, which was nearing the end of Southeast Asia’s monsoon season, and the mornings were heavily overcast until today.

The forty-eight passenger river vessel is a classic shallow draft, teak and brass finished riverboat, based on historical designs of colonial era river ships that once plied the waters of the Mekong Delta and southeast Asia from the late-1800s to the 1930s, and was built specifically for the luxury river cruise provider Pandaw. We had signed on for their Four Country 21 Night Combo Cruise, which would take us up river into Cambodia, then connect us with flights to Thailand and the resumption of the cruise, on the smaller Pandaw RV Laos downriver from the golden triangle, where the borders of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos meet along the Mekong River, in Chiang Khong, Thailand.

Waiting for us as the boat docked along the city’s quay on the Tonle Sap River, just upstream from its confluence with the Mekong River, was a row of rickshaw tricycle taxis or cyclos, set against Phnom Penh’s rapidly expanding skyline dotted with construction cranes. In times past, the cyclo was the predominant mode of transportation around the city but now are mostly used by tourists for scenic tours that weave through its streets.

We whizzed through traffic past the National Museum to the Royal Palace of Cambodia, a richly ornamented grand palace complex built in the 1860s, on the site of an earlier citadel, for Cambodia’s royal families. The palace’s architecture leans heavily on influences from Ankor Wat, a massive 12th-century religious monument that is Cambodia’s most famous attraction.

The palace’s formal and ceremonial buildings feature golden spires atop steeply pitched stacked roofs, orange in color to symbolize prosperity, with highly decorated upturned finials and gables that characterize Khmer architecture. The spires on the rooftops represent Mount Meru, the sacred center of the universe in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology.

The grounds also have several large pyramid and cone shaped sandstone stupas carved with elaborate high-relief sculptures of gods, floral patterns, and legendary creatures. 

Across the site are sculptures of fearsome mythological animals depicting Naga (seven-headed serpents), Singha (guardian lions), and Kala (fearsome faces), which symbolize protection, power, and the bridge between human and divine realms. There were also some interesting ancient murals depicting significant events in the country’s history. And surprisingly several tranquil spots to rest and contemplate.

By midmorning that day in late September the temperature was in the mid – nineties, 35C, and the humidity was terrible. Some relief was found in the shade of the central market where some folks sought out the post office and a pharmacy while others wandered through the tightly packed clothing stalls. We didn’t find the shopping particularly interesting, but the flower market with its vendors making floral temple offerings of maali (garlands), and Kantong (small bowls made of banana leaves containing flowers, incense, and candles) was colorful, and intriguing. The Cambodian art of Lotus flower folding is a cherished, ancient art form where the green outer petals of a lotus bud are meticulously peeled back and folded, creating intricate, rose-like shapes that symbolize purity, devotion, and enlightenment. The market was beautifully full with these floral displays that represent a spiritual offering to Buddha. The ritual of daily offerings placed in home shrines and pagodas to honors ancestors, bring blessings, and symbolizes enlightenment, and is ingrained in the culture of Southeast Asia.

The market was also a good place to watch life go by on the street, especially the scooters and the configuration of families they seemed to effortlessly carry.

It’s always great to escape to an exotic new destination and see only the good stuff, but there’s always history. Cambodia’s recent history is difficult to ignore, and we encountered it later that afternoon we went to the Choeung Ek, “Killing Fields,” memorial near Phnom Phen. Horrifyingly, these areas and their mass graves were all across the country between 1975 and 1979 when the Khmer Rouge regime under the leadership of Pol Pot killed nearly 2 million people, roughly 25% of Cambodia’s population, through forced labor, starvation, and execution. At the height of this nightmare, folks living in the country’s large towns and cities were forcibly relocated to rural labor camps to work in the fields. There the regime targeted the country’s city dwellers, professionals and intelligencia. The cruelty of the regime was relentless, with children brainwashed to execute their own parents. All in a delusional vision to create an agrarian utopia.

The terror didn’t end until Vietnam invaded the country and installed a pro Vietnamese government, after brutal Khmer cross border attacks. Following the collapse, many former Khmer Rouge leaders were eventually brought to justice, with major leaders being jailed in 2014 by a United Nations-backed tribunal. The murder of the county’s teachers, engineers, and doctors fundamentally halted Cambodia’s development for decades as other countries in the region prospered. The trauma of those years has marked a generation of survivors with untreated PTSD. Today, over 60% of Cambodia’s population is under 30, with no direct memory of the atrocities committed against their families. After all that, it is amazing to see how far the country has come and how welcoming the folks are.

That evening on board a troupe of traditional Khmer dancers and musicians performed. It was an intriguing evening watching several Apsara dances, a style known for its slow, graceful, and highly symbolic hand gestures, that through motion depicts spiritual devotion, as well as to illustrate the Reamker (Glory of Rama), a 16th-17th century Cambodian epic poem that is an adaptation of the Indian Ramayana, that blends “Hindu cosmology with Buddhist themes of karma and dharma. It follows Prince Preah Ream (Rama) and his loyal brother Preah Leak (Lakshmana) as they battle the demon king Krong Reap (Ravana), who kidnapped Preah Ream’s wife, Neang Seda (Sita).

The next morning at sunrise our boat left the quay and headed upstream on the Mekong, the start of a journey to explore rural Cambodia, to the riverport town of Peam Chi Korng where we traveled by tuk tuk to an outlying pottery village. That early in the morning the river was busy with small ferries taking folks to work in the city, as long-tail boats raced by colorful shanties that reached down to the river edge.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Here we visited a family that made large decorative pots and vessels as well as ceramic souvenirs that are sold in Phnom Phen, and a traditional charcoal burning ceramic stove called a Changkhran Lao that’s wrapped in metal to help it keep its structural integrity. Our guide was doing a wonderful job eliciting smiles from the families’ elders as we sat on long wooden benches and listened to a translated presentation.

Behind, younger children had also gathered to watch their visitors, and giggle as kids do, only to be silenced by the wave of the speaker’s hand. Later he demonstrated how quickly a pot could be created by hand coiling, and his son demonstrated climbing a palm tree for our group.

A small local passenger ferry pulled up alongside the RV Mekong Pandaw the next morning after we docked in Kratie to transport us to Koh Trong Island across the river. It’s a small tear-shaped island in Cambodia’s Kratie province that is the home to fishermen and farmers who tend rice paddies and pomelo citrus orchards.

The islanders also promote an authentic community-based tourism initiative that offers homestays and bicycle rentals. The monsoon flood waters on the lower part of the Mekong River had begun to recede weeks earlier so our ferry dropped its boarding ramp onto a steep embankment in front of the island’s elephant guarded Santheati Baram Pagoda, and a cluster of small basic shops. Outside the temple a small group of kids were kicking a soccer ball around as an orange robed monk walked nearby.

Villagers warmly greeted us as we walked along the island’s only lane for a short distance to view the community’s unique stilt homes that are purposefully built to be lifted by the men of the village, and moved when needed to avoid flood waters.

A small caravan of tuk tuks took us to the Kbal Koh Pagoda on the north end of the island, the first on the 10km (6mi) loop which circles the island. Built in the early 1800s, the historic pagoda is surrounded by banana trees and is located across from the verdant rice paddies that run down the center of the island. The simply adorned pagoda gracefully showed its age with a weathered patina courtesy of the numerous monsoons it has withstood. Behind the temple, nearly obscured from view by banana trees, was a row of brightly colored steeple-shaped burial stupas, mausoleums, called chedi.

On the grounds in front of the temple were two statues of sacred white elephants and various Bodhisattvas, compassionate helpers, on the path to enlightenment who stay in the world to assist others. Along with other sculptures depicting Buddhist Protectors and Guardians whose fierce looks deters negative powers. A multiheaded Snake Being called a Naga King guarded the stairway to the pagoda to protect the Dharma, the Budha’s sacred teachings.

Nearby a young man guided a cow along the path, and teenagers played volleyball on a hard packed dirt court. Farther along a man fished from a low bridge over a stream that flowed through the rice fields. These vignettes of rural life were the charm of Koh Trong Island and Kratie province.

That afternoon back in Kratie we explored the town on our own. Just down from our docking was the Krong Kracheh Pagoda, an important community center where the town’s lay people can study Buddhism. It’s quite a pretty temple known for its pink walls and is surrounded by several grand stupas that are the final resting place for several generations of post-Angkorian royalty.

Two blocks away from the temple was Kratie’s central market, a huge, covered pavilion that occupies an entire city block. Think of a Costco super store on steroids, with merchandise of every sort stacked floor to ceiling along aisles as wide as a single shopping cart, operated by nearly 100 different vendors. This is an authentic, vibrant local market, there’s nothing touristy about it. If you can’t find what you need here it probably doesn’t exist.  The outside of the building is surrounded by numerous fruit and vegetable stands piled high with produce. Truly a vegetarian’s paradise. Fresh fish and seafood is also abundant as well as fresh poultry and meat. Some of the vendors kept these things cool under ice, while others swatted flies away from the exposed offerings. The smoky grill stands along the street stay open late into the evenings.

The narrow beam and shallow draft of Pandaw’s river vessels make visiting many remote areas along the Mekong River feasible, but north of Kratie the river becomes unnavigable to cruise boats all the way to Vientiane, Laos, adistance of roughly 850km (530mi) due to shallow waters, ever changing sandbars, numerous rock hazards, and the massive Khone Waterfalls, located near the Cambodia-Laos border.

While unsuitable for larger boats, this section of the river is the perfect habitat and a protected zone for the Irrawaddy freshwater dolphin, an endangered species. With a big bulbous head and short dorsal fin, they look significantly different from saltwater dolphins. Sadly, there are only an estimated 117 Irrawaddy dolphins left in Cambodia, but the population has been rebounding in recent years due to enhanced conservation efforts. Fortunately for us a large group of dolphins live in several deepwater pools near the town of Kampi, just north of Kratie.

Viewing rural life along river has its advantages, but traveling by bus to Kampi did provide us with a different perspective. We passed motorcycle vendors laden beyond belief with merchandise, young monks walking along the shoulder of the road as they returned to their monastery, homes on stilts, and all sorts of traffic violations that would incur huge fines in the states.

Reaching the dock in Kampi we were divided into several groups to board small boats. Our boatman was very friendly and made sure we all wore the required life vests, but he wasn’t particularly diligent about balancing the weight on the boat for an even keel and we got underway in a rather tipsy fashion before our group of eight took the initiative to redistribute the load ourselves.

As we traveled to the dolphin pools the Mekong widened, and houses along the river edge disappeared. It was a lengthy boat ride and wonderfully tranquil, as we trailed our fingers into the cool river, passing kayakers paddling, and getting closer to nature as we reached the dolphin pools which are adjacent to the Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary. The reserve is Cambodia’s largest national forest, and with roughly 500,000 hectares (1,235,527 acres) it’s Southeast Asia’s largest lowland evergreen forest, and the home to 400 different animal species, that includes Pileated Gibbon, a herd of wild Asian Elephants, Malayan Sun Bear, wild cattle, Sunda Clouded Leopard, and Great Hornbills to name only a few.

The dolphins were very elusive, and we sat quietly in the boat for quite some time before a pair of dolphins gently broke the surface of the water a distance away for a brief moment. We are not sure how many different dolphins we saw, but their surfacing became more frequent, though they were extremely difficult, almost impossible to photograph. Still the experience was very entertaining. Across Southeast Asia and Cambodia the dolphins are considered symbols of good fortune and prosperity. Many folks living along this stretch of the Mekong River also believe that the Irrawaddy dolphins are sacred, protective spirits, and reincarnations of their ancestors.

Later that afternoon, we set sail downstream back along the Mekong toward Phnom Penh to moor overnight and then continue upstream the next morning on the Tonle Sap River to visit the silversmith workshops and Buddhist pagoda in Chey Odam. This section of river was lined with colorful shanty houses, and occasionally the minarets of a mosque or a church steeple protruded from the riverscape. 

The ping of a cacophony of unsynchronized hammers surrounded us as we walked along Chey Odam’s main street which paralleled the river and is lined with metal workshops of various sizes. Across the river on a distant hill, we could see the stupas of Phnom Phreah Reach Throap, a sacred mountain that was home to Cambodia’s royal capital for nearly 250 years until 1866.

This was the most touristy of places we visited with each workshop having displays of their craft for sale. But it was still interesting as the skilled artisans create everything by hand using hand-hammered repoussé and chasing techniques, crafting intricately decorated brass or copper plates and bowls to Betel sets, and silver jewelry. We thought the prices were fair, so we shopped for our young granddaughters. Of course, credit cards were accepted.

Geese waddled freely along the road as our group walked to the outskirts of town. We seemed to become a group of pied pipers as we swept up a band of children that followed us to the Moni Sakor temple. Reaching the pagoda, and with smiles all around, the kids suddenly lined up and sang the Cambodian national anthem.

It was a rustic temple with a collection of Buddhist sculptures and colorful stupas on its grounds. While we rested under a shade tree one of the small girls in the group entertained us and her friends by making cat woman like claws on her fingers with yellow trumpet flowers. Across the road a three-wheeled flatbed motorcycle vendor went door to door selling fresh produce, and un-iced fish and meat in the morning sun.

Later that afternoon after sailing upriver the crew tied the boat to trees along the riverbank outside the small town of Kampong Tralach and lowered the gangplank to a line of waiting oxcarts. Our traditional mode of transportation through the town to the Kampong Tralach Kraom Pagoda that was a local tourist initiative, that helped the drivers buy their own ox and cart.

I walked ahead to take some photos of the line of oxcarts. Several had passed by already, but there was one stubborn beast that refused to move until one of the carts behind him tried to pass by. Suddenly it seemed to be a chariot race, with whooping and hollering as the two oxcarts lurched forward. As fun as it was, the folks in the back of the carts held on tightly, worried that they would be shaken out of the speeding cart like fortune sticks.

The jolting ride ended with a circling of the carts, in front of the beautiful monks’ dwelling, in the courtyard of the Kampong Tralach Kraom Pagoda. Though the real attraction of the site was the old Buddhist temple located behind it, that wasn’t particularly well-maintained. Like the two other temples we visited days earlier the exterior of the pagoda showed the challenges of building maintenance in the heat, humidity and monsoons of Southeast Asia. On the raised terrace surrounding the pagoda were a collection of folk-art style sculptures depicting Buddhist protectors and guardians that gave no hint of the treasure that awaited us inside.

The temple’s interior was astonishing, with every surface of the walls and ceiling covered in beautiful murals depicting the life and teachings of Buddha. This hidden gem struck us as being the Cambodian equivalent to the Sistine Chapel! Fortunately, this temple was open when we visited, but it made us wonder what we missed at the other two which were not.

That evening our boat stayed tied to the riverbank, and we had a bonfire in a vacant lot nearby where the crew had invited a few of the townsfolk to join us. With wet kindling from an earlier rain, it was a smoky affair, but folks’ spirits weren’t dampened and there was a lot of joyful dancing. 

The next morning, we continued cruising north on the Tonle Sap River. The high riverbanks from the earlier part of our trip now disappeared as the river broadened into a wide floodplain that covered the roads. Only the telephone poles along their edge offered guidance to where they were. Fast long-tail boats were more prevalent now as scooters were stored away on higher ground until the dry season.

Here homes on stilts are surrounded by monsoon floodwaters for six months, from June to November when the Mekong River expands 45-fold, overflows and forces the waters of the Tonle Sap to back-flow into its lake. This in turn forces it to expand in size 4x from its dry season size of 3,000 square kilometers (1,200 square miles) to 15,000 square kilometers (5800 square miles) and cover the surrounding countryside with flood waters to the depth of 9m (30ft) or greater.

The weather since our departure from Phom Phen had been rather unpredictable, with overnight rains and heavy morning mists and cloudy afternoons, but today the weather was brilliant and the river was café au lait colored, and extended to the horizon all around us. The tranquility of watching this broad waterscape and sky change throughout the next two days was one of the trip’s serene pleasures.

We sailed past villages with temples and mosques. The number of mosques surprised us, but there has been an Islamic presence in Cambodia since the 10th century and today Muslims compose three percent of the country’s population with the majority concentrated along the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers.

More of the small sampans we passed now were covered and appeared to be floating homes, with small children aboard and cooking platforms at the rear. Fishermen set their nets with the help of their wives.

We anchored in the lake offshore Chong Khneas, a Vietnamese refugee floating village near the mouth of the Siem Reap River. It’s a fully functioning community with a floating school, church and markets that get paddled between the homes. That supports itself from fishing on the lake and tourist tours. It started in the mid-1970s as a safe haven for migrants in Cambodia to avoid persecution from Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

Though many of the refugees have been in Cambodia for two generations they have a precarious legal status that denies them citizenship and the right to own land, and cuts them off accessing any state sponsored social programs, forcing them to live in floating homes or marginalized, informal communities. This is due to a deep-seated historical prejudice between the two countries which have often been in conflict with each other. Sadly, the beauty of their floating village makes it too easy for visitors to overlook the complexity of their situation.

Nearby on stilts was a Buddhist temple surrounded by flood waters. During the dry season it is partially accessible by land when you follow Rt63 south from Siem Reap and then walk across a wide sand bar, but now we needed the local boatmen to ferry us over.

From what our tour guide explained, this was the first time a group of westerners had ever visited the temple where young monks are sequestered away to study the teachings of the Buddha. Through our guide’s translation the monk answered questions from our group and with the wave of his hand blessed us with sprinkles of water from a Kusha grass stick. Outside, the boatman’s young son entertained himself by jumping from one boat to another.

Earlier that morning our guide was admiring the day and the clouds floating over the lake and said, “there will be a nice sunset tonight.” His prediction was right on, and it was the perfect ending for our adventures in Cambodia.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

Vietnam: A Journey Along the Mekong River or A Lion Dance, Sampans & Fortune Sticks

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Ho Chi Minh City surprised us with its vitality and prosperity, from the daily mass migrations of scooters throughout the city during the morning and evening rush hours to verdant parks filled with folks doing their morning calisthenics. The city’s success was reflected in its quickly evolving skyline where construction cranes almost outnumbered the buildings in this old French colonial town metamorphizing into a modern metropolis.

Slow commuter and transport ferries which used to be the only way across the country’s inland waterways are now being systematically replaced at an intense pace with modern suspension bridges to support an economy on steroids and a society that’s increasingly mobile. Since the year 2000 six major bridges have been constructed across the Mekong River Delta in an infrastructure push to improve the region’s connectivity. During our cruise we sailed beneath four new bridges under construction.

Torrential rain and high humidity define the monsoon season that ends during late September in southern Vietnam. The week prior we had lucked out on the weather with it being mostly sunny during the day, but with monsoon showers overnight into the early mornings. The humidity was intense, even for two folks living in the southern United States. What we didn’t expect was the extraordinary amount of time it took for our camera lenses to defog every morning, as we left our airconditioned cabin. Surprisingly it usually took about twenty minutes for our cameras to acclimate to the temperature differential.

Starting in the Tibetan highlands, the Mekong River flows 4,900km (3,000mi) through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, before widening into a web of multiple channels that comprise the Mekong Delta as the river empties into the South China Sea. The delta is a huge area that covers thirteen provinces in southern Vietnam, a region that is often referred to as “Vietnam’s biggest rice bowl.”  The river has been a life force in Southeast Asia since the first people settled along its riverbanks in the delta around 2000BC.

According to Vietnam’s ancient mythology, the dragon, as a symbol of the monsoon, is revered as a rain deity that rises from the sea to the heavens with the spring equinox, bringing rain, wind, and flooding along the country’s rivers. The flooding fertilizes the fields with a fresh layer of silt, before the monsoons cease and the dragon slides back into the sea at the autumn equinox, to wait for the cycle to start again the following spring.

As if wanting to remind us of his power before fading away until next year, the dragon whipped up a torrential rainstorm from which we and most of our fellow travelers couldn’t  escape getting soaked, on the first day of our Mekong River cruise aboard the Pandaw RV Mekong as we departed Ho Chi Minh City. Built and operated by the luxury river cruise provider Pandaw, the Mekong is a classic shallow draft, teak and brass finished riverboat, based on historical designs of colonial era river ships that once plied the waters of the Mekong Delta and southeast Asia from the late-1800s to the 1930s. We had signed on for their Four Country 21 Night Combo Cruise, which would take us up river into Cambodia, then connect us with flights to Thailand and the resumption of the cruise, on the Pandaw RV Laos downriver from the golden triangle, where the borders of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos meet along the Mekong River, in Chiang Khong, Thailand.

Located 50 miles upstream from the South China Sea at the confluence of the Dong Nai River and Sông Sài Gòn, Saigon River, Ho Chi Minh City is a major container seaport in Southeast Asia. Shipping containers offloaded at the port are then transferred to various size barges which then deliver their cargo to other areas further inland in Vietnam or to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

The coffee-brown rivers in Vietnam were like highways, and the main channel of the Mekong River which is very wide and approximately 20m (65 ft) deep was robustly busy with container barges of every size. What was unexpected though was the hundreds of dredging barges loading construction grade sand into large barges with 4m (13ft) drafts to the point that their decks were almost awash as they navigated the waterway, to supply the country’s building boom.

As hectic as the water traffic on the river was, the pilots of the barges we passed all seemed nonchalant. As they steered their vessels with their bare feet, leaning back in their captain’s chair and watching the river’s ubiquitous long-tail boats, the waterman’s equivalent to a motor scooter, whiz by.

Viewing life along the river was intriguing. We watched fishers pulling nets from the river as we motored in a smaller boat to a landing near Bến Tre. We then traveled in a small convoy of openair tuk-tuks through a small town where students in their school uniforms and a bread vendor were bicycling along the road.

In the fields nearby we watched the back breaking activities of farm women, wearing the traditional cone shaped hat woven from palm or bamboo leaves called a “Non La,” as they planted onion sets by hand in raised beds near a riverbank. Occasionally laughter drifted from the field where the women worked rhythmically together in teams of two.

Afterwards as we walked to a nearby outdoor community center, we passed a vendor with a motorcycle-cart laden with everyday hardware and general merchandise conducting business along the roadway with folks that waved for him to stop.

At the center we watched a colorful and acrobatic Lion dance, accompanied by loud, fast-paced drumming and cymbals. It’s traditionally performed during the Tet Trung Thu, Vietnam’s mid-Autumn Festival, that’s held after the busy rice harvesting season for families to reconnect, thank the gods for a good harvest, and wish for prosperity and good luck.

Back on our tuk-tuks we continued through a village surrounded by soursop, jackfruit, and durian orchards to a small dock along a narrow canal in a mangrove swamp of nipa palms, water coconut trees. In narrow wooden sampans, boatmen poled our group along a stream through a jungle of towering trees, where the nipa palms’ roots extended into the water, like fingertips into a shallow bowl. The trees’ canopy cloaked the canal in silence, broken only by the gentle swoosh of the sampans slicing through the water and the occasional bird call.

At one point the canal was so narrow our boatman switched from poling and walked along the edge of the sampan from the stern to the bow and pulled us farther along by grabbing the trees next to our boat. The sampan ride ended at a rustic open air candy workshop where we sampled sweets made with locally harvested coconuts, and durian, that famously stinky fruit that surprisingly tastes delicious.

Returning to the Pandaw RV Mekong via a larger waterway we passed men chest deep in the river, using their bare hands to scoop up mud from the river bottom into sampans. The purpose: to backfill their farmland that’s been eroded away by the monsoon flooding. A little farther along a woman was waiting for passengers to ferry across the river in her sampan.

Across the Mekong the giant glistening white statues at the Chùa Liên Hoa – Mẹ Nam Hải Tiền Giang rose enticingly above the riverfront, but unfortunately the Buddhist pagoda was not part of the tour.

The next day our exploration of life along the Mekong continued as we headed in a larger sampan up a tributary of the Mekong River lined with monsoon-worn, simple tin-roofed shacks on stilts, slung with hammocks, and floating homes on a variety of rivercraft that seemed permanently moored. Boat dogs barked as we floated past.

Our destination was the Miếu Ông Bảo Sanh Đại Đế temple built in the late 1800s by Chinese immigrants to Vietnam. The temple is dedicated to Bảo Sanh, an ancient physician widely worshipped for treating the sick. Today his followers can receive his advice by using “fortune sticks,” where you shake a container of numbered bamboo sticks until one falls out, revealing a number that corresponds to a specific fortune card located on a wall rack that is then taken to the temple’s fortune teller for interpretation.

The numbers 3, 6, 8, and 9 are quite auspicious, being linked to wisdom, luck, prosperity, and longevity. It was very busy with local folks and a family that brought a newborn child to the temple for a blessing.

The temple was colorfully decorated with figures from Chinese epic novels and mythology to create a tranquil space for contemplation.

Occasionally we passed the belltowers of Catholic churches as we continued upriver to Cambodia that afternoon. Nearer the border the sand dredging activity was significantly higher and we were amazed by the number of barges traveling up and down the river, as well as ferry boats traversing the river from one bank to the other.

Crossing the border, officials from Cambodia’s Department of Border Control were welcomed aboard as they jumped from a small motor launch onto the deck of the RV Mekong, to check everyone’s passports. It was a simple process and they were quickly finished.

We continued sailing. More floating homes lined the riverbank, and the river’s islands now hosted banana farms and clusters of simple homes. Farther along cattle stood in the water up to their knees to drink from the river.

The last roar of long-tail boats racing by faded with the twilight as their drivers tried to reach home before total darkness fell, as the darkening river slowly blended with the tree line.

A silhouette of a Buddhist pagoda, highlighted by a swath of orange on the western horizon, slowly vanished with the setting sun. By dawn we would be approaching Phnom Penh.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City – A Dynamic Blending of the Old and New or Scooters, Neon, and Warm-Hearted People

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Scooters everywhere, with apocalyptic-looking masked and helmeted riders roaring along the streets, like cells in our veins always moving never stopping. Individuals off to work, parents taking kids to school, and florists delivering large floral bouquets, along with ice vendors whose towers of bagged ice tied to the backs of their scooters were slowly melting away in the heat.

Cartons of fresh eggs, ladders, toolboxes, and wheelbarrows all whizzed by our GrabTaxi, the Vietnamese equivalent to Uber, as we headed into the city. Think Mad Max set in a metropolis of ten million; Ho Chi Minh City, formerly called Saigon, was crazy!

What had we gotten ourselves into? With horrific traffic like this into the city from the airport, downtown must be a congested nightmare! But it wasn’t. The cars, buses, and scooters flowed in an impressively smooth manner during the morning rush-hour without tempers flaring or any horns being blasted.

Along our route, ubiquitous Xe Bánh Mì and Xôi, bread and sticky rice carts, were set up along the roadside curb to offer takeaway, while also offering low colorful plastic stools on the sidewalk for customers to perch on while they ate.  These street vendors offered Banh mi, small French style baguettes stuffed with various fillings, or a variety of Xôi Mặn, savory sticky rice dish, traditionally served wrapped in banana leaves or a paper container nowadays.

Crossing the street was quite an adventure. We soon realized we couldn’t be timid, and followed the locals’ lead; wait for the light to change and once you commit don’t hesitate. Scooters drivers will give way; they really don’t want any pedestrians as fender ornaments.

After our long flight we spent the balance of the afternoon resting after checking into the Au Lac Legend Hotel, named for the ancient Vietnamese Kingdom. The small boutique hotel was our base for seven nights. It was conveniently located in District 3, an interesting area where “The Pearl of the Far East” remnants of Vietnam’s French colonial past merge with the vitality of a modern neon lit and towering skyline in District 1.  There is a confusing merging of districts and reorganizing them into different administrative subdivisions in progress.

Later that evening we walked to Ben Nghe Street Food, a large food hall with many different stands offering a great variety of foods from seafood and Pho noodles to Bún Thịt Nướng, Vietnamese Grilled Pork & Rice Noodles. With a nightly band singing a mix of Vietnamese, and American pop songs, that included the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, and the Village People’s YMCA, along with its delicious food and good vibes, it’s a popular spot for locals and tourists.  

After dinner we continued our first explorations of the city and headed to the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee building in District 1. It is a historic French colonial building constructed in 1902 that served as the Hôtel de Ville, Saigon’s city hall. Tall buildings with electronic billboards now tower over the People’s Committee Building and the in the plaza across the street there’s an imposing monument to Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader whose military campaign reunited North and South Vietnam.

On our route back to the hotel, brightly decorated street posts sponsored by BIDV, the Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam, lit our way. Outside a college, small groups of students taking a break from their evening classes were gathered, two or three friends on a blanket along the sidewalk, thoughtfully supplied by their snack vendor.

Torrential rain and high humidity define the monsoon season that ends during late September in southern Vietnam. The streets were steaming the next morning when we peeked through the curtains of our room, but the weather report forecast clearing skies. The humidity was intense, even for two folks living in the southern United States. What we didn’t expect was the extraordinary amount of time it took for our camera lenses to defog. We observed the balletic chaos of the morning rush, which now included bicycles and an occasional xích lô, or cyclo, a traditional human-powered bicycle rickshaw where the passenger sits in a seat in front of the driver. Along with helmeted tourists and fashionably dressed women sitting side saddle as scooter passengers on GrabBikes.

Our destination for the morning was the War Remnants Museum,several blocks from our hotel, but along the way we detoured to Tao Dan Park, where morning calisthenics are a daily ritual for older folks and women who have just gotten their children off to school. The park was full of hundreds of people practicing traditional Tai Chi, aerobics, badminton, Vo Thuat Quat (fan martial arts), and Múa Kiếm (a sword dance).

In multiple sections of the park folks twisted, turned, and stretched to classical Asian music, channeled Richard Simmons with eighties pop songs, or pursued a modified course inspired by Chloe Ting, a YouTube fitness instructor. In front of the Temple of the Hung Kings, the legendary founders of the Viet dynasties more than 4,000 years ago, was a fountain with a beautiful display of orchids. Nearby the soft aroma of jasmine drifted on the air in a sculpture park.

Everyday during our teen years – this certainly ages us – the Vietnam War was on the front page of every newspaper and the nightly news. We are not historians; the victors write their history and the War Remnants Museum does document both French and American participation in a horrific war. Though the museum does not address the story of the Vietnamese boat people, more than 800,000 refugees who fled Vietnam by sea between 1975 and 1995 following the war. Nor does it address the forced labor “re-education” camps spread across the country where the victorious Vietnamese communist government interned nearly one million people for three years or longer in a system of prison camps modeled after the Soviet Union’s gulags in Siberia.

Ho Chi Minh City was interesting to walk around and the next day we headed to Tân Định Parish Church, a Catholic church dating to the 1870s that’s admired for its distinctive pink façade and Gothic pillars. We then continued to Hồ Con Rùa, Turtle Lake, a large manmade lake in the center of a traffic circle. The site originally housed a water tower built in 1878, which was later replaced in 1921 with a statue of three French soldiers around a water fountain, symbolizing their colonial rule over Vietnam. This monument lasted until the French army left Vietnam in 1956. The lake was later enlarged in 1967, and the concrete tower that looks like a blooming flower was added by the newly elected president Nguyen Van Thieu of the Republic of Vietnam.

There’s a legend associated with the tower – it says that the president, to ensure his success, “invited a famous Chinese feng shui master to assess the land at Independence Palace,” now Reunification Convention Hall. The feng shui master praised the palace for being built on a dragon’s head, but the dragon’s tail was wildly thrashing about in Turtle Lake. In feng shui terms, this was really bad news for political stability, and a large turtle needed to be cast to hold down the dragon’s tail. Following the master’s advice a turtle sculpture was cast and placed at the center of walkways built over the lake that resemble a bagua, a feng shui symbol used for protection. And the flower shaped tower was reinterpreted as the shaft of an arrow shot into the tail of the dragon to pin it down. The turtle didn’t survive the city’s new communist regime and was destroyed in 1976. The plaza, surrounded by a variety of restaurants and coffee shops, was a nice place to relax for a while.

There are many upscale stores and shops across the city, but for every fancy store there are multiple small mom and pop shops that specialize in one item, like glassware or wicker, which is spilled onto the sidewalk in order to show the wares. There were numerous small mechanic shops that tended to the thousands of scooters that whizz around the city; they conducted their business on the sidewalks, repairing tires, changing oil, rebuilding engines, or doing body work and spray painting. This sidewalk sprawl often forced us to walk in the street to pass by.

A large metal relief sculpture above the entrance to the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of History caught our eye as we headed to the Saigon Zoo and Botanical Garden in District 1. The cataclysmic scene commemorates the great victory of Vietnamese General Trần Hưng Đạo over the army of the invading Mongol Empire in 1288. The captioning on its placard described it as “emphasizing national heroism and successful resistance against foreign invasion, a recurring theme in Vietnamese history.”

Founded by the French in 1864, the zoo is the eighth oldest in the world and a beloved destination for generations of Vietnamese families. The botanical section with its topiary sculptures of wild animals is what drew us here and we spent about two hours wandering the gardens amid flowering plants, a collection of bonsai trees, some irresistible reptiles, and a miniature Jurassic Park geared for kids. 

Turning left upon exiting the zoo we were waiting for a traffic light to change at the intersection of Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh, when we noticed a row of recently painted patriotic street murals. Obviously, these were government approved to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and the thriving economy that Vietnam now enjoys. Graffiti is unheard of and unapproved street art as a form of expression is illegal throughout the city, and the few decorative murals on buildings we saw were apolitical but still required the city’s permission. While talking about the unusual, we also didn’t see any homeless people sleeping rough on the streets. This is due to active government policies that relocate homeless individuals to social support centers, their home region, or shanty towns away from the city center.

Walking back towards the historic center of District 1 we passed tall glass office buildings and transportation infrastructure projects built to sustain one of the fastest-growing economies in Southeast Asia, which is transforming Ho Chi Minh City into a global financial hub by focusing on digital technologies, finance, and high-tech industries.

Near a plaza along the Sông Sài Gòn riverfront with a statue of the legendary General Tran Hung Dao we ducked into a passageway, off Mạc Thị Bưởi, lined with artwork called Alley 39 that opened to a narrow lane lined with small no-frills restaurants filled with folks. We found one with an empty table and enjoyed Pho for lunch.

Afterwards we headed to the Municipal Theatre of Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon’s old opera house built by the French in 1897. It’s a fine example of grand colonial architecture, and it served as the legislative assembly for South Vietnam after the war before being restored to its original use and declared a national monument in 2012. Surrounding the opera house are several small squares with musical themed statuary. It’s also a popular place for couples to have their engagement and wedding photos taken and there even seemed to be two vintage sports cars permanently parked there to facilitate a variety of shots.

It was a long hot and humid day, but we strolled slowly back to our hotel past Saigon’s monumental Central Post Office. Across from it was the Notre Dame Cathedral of Saigon, wrapped in construction scaffolding for a multi-year renovation. It was extravagantly constructed between 1863 and 1880 with every brick, piece of structural steel, nail and stained glass window imported from France. Both structures are beloved vestiges of the city’s colonial past and historic landmarks. While Vietnam’s communist government officially guarantees religious freedom in its constitution, it heavily regulates Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, and Islamic houses of worship and the activities they support via the Government Committee for Religious Affairs.

Next to the post office was Nguyen Van Binh Book Street, a pedestrian-only lane lined with books, shops, and cafes. As we enjoyed a cup of coffee in a café, the bookseller across the way sent her young daughter over chat with us, to practice her English. The young girl spoke very well, and we enjoyed her company, but she soon lost interest and wandered off.

The next day we hired a private driver, a relative of the hotel’s concierge, to take us to the town of Thủ Dầu Một to see the reclining Buddha at the Hoi Khanh Pagoda complex, and several smaller temples on the return trip to the city. This was a fascinating ride down roads filled with overburdened scooters delivering various wares and lined with weathered roadside businesses that included a rubber clogs shop and factory with thousands of brightly colored shoes, a coffin shop, poultry and gold fish stores, a birdcage shop, various statuary makers, one of which had a Statue of Liberty out front, and numerous mechanic shops. It’s traditional for business owners to live above their tightly spaced shops in narrow dwellings called “tube homes,” which are often faced with marble to reflect the prosperity of the owners.

The massive pure white Buddha is 52m (170ft) long and reclines atop the temple’s two-story Buddhist academy. Along the base of the giant statue are 20 reliefs showing the life of the Buddha from his birth to his Parinirvana. According to the Buddhist tradition, women cannot ascend to the status of a Buddha — one who is awake, enlightened and emancipated. I like to tease Donna, who is a Methodist minister, that she might have been a little too close for the Buddha’s comfort, and he pushed her as she was coming down the stairs. Fortunately, a very sweet vendor selling flowers for offerings gave Donna an herbal salve to help with the immediate pain while our driver hurried down the street and bought two bags of ice from a nearby restaurant, to help reduce the swelling. 

Across the street was the site of the original small Hoi Khanh temple, first established in 1741 by Zen Master Đại Ngạn Từ Tấn, a third-generation monk. This temple was destroyed during fighting in 1861, as the French colonial army colonized southern Vietnam. The temple is a major spiritual site in the region and continuous to evolve with additions of the seven-story pagoda in 2007, along with the academy and reclining Buddha in 2010.

Returning to Ho Chi Minh City, we visited the Vinh Nghiem Buddhist Temple in District 3, where we incorrectly assumed that classical design of the temple reflected its ancient history, only to learn that the temple complex was started in 1964 by two monks who migrated from North Vietnam to spread the Truc Lam Zen meditation sect to the south of the country.  The Vinh Nghiem Pagoda holds an important role in the spiritual life of Ho Chi Minh City. “It serves not only as a place of worship but also as a center for moral education and community learning. The temple actively promotes Buddhist teachings on compassion, mindfulness, and filial piety through lectures, study courses, and social activities.” It’s a large complex with many areas and a 14m (46ft) tall stone memorial tower, that was once the tallest in Vietnam. In the Buddha Hall we received our first introduction to Buddha puja, a devotional tradition that symbolizes respect to Buddha by offering fruits, clean water, non-alcoholic drinks, or vegetarian foods. These offerings are often shared daily with the less fortunate.

The Saigon Cao Dai Temple in District 5 was the last temple we visited and fascinatingly different, with a tarpaulin covered courtyard sheltering scooters, coffins and a hearse. Cao Dai was formally established in 1926 in southern Vietnam by Ngô Văn Chiêu, a civil servant who received divine revelations, along with several others who practiced spiritualism, to create a syncretic religion that unites the philosophies of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam into a into a single, universal faith. 

The group revealed through séances the faith’s three saints and “Divine Messengers;” French writer Victor Hugo; Sun Yat-sen, a Chinese revolutionary who fought against oppressive rule; and Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm, a 16th century poet regarded as the “Vietnamese Nostradamus” for his accurate prophecies. The faith’s minor saints include Joan of Arc, Thomas Jefferson, William Shakespeare and Louis Pasteur, amongst others. In the sanctuary colorful dragon motifs surrounded an altar prominently displaying the Eye of Providence.

On our last day in the city we waited for morning showers to clear before we took a GrabTaxi to Landmark 81. With eighty-one floors, this has been Vietnam’s tallest skyscraper since its completion in 2018, a symbol of Vietnam’s economic growth, and an iconic structure on the city’s quickly evolving skyline. It’s a mixed use building with a shopping mall and entertainment complex, residential apartments, and the Vinpearl Landmark 81 – Autograph Collection hotel. We, however, were there for the fantastic panoramas of Ho Chi Minh City’s sprawling metropolis from its SkyView observation deck.

Afterwards we took another GrabTaxi to Ben Thanh, the city’s old central market in district 1, where a bazaar has been on this site since the 1600s. The current building dates from the French in 1914. It’s a sprawling place with hundreds of stalls offering clothing, food and everything in between. The premium outer perimeter stalls are operated by the government with set pricing, while the maze of hundreds of inner stalls offer dynamic opportunities to bargain. We bought several shirts and blouses, along with some dresses for our granddaughters at very reasonable prices. Nearby was the nicest fish store we’ve ever visited. It featured a towering pyramid of sculptural water tanks holding the fresh catch of the day. 

After returning to the hotel for a reprieve from the day’s heat and humidity, we headed out in the early evening to Bui Vien Walking Street, the city’s center for nightlife. It’s known for its partying atmosphere along a vibrant neon-lit street lined with open-air kitchens, bars and clubs that stay open into the early hours of the mornings. It was a fun place to stroll, and people watch as the night sky darkened and more groups filled the street.

We are not sure why it took us so many years to get to Southeast Asia, and Vietnam in particular. It was a nice change from our European centric vacations, and we found Ho Chi Minh City to be a youthful, vibrant and energetic destination that was very affordable compared to the United States and Europe. Everyone we encountered was friendly and welcoming, with the hotel staff almost feeling like family by the time we left. And we managed to stay dry during the occasional monsoon downpour with the help of umbrellas provided by our hotel.

Since the airfare is a considerable portion of any trip, we also booked a cruise up the Mekong River to Cambodia because we’re not sure if we’ll get a chance to return one day or decide to explore other areas of Asia. But after getting our feet wet in Vietnam, we are confident we’ll enjoy wherever we choose to go next in the region.

Book your flights!

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

A Balkans Road Trip Part 9: Split, Croatia – Rocky Coasts, Sunny Skys and Relics

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From Mostar our route along the M6.1 climbed above Stari Grad into karst mountains covered in a garrigue landscape freshly green with the colors of spring. Along the high road, sweeping views of farmlands, vineyards and orchards spread west to the horizon where the Biokovo Mountain range rose and separated Bosnia and Herzegovina from Croatia’s Dalmatian coast and the Adriatic Sea.

It wasn’t the fastest route to the ancient city of Split, but it avoided backtracking along roads that we had driven on during some day trips from Mostar, and allowed us to see a different part of the region. Getting our exit and entrance stamps at the Vinjani Gornji/ Osoje  Border Crossing went smoothly and we were soon driving through the Sveti Ilija tunnel to the Makarska Riviera and Baška Voda. The town is dramatically set at the foot of the western slope of the Biokovo Mountains which tower above it and provide a dramatic backdrop to the beaches and harbor along the town’s waterfront.  We parked and enjoyed lunch at a restaurant across from the harbor, one of the few eateries open midweek early in the May shoulder season.

After lunch we strolled a little way along the Lungomare Promenade, a 60km (37mi) coastal walkway that starts north in Brela and runs south passing through pine forests, alongside pebble beaches, and  seaside villages to Makarska, before ending in Gradac. During the summer high season Baška Voda’s crystal-clear Nikolina Beach is a popular destination along the promenade. It’s been a Blue Flag beach since 2006 and is often listed as one of the nicest beaches in the Mediterranean.  The town is also a favorite spot to splurge on a boat hire to explore the nearby islands of Brač and Hvar.

The ride north along coastal Rt8 was gorgeous, and we stopped at nearly every scenic overlook along the way. Outside of Dubci the Stella Maris lookout provided a fabulous vista to the south of the rugged Makarska Riviera.

Some of the towns along the way hosted large marinas filled with massive superyachts and sailboats of every size, where boatyard workers were busy readying the vessels for the start of the warm weather boating season. Our favorite sight though was the shipwright, who was extending the life of one, old wooden tour boat for a few more years, in a small boatyard along the side road in Omiš.

The narrow roads around Diocletian’s Palace in Split’s historic center are normally congested at any time, though even more so in the days preceding the annual May 7th Feast of Saint Domnius. Martyred in 304 AD by the Roman Emperor Diocletian, he is also the city’s patron saint. Fortunately, our hosts at Pellegrini Luxury Rooms recommended several parking areas and we were able to find a convenient lot within easy walking distance from the small boutique guest-house converted from a 200-year-old historic stone building, that was once the home of a wealthy merchant. The inn was just 60m (200ft) from the palace’s Zlatna Vrata, the golden gate, and the giant statue of Gregory of Nin, which we would pass many times during our in Split.

Nin was a bold medieval bishop in the 10th century who advocated strongly for the use of the Croatian language in religious services so that Croats could understand the liturgy, a move which Pope John X outlawed in 925. It’s common practice in Split to rub the golden big toe of Nin’s 8.5-meter (28 ft) tall statue, because legend believes it brings good fortune and the fulfillment of wishes.

After settling into our room, we headed into Diocletian’s Palace, a huge fortified grand estate the size of a city block in Manhattan. It took ten years to build before the Roman Emperor voluntarily retired to it in 305AD to tend his gardens, where he was particularly fond of “growing cabbages,” preferring peace over the “storms of a never-satisfied greed.” Though his retirement city is a far cry from a pensioner’s cottage in the countryside.

Diocletian was a hometown boy, born in Croatia around 244 AD, who rose through the Roman army’s ranks to become a prominent calvary commander during the rule of Emperor Carus. After Carus and his son Numerian died while returning from a successful  campaign in Persia, Diocletian, who was commander of Carus’s elite imperial bodyguard, was proclaimed emperor by the troops. This was contested by Caru’s surviving son, Carinus, whom Diocletian defeated in 285 AD at the Battle of the Margus in Serbia to retain the throne. His reign was known for stabilizing the frontiers of the Roman Empire and dividing the empire into Eastern and Western halves for administrative purposes, the precursor to what eventually became two separate empires. He also initiated the last, most severe and systematic persecution of Christians before the empire slowly began to adopt Christianity under Emperor Constantine in 312AD.

Following narrow alleys, some of which needed retaining braces across them to prevent the centuries’ old buildings from collapsing onto the cobblestones, we reached the Peristyle, the imperial plaza.

A marching band was playing as part of the prelude to the celebrations for the Feast of Saint Domnius. Fans of the Game of Thrones television series will recognize the Peristyle as the filming location for the city of Meereen, during seasons three to six.

Surrounded by a colonnade of Corinthian columns, this was the ceremonial heart of the palace, with the Temple of Jupiter, as well as Diocletian’s mausoleum, now the Cathedral of St. Domnius. The cathedral’s belltower, which blends Romanesque and Gothic styles, is the tallest along the Dalmatian coast at 57m (187 ft) in height and took over 300 years to build from when its cornerstone was laid in the 13th century. If you have the stamina, the belltower is open for folks to climb 183 steps to the top, for a beautiful view over the city. 

On the other side of the Peristyle a Roman Temple of Venus once stood, though only a circular marble medallion denoting the position of the temple remains on the floor of the Lvxor Café. The café’s site has gone through multiple reconstructions across the centuries before receiving its ornamented columned façade in the Middle Ages, when it was used as Split’s City Lodge, an administration center.  Later it was repurposed as an elaborate home for various Split noble families until 1941, when the Lvxor Café opened. It’s now a popular place for coffee and dinner, and to people-watch while sitting on the steps out front on cushions they provide.

At the far end of the plaza were the stairs to Dioklecijanovi Podrumi, the palace cellars, which were also used as the location for a dragon’s dungeon in Game of Thrones. At the other end of the cellars was the Porta Maris, or Sea Gate, where imperial galleons rowed by slaves once docked along the palace’s seaward wall. Stairs going up also led to the Vestibul of the royal quarters. It’s a tall cylinder-shaped tower with a dramatic ocular opening at the top which illuminates the interior wall with a round beam of light on a sunny day. From here various passages, now walled off, led to different living areas within the palace.  

With the decline of the Western Roman Empire, Avar and Slavic tribes began attacking the region in the early 7th century, and large numbers of folks living in the area fled to safety behind the palace’s defenses. Over the centuries these refugees turned the palace into a small bustling medieval city where homes and trade shops were built within, around, and on top of the palace walls and halls. It was during this time that Diocletian’s mausoleum was converted into the Cathedral of St. Domnius, and the relics of the saint were encased in a silver bejeweled bust and displayed in a side chapel of the church, while the Temple of Jupiter was repurposed as the church’s baptistry.

The city became an important Roman port after the region was reconquered by the Byzantine Empire, the former Eastern Roman Empire. Today, Diocletian’s Palace is a vibrant UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a living city with 3,000 residents that live behind its walls, blending history and daily life. Locals and tourists enjoy coffee in cobbled courtyards, and shops and restaurants invite visitors into buildings that have stood for nearly two millennia.

We exited the Sea Gate, now 60m (200ft) from the sea onto the Splitska Riva, a wide palm tree lined promenade along Split’s harbor. Looking back at the palace, we saw the last vestiges of Diocletian’s private cryptoporticus, a columned and arched balcony that extended along the entire waterfront façade of the palace. The columns and arches still stand, but the spaces between them were walled up with windows ages ago and turned into apartments, and boutique hotels like the Heritage Hotel CardoandPalace Suites Heritage Hotel. Lined with umbrellaed tables restaurants and bars, the Riva is a popular spot to dine outdoors and enjoy some Croation wines or the ubiquitous Aperol spritz.

As the day’s shadows lengthened we strolled along the waterfront and watched various cruise ships arrive, and ferries depart for Hvar or other nearby islands. There is also a twice a week ferry service to Ancona, Italy. At the end of the Riva, workers were busy assembling a large stage for the May 7th festivities.

Past the Riva at the end of the quay, we enjoyed dinner seated outside on a terrace that overlooked the harbor at Konoba Fratelli. Their specialty, of course, was seafood. The quality of the seafood was splendid, and it was so fresh. Locally caught, the morning catch moved quickly from the fishing boats to restaurants the same day, and we couldn’t get enough of it. Afterwards the sunset silhouetted the palm trees along the Riva as we headed back to our hotel. The marble surface of the Peristyle’s plaza and the cobblestones of the old palace, polished smooth by centuries of foot traffic, warmly reflected the old town’s night lights.

Split was delightful to explore, and we spent our days soaking in the ambiance of its weathered walls, interesting vignettes and small plazas with numerous places to stop for a leisurely café.

Outside the walls of Diocletian’s Palace, the surrounding streets and neighborhoods that grew up around the citadel were equally interesting with historic squares and sculptures. The stone lanes were wider, but only enough to allow an innovative burek deliveryman with his three-wheel scooter to scoot by when we pulled in our chairs on the lane at the Tinel Specialty Coffee Shop, a nice place for a variety of coffees and small bites.

Down from Trg Republike, Republic Square, on Matošića ul, a long line had formed at Kantun Paulina, Paulina’s Corner, a small tavern that allegedly has been serving the best ćevapčići, in Split for close to fifty years. Cevapčići is a heavenly combination of grilled kababs served in a somun flatbread, similar to a pita, and garnished with diced red onion, creamy kajmak, and ajvar, a relish of red peppers and eggplant. At Paulina’s it’s a popular takeaway food.

The old town gave way to newer high rise apartment blocks as we walked along Ul. Zrinsko Frankopanska, a tree-lined shady street, to the Split Archaeological Museum.

This was a fascinating museum with a large courtyard and surrounding portico which sheltered an extensive collection of Roman architectural elements, statues and exquisitely carved sarcophagi unearthed in Split and the surrounding region. Inside there are exhibits of coins and jewelry, as well as artefacts from earlier ages.

Backtracking we had dinner at the Downtown Grill Split where their freshly made burrata was delectably soft and creamy on the inside and the grilled octopus marvelously tender. Through our travels we’ve gotten into the habit of having our dessert and coffee in another establishment after dinner. We’ve found it to be a nice way to experience a greater variety of eateries in a limited amount of time. Split takes its coffee scene, an integral part of the social fabric of the city, very seriously. With that in mind we only had to walk a few feet across the small plaza to Stow Coffee Roasters Split, a local favorite and one of several new specialty coffee shops that include Kava2, D16 Coffee, and 4Coffee Soul Food that have opened across Split in the last couple of years.

The next morning was May 7th, Saint Domnius’ feast day. Outside the palace’s East or Silver Gate, preparations were underway for a colorful religious banner-led procession with scores of people and school children dressed in traditional costumes. The participants were preparing to accompany the silver-encased relic of Saint Domnius, which had been brought from the cathedral for the occasion.

It was a well-attended pageant with thousands of spectators lined up along the route to watch the procession make its way down the Riva to the stage that had been constructed earlier in the week, where a mass was then held before returning the relic to the church. Later that day the festival ended with an evening concert featuring local musicians, but thunderstorms canceled plans for a fireworks display over the harbor.

The morning and afternoon weather was perfect, and we spent the day investigating the Gradska Tržnica, Split’s daily outdoor morning market, that featured some early spring vegetables, cut flowers, tasty Croatian cheeses and wine, along with permanent small butcheries and fishmongers. We love cheese and purchased some vacuum packed goat cheese made by the award winning Gligora Dairy on the nearby island of Pag and a Dalmatian kozji sir roko goat cheese to savor when we returned to the states.

Afterwards we strolled along crafts booths on the Riva where it’s been a tradition to buy something wooden from the crafters of Solana, modern Solin, where Domnius was once bishop. The tradition is so old no one is sure exactly why or how it originated, but it has been in existence for centuries. One of our little traditions is to purchase a handmade wooden spoon from a local business, and we were hard put to choose just one from the immense selection. The craftsmen’s tents were also full of wooden spoons, cutting boards and klepetalo or ptice klepetuše. These are wooden toys with birds or butterflies at the end of a long stick with wheels. When pushed along the wings of the flying creatures flap and they clack as they go. Literally hundreds of kids were playing with them, and wooden spoons protruded from numerous shopping bags. It’s a very festive occasion.

We had a grand time exploring Spilt. It was especially nice being there during the Feast of Saint Domnius, which gave the city a wholly different cultural dimension. It was the perfect place to end our travels through Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Croatia, a roundtrip journey that started and ended at the airport in Zadar.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

A Balkans Road Trip Part 8: Bosnia and Herzegovina: Mostar, Počitelj and the Kravica Waterfall – Charming, Intriguing and Magnificent

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We had been in the Balkans almost two weeks by now, and this was the first time we encountered heavy traffic. Without realizing it we had planned on driving from Sarajevo to Mostar on May 1st, Labor Day, a major two-day holiday in Bosnia, where it is traditionally spent picnicking and relaxing with family and friends in the countryside. It was a warm beautiful spring day, and did in fact feel as if every family in Sarajevo was heading to Mostar, in the southern Herzegovina region, turning what would normally be a two-hour drive into five.

Our journey was off to a good start as we headed southwest on the A1, from Sarajevo through the rolling foothills of the Dinaric Mountain Range, a wide 644km (400mi) long stretch of peaks that runs southeast from Slovenia through Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, and North Macedonia. But it soon slowed as this major four-lane wide infrastructure project, which will eventually reach the Adriatic coast, narrowed for construction projects. The countryside was lush with fresh spring greenery, though disappointedly there were not any scenic pullovers along the way, and we contented ourselves as best we could, by taking landscape photos through the window of our car as we drove.

Our “drive a little then café” yearning for caffeine was seriously overdue, so we detoured slightly to Restoran Vrata Hercegovine for coffee and lunch when the A1merged into the two-lane E73 at the traffic circle in Bradina. They had a large menu to select from and everything we ordered was very good; the pricing very budget friendly.

From here the E73 basically follows the Trešanica River, the headwaters of which flow from the slopes of Mt. Bitovnja 1,700m (5600ft) which wasn’t far from where we stopped for lunch, to Konjic where it merges with the Neretva River at Konjic before flowing into Lake Jablanica. We had originally planned to have lunch here and walk across the Stara Ćuprija, Konjic’s old Ottoman bridge, a six-arch stone span constructed in 1682. The bridge is 107km (66mi) downstream from the river’s source on the slope of the Zelengora mountains near Mt. Maglić 2,388m (7835), Bosnia’s highest peak on the border with Montenegro. Nearer to Konjic is Glavatičevo, a popular village for river rafting on the Neretva.

The road roughly traces Lake Jablanica’s picturesque shoreline. The large lake is actually a manmade reservoir that is 30km (19 mi) long and covers 67.5 square kilometres (26.1 sq mi). The damming of the upper portion of the Neretva River was created between 1947 and 1955 to supply hydroelectric power to the region. While this was the first dam built on the Neretva River there are now many environmentally controversial proposals to block the remainder of free-flowing waterway with 50 more dams across the river and its tributaries. In Ostrožac there was a nice beach where we stopped to take photos of the Lake.

South of the lake we detoured to the Old Neretva Train Bridge in the town of Jablanica, an important site during the “Battle of the Wounded” during February–March 1943. Here Josip Tito led the escape of over 20,000 Yugoslav Partisans, plus roughly 4,000 wounded, east across the Neretva River to escape the pursuit an overwhelming Axis force assembled to destroy them after their unexpected victory at Prozor.

This successful strategic retreat relied on a deception which required the destruction of all the bridges across the Rama and Neretva rivers between March 1stand 4th. This action led the Axis forces to believe the partisans were headed towards northern Bosnia, while in fact Tito was leading his men to safety on March 7th and 8th across a temporary wooden bridge built across the Neretva, in just 18 hours, after the rail bridge was destroyed. A museum at the site commemorates this history. As does the 1969 movie “The Battle of Neretva” starring Orson Welles and Yul Brynner, among an international cast by directed Veljko Bulajić. The film was a contestant in the best foreign film category in the Academy Awards that year. The European film poster for the movie was famously designed by Pablo Picasso, in which he used motifs of his painting “The Rape of the Sabine Women” but “painted them red to symbolize the anti-fascist fight for freedom.” It’s one of the two movie posters that Picasso ever designed. The artist refused payment, instead requesting 12 bottles of Yugoslavia’s finest wines gathered from across the region.

Our 55km (34mi) drive from Ostrožac on Lake Jablanica to Mostar paralleled the river as it coursed through rugged gorges on its way to the Adriatic Sea and was gorgeously scenic, pun intended.

There is time-limited metered street parking in Mostar’s old town near the historic old bridge, Stari Most. Many folks decide to visit Mostar as part of a guided day trip from Sarajevo, Dubrovnik & Split, Croatia or even as far afield as Kotor, Montenegro. We chose to base ourselves in the Hotel Kriva Ćuprija for four nights to enjoy Stari Grad, the old town, and explore the region. We parked in a convenient monitored lot at the foot of Onešćukova that the hotel recommended. The view from our room looked out over slate roofs, a mosque, and an old stone bridge.

The 1990s war in Bosnia brought total devastation to Mostar, where an estimated ninety percent of the buildings were destroyed by forces bombarding the city from the surrounding hilltops. Mostar was once a tiny hamlet along the Neretva River, before the Ottomans seized it and transformed it into an important multicultural trading center and frontier garrison town during their 15th century conquest of Bosnia. The site where the hotel stands overlooking the Crooked Bridge, Kriva Ćuprija, from which it takes is name, was an ancient dwelling, and the hotel is a modern reconstruction of Stari Grad’s historic “Turkish houses” – residential buildings of stone and wood that defined the Old Bridge Area’s pre-war heritage. While the famous 15th century Stari Most bridge was destroyed in the 1990s war, the Crooked Bridge amazingly survived the conflict but succumbed to raging flooding in 2000 and was subsequently rebuilt.  

Reconstruction of Mostar began with funds from the European Union, the World Bank, and UNESCO shortly after a permanent ceasefire was established with the Washington Agreement on March 18, 1994, nineteen months before the cessation of the wider Bosnian conflict was resolved with the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords on November 1, 1995.

Old Town Mostar is beautifully atmospheric and while most of the buildings in the Stari Grad have been fully restored, several owners have chosen to leave the numerous bullet marks on the sides of their buildings as reminders of the wrath of war. Throughout the city there are still over 1,000 buildings in ruin or abandoned as a result of the conflict, with many of them concentrated across the river in east Mostar.

Cobblestone alleys twisted through Stari Grad and we followed them all to soak in the ambiance. Visiting the old town was a sensory experience: dazzling color, aromas of grilled meats, textures and the melancholic song of the call to prayer that the muezzin sings from the minarets dotted around the city.

Our wanderings took us over the high arched, Ottoman built Stari Most. The iconic symbol of Mostar was a vital lifeline used by soldiers and civilians to transport food, medicine, and arms to besieged areas of the city on the west bank Neretva River during the 1190s war. It’s a popular area where folks gather to hopefully watch divers jump from the bridge 28m (92ft) into the cold water below, a decades old tradition that started in 1968. None of the divers were working the crowd for tips when we crossed. Diving from the bridge has also existed for 450 years as a traditional rite of passage for young men, and as an old legend says, “the way a boy becomes a man in Mostar.”

Across the bridge the lane narrowed through the Kujundžiluk alley. Known as the old goldsmiths’ quarter, it served as a crucial trading alley for merchant caravans before they paid customs duties to cross the bridge during the Ottoman era. Our “walk a little then café’” philosophy took us to the restaurant Urban Taste of Orient. Their beautiful terrace offered spectacular views of the river and Stari Most. We were enjoying a charcuterie board of Bosnian cheeses and cured meats when I looked at the bridge and noticed a lone man, seemingly much taller than the rest of the folks, who from our perspective appeared to be standing on the bridge’s far wall, until he vanished. I almost screamed to Donna, “look, a diver jumped,” as his silhouette splashed into the river. We had just witnessed the first dive of the tourist season on this Labor Day holiday.

Afterwards we visited the early 17th century Koski Mehmed Pasha Mosque, where it’s possible to climb its 30m (98ft) tall minaret for panoramic views of Mostar and the river. We also viewed the wrenching exhibits at the Museum of War and Genocide Victims, the only such museum we visited while in Bosnia & Herzegovina. It gave us tragic eye-opening, first-person accounts of life in Mostar when it was under siege.

The next morning on an early morning walk before Mostar awakened, I came across one of the town’s tagged stray dogs, a large black sheep dog, semi-asleep on the bridge’s highest point. He struck me as the reincarnation of an ancient watchman guarding the entrance to Stari Grad. He opened his eyes, but did not move, having determined I was not a threat, and I passed quietly.

Beyond the old town we found Mostar to be a wonderful compact cosmopolitan city with cafes and large colorful street murals in some neighborhoods. The walk along Alekse Šantića Street, a former frontline in the war, to the Cernica neighborhood is full of mural paintings. It was an initiative in 2012 by Marina Mimoza, a prominent cultural activist and artist who sought to heal the wounds of war and promote reconciliation through art “transforming ruined, bullet-ridden buildings into a vibrant cultural hub, and open-air gallery.” Since its inception the event has grown into The Street Arts Festival Mostar which turns the city into a colorful canvas each summer for invited artists and performers, typically in June or July.

Several tourist attractions nearby beckoned to us. First Fortica Hill, on the east bank of the Neretva River where the Skywalk, a glass bridge, has been open since 2021. From its height there’s a commanding view of Mostar and an Instagram worthy “We Love Mostar” sculpture. Amazingly, there was no entrance fee for the Skywalk, and there’s a small restaurant with a great view from its terrace.

Within walking distance of the Skywalk were the late 19th century ruins of an Austro-Hungarian stone fortification that had sweeping views north to the mountains on both sides of the Neretva River Gorge.

Later that afternoon we headed fifteen minutes south of Mostar to the orthodox Žitomislić Monastery, dedicated to the Annunciation of Mary. The church on the site was constructed upon the ruins of an earlier house of worship in 1566 with the surrounding monastery buildings taking another forty years to complete. It was a major spiritual center in the 16th and 17th centuries, hosting a large library, a scriptorium, and beautiful iconostasis. At the height of its existence the monastery was supported by large land holdings that included vineyards and orchards worked by the monks themselves. During World War II the entire brotherhood of the Žitomislić monastery were killed by local fascist troops allied to the Axis Alliance, and the complex was severely damaged and looted. Rebuilt after World War II, the monastery was again burned, but the church was savagely destroyed with explosives, reducing it to rubble during the 1990s Bosnia War.  The original stones of the church were reused during its reconstruction in 2002 to recreate its earlier appearance, and it was reconsecrated in 2005.

We arrived to the monastery just as a tour bus finished disgorging its passengers. We dislike crowded sites, so we decided to explore the new monastery’s museum first, which had a small collection of ancient manuscripts, books, and liturgical objects, as well as a collection of some of the region’s oldest surviving icons. The works transcend several artistic styles from traditional Byzantine, featuring austere lines and dark color, to more graceful interpretations as Venetian and Baroque influences reached the Balkans. During exploration of the museum’s gift shop we discovered that the resident monks still make a traditional walnut liqueur  called Orahovača. It’s made by soaking green, unripe walnuts in plum brandy with honey, citrus and spices like cloves and cinnamon. It is usually enjoyed chilled as a digestif  after meals, or to treat stomach ailments. It was very tasty and we enjoyed the small bottle we purchased throughout the trip.

When the tour group departed, we entered the foyer of the church where a 200 liter, (50 gallon) stainless steel drum of what we assumed was holy water stood in the corner, available to fill your water bottles from. Entering the sanctuary revealed a stunningly beautiful space where every surface was covered in rich iconography.

A short drive away, but a long walk from the parking area was Blagaj Tekija, a historic Sufi Dervish monastery constructed in the early 16th century at the foot of soaring 240m (787ft) sheer rockface next to a karst cave. The cavern shelters a spring called the Vrelo Bune which is the source Buna River. It’s a dramatic setting. From its banks we watched visitors take small boats rowed by local men a short way into the mouth of the cave to see its large cavern.  Professional divers have explored the dark cold water of the spring to a depth of 150m (492ft), but the total depth of the spring remains unknown. We enjoyed a late afternoon dinner at one of restaurants along the river’s edge. It was a very tranquil setting with ducks lazily paddling about on the softly gurgling water as it glistened in the bright sun.

Heading back to Mostar we made one last stop at Objekt Buna in Gnojnice. It’s an unofficial tourist site where visitors are semi-discouraged by a decrepit incomplete fence to not enter this Cold War era secret aircraft bunker. Located across the main road from what is now the Mostar International Airport, the military bunker was constructed into the side of a small hill in 1969 to shelter up to twenty planes and helicopters from attack.  It was abandoned after the Bosnia War and is now a graffiti covered relic of the communism of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Outside the bunker the hillside was covered with wild poppies.

Mostar was especially enchanting in the evenings. Across from the small beach under the bridge where the boat rides launch from, we were surprised to see so many photographers lined up with their cameras mounted atop tripods placed, we hoped, firmly into the riverbed. Along with us, they were all intent on capturing the ultimate night picture of Stari Most as darkness fell. There were many previous attempts to build an arched stone bridge across the river, but all had failed, to the frustration of  Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. In 1557 he commissioned Mimar Hayruddin, a former apprentice to Istanbul’s grand architect Mimar Sinan to build a single arch bridge, but legend says the Sultan threatened him with death if his design collapsed. Fearing the worst as completion of the bridge neared in 1566 the architect reportedly prepared his own funeral shroud, expecting to be killed when the scaffolding supporting the bridge was removed. But to everyone’s relief, the 29m (95 ft) span, the widest man-made stone arch bridge in the world at the time, held firm. A marvel of engineering, the original stone structure stood for over 450 years until it was destroyed during the 1990s Bosnia War.   

For our last day trip from Mostar we headed to Kravica Waterfall, but we rarely go directly to a destination, as there’s always other sites of interest along the roundabout routes we choose. Forty minutes south of Mostar we stopped at the Church of St. James in Medjugorje, a modest Bosnian town with about 4,000 people living in it. The catholic church was started in 1934, but its construction was interrupted by WW2, and religion was suppressed in Yugoslavia’s early communist years until authorities loosened their policies toward religious institution. The church was allowed to be completed and consecrated in 1969. But the quiet town suddenly rose to world-wide fame when six young people  claimed to have seen the Blessed Virgin Mary on June 24th, 1981 on Crnica hill. Subsequent apparitions appeared to the children in different locations around the small town, and eventually in the church. The Virgin Mary’s visitations, with her messages emphasize reconciling with God, reading scripture, and encouraging peace are said to have occurred daily since then. And Medjugorje has grown into the third most visited pilgrimage site in Europe, after Lourdes in France and Fatima in Portugal, receiving over 40 million pilgrims since 1981.

When we arrived an outdoor mass was in progress behind the church in a large park-like setting; thousands of pilgrims were seated along rows of permanent benches or stood nearby. Around the front of the church folks prayed before a statue of the Virgin, as another mass was underway in the sanctuary.

Continuing our journey we headed to the Fortress of Herzog Stjepan Vukčić Kosača. Set atop a towering hill, the medieval 15th century castle was an important stronghold of the Kingdom of Bosnia as the Ottoman Empire expanded across the region.  Kosača’s title “Herceg” (Duke), was also the name of his expansive domain which later became known as Herzegovina. Unfortunately, there was a large sporting event being held the day we visited, which would have required us to park at the bottom of the hill and walk to the summit. This would have taken too much time away from the rest of the day, so we contented ourselves with photos of the mighty stronghold from the foot of the hill.

The Trebižat River was full from runoff from recent heavy spring rains across the region and the Kravica Waterfall was the beautiful beneficiary. The spectacular bridal veil fall is 120m (394ft) wide with a cascade that drops 25m (82ft) into a crystal-clear turquoise basin. Local boatmen can be hired to row folks closer to the falls to hear the thunder of the water and get soaked in mist. A few swimmers were daring enough to brave the cold water.

There was plenty of parking near the park entrance and we opted for the ticket with the tourist train. This is especially helpful for folks like us with bad knees; the other alternative is a walk down many steep stairs, but be prepared for a vigorous climb up. Along the water edge there are three outdoor restaurants that are seasonally open. If pursuing waterfalls is your thing, another smaller cascade, Koćuša Waterfall, is 30 minutes away to the northwest.

The last stop of the day on the way back to Mostar was the ancient fortified stone village of Počitelj along the east bank of the Neretva River, that’s a tentative UNSECO site. Our descent into the town was down a narrow single-track lane, with occasional pullover spots in case you encountered any oncoming cars. At its bottom was a small plaza with a few restaurants and a tourist shop, from which the village spread dramatically up a steep hill. Founded in 1383 by Bosnia’s King Tvrtko I, the village was also a strategic stronghold and administrative center of the Ottoman Empire for 400 hundred years after its conquest in 1471, having a large mosque, hammam, madrasa, and a clock tower to reflect its importance as a governmental seat.

We entered the old town through an arched gateway. Under an ancient watch tower we spotted the largest fig tree we had ever seen, growing spectacularly from between stones of tower’s wall. If the tree ever fell, we were sure the tower would also collapse. Though there were several other tourists about, and signs that some of the old dwellings had been gentrified as vacation homes, the village felt as if it had been forgotten in time and abandoned; the aftermath of the 1990s Bosnia War.

Reaching Pašina tabija, a restored tower along the upper defensive wall, we were rewarded with a fantastic panorama of the village and the Neretva. Renovation to the tower included a glass walkway along the ramparts and a large deck to be used as a venue to host summer sunset concerts. Our late afternoon visit to Počitelj was the perfect way to end our time in Bosnia & Herzegovina, a destination we founded to be very charming and intriguing.

The next morning as we departed Mostar I promised that we would drive straight to Split, Croatia. “We’ll only stop for coffee, right?” “Yes, unless the steering wheel guides me like a Ouija board to some interesting locations.” I winked.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna