Hey everybody! Since I last talked to you, I have spent three nights in Zvornik, Bosnia. My first night there, Saturday, was a pretty small affair. Mickey was pretty busy until later in the evening after having just arrived from Belgrade, but we did go out for a beer my first evening and catch up for a minute. The best part about my first night in Zvornik was that I met two of Mickey’s good friends, Slaven and Joe. These two guys wound up being my tour guides the next day because Mickey had some other family obligations during the day on Sunday.

Sunday afternoon, I picked up Slaven and Joe and we went up to the fort that overlooks Zvornik. Zvornik is not a tourist town by any means, so the fort is probably the most touristy thing in town. But the views from up there were incredible!

After the fort, we went to the newest hotel in town to have a coffee with a view of the lake created by the damming of the Drina river.

After coffee, we parted ways for a couple hours and I made my way back to my hotel to get ready for the evening festivities. When I got back to the hotel, there was another wedding going on!

Our plan for the evening was to go to the festival that was going on in Zvornik down by the river, and then to have a fire afterwards nearby in the park on the river. This required some logistics, as I was the only one with a car and we needed wood and booze for this operation. We worked out a plan to haul the wood in the car, and to have Mickey’s friend who is a police officer in Zvornik drive me and the car back to the hotel at the end so I wouldn’t have to drink and drive. Sounded perfect to me!

I had intended to leave on Monday, but on Sunday night I was offered a one hour gig at a bar on the river where Mickey knows the owner. They already had a band set to play Monday night, but the owner seemed to really want me to play as well and offered me 20 euro to play for an hour, so I figured why not? There’s more to this story that I’ll tell you about later. When I got back late Sunday night, I made sure they had a vacancy for me for Monday and then proceeded to go comatose for several hours, excited to have a gig for the evening.

On Monday evening, I linked up with the guys again and we all went to the bar where I was playing that night. After meeting up with the owner and the other guys that were actually scheduled to play that night, the owner told me that he only wanted me to play for a half hour and he wanted me to play first. It wasn’t clear if he wanted me to play again later in the night or not at that point. So I played for 30 minutes, and handed it over to the other guys to start their set. The owner gave me 15 euros and said to stay and have some drinks on the house. We all sat there for two more hours, but I was never asked to come back up to play again. Everybody seemed to enjoy my songs and my crew said it sounded great, so I’m really not sure what happened on that. But I got an extra day with the guys, got laundry done, cleaned out the car, and made money for playing music (although less money and a shorter set than agreed), so overall it could have been a lot worse.

After realizing my services were no longer needed at the bar, we set out to get some food from the festival and hang out for a few more minutes before parting ways for the evening. Everybody was pretty wiped out from Sunday night’s fire!

I had a great time with these guys, and it was really nice to spend a few nights away from any other tourists and have a great and authentic experience in a town like Zvornik. I hope to see all three of them together again in the future, but I have define plans to see Mickey when I am passing back through Belgrade, where he lives full time, later in the fall!

This morning, I got up and headed out for my destination of Tara national park on the Serbia side of the Serbia/Bosnia border. I noticed on the map that I would be passing by Srebrenica along my route. Srebrenica was the sight of a massacre of Bosnian Muslim civilians during the war in 1995 by Serb forces. I had heard of it before, but knew very little about what happened. Seeing all the markers at the cemetery and learning that they are still finding bodies and new mass graves from this genocide was very moving.

I make a point to not pick sides as I’m learning more about the conflicts that have occurred in this area because I have met many great people who are Serb, Croat, and Bosniak Muslim. They all have a perspective on what happened and who is at fault, and it’s a very complicated situation with a lot of wounds that are still very raw. But regardless of this, I feel deeply for innocent victims from every side and seeing things like Srebrenica is eye opening and very sad.

As I traveled from Srebrenica to Tara, I came across many markers for the Muslims from that particular area who were killed at Srebrenica.

The route that Google had me take was to a border crossing that looked like it had been closed for years. Slightly aggravating because it took me an extra hour to backtrack to a place where I actually could cross the border into Serbia.

When I finally did get to the border crossing, the Bosnian guard asked me how long I had been in Bosnia. When I told him 4 days, he responded “that’s a problem” and had me pull over and get out of the car. Evidently, you are supposed to register at the local police and get a piece of paper to show if you stay in Bosnia more than 3 days. I had no idea about this, and I told him and his colleague so. They were not going to budge, and they told me I had to pay a 50 euro fine for not registering. Since I didn’t even have 50 euros on me, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I decided to play for sympathy and I told them I was a traveling musician and showed them my guitar in the trunk. When I grabbed a CD from the backseat, the guard took it and made me give his colleague and his supervisor one as well. And then he said to have a nice day. So I can honestly tell you all that my CD saved me from an international border crossing incident..😂

The drive from the border up to my hostel in Tara national park was beautiful and I arrived just before the sun went down.

Upon arriving and checking in to the room, I met a group of older Serbians from the Novi Sad area who had rented a house next door for 2 weeks. I walked over there to investigate the accordian music that I was hearing in the distance, and they couldn’t have been more welcoming and nice to me. I listened to a lot of folk music and played them a couple of songs, and ate some really great food.

Tomorrow I’m off to explore a little bit in the park and do a hike, and then drive to Montenegro to overnight with my buddies Stefan and Alex. My sister-in-law Vickie arrives in Athens, Greece in 7 days, so I have to start making my way south pretty quickly to be there in time to pick her up for our week together in Greece!

That’s all I have for today, so I’ll talk to you again soon!