One, Two, Three, Hike!

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, today Wiley and I went hiking - take heart, there were no landmines on this mountain, though we did pass the site where they were checking for mines. We went to this itty bitty town called Lukomir, which has one road leading to it, part of it just gravel, which is closed during wintertime because there's too much snow. Can you imagine living for 6 months with no contact? Think The Shining: all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Anyway, we saw lots of shepherds and sheep and herding dogs, and just tons and tons of scenery.

Ok - so at 9:15, we're picked up at a bus stop near our apartment, where we meet Lawrence, our guide, and a character. In our troupe, we had a total of eight people, one from Holland, one from Norway, one from New York, one from Switzerland, and I don't know where Lawrence and his other guide was from - I assume here, but that may not be so. Everyone was really nice, and we found out NY was a playwright as well as an ad writer (and she stayed at Halvat House, where we stayed our first four days here), and Holland and Norway were both journalists. So we start the trek out of town in our bus - held 9 people very comfortably, and was not a huge beast of a machine - US, take note! It's really hard to describe the experience. We had fields of gold, a beautiful day, a couple dalliances with rocks that didn't want to hold under our feet, a lovely lunch on a little cliff (my cookies were a hit, especially with Lawrence), my hiking boots didn't hurt my feet and in fact my feet didn't hurt once all day (so I'm now wearing them all the time in the house, hee hee), some silences where it's just you and the world, a traffic jam with sheep...sometimes it really felt like we were in the middle of nowhere. We did not see the river that flowed through the canyon, but we got to see the canyon, and if you want, you can view some of the pictures I uploaded here. It's hard to believe that this landscape is really about a half-hour out of the city hustle and bustle. The company that sponsored this tour is Green Visions. They have lots of other tours too, so it wouldn't surprise me if we go on more of these tours, especially if we can get Lawrence! You can check them out at www.greenvisions.ba .