O Sarajevo...

“The Balkans produce more history than they can consume.”
-- Winston Churchill

“Sarajevans will not be counting the dead. They will be counting the living.”
-- Radovan Karadzic, Bosnian Serb leader



Sarajevo has been rebuilt in the last 3 years. See this great travelogue by Michael Totten who specialises in going to former warzones...

"Sarajevo can be startling for first-time visitors. Shattered buildings, walls riddled with bullet holes, and mass graveyards are shocking things to see in a European capital in the 21st Century. The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was more violent than the others in the former Yugoslavia, and it shows. If I believed in ghosts I'd say Sarajevo must be one haunted place. At the same time, the reconstruction and cleanup work is impressive. The destruction gave me a jolt, but at the same time I was slightly surprised I didn't see more of it.

Bosnia is a troubled country with a dark recent past, but it is no longer the war-torn disaster it was. Sarajevo was under siege for almost four years by Bosnian Serb forces on the surrounding hilltops who fired mortar and artillery shells and sniper rounds at civilians, but it’s over and it has been over for more than a decade. Most damaged buildings have been repaired, and many neighborhoods look almost as though nothing bad ever happened to them.
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Some really great pics of the Taj

Truly beautiful... I have never been to the Taj Mahal, and looking at the pics, I used to wonder what the big deal was. Now I get it...

via Amit Ranjan

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Discovering India the right way

The Sunday NYT tells how to have a satisfying short tourist trip to India. Pragmatically, they don't advice the tourist to pack everything there is to see in India within 2 weeks. Instead, the model should be to sample the richness of a particular region.

"FOR the first-time visitor to India, the sheer vastness of the country — more than a million square miles — all but defeats the romantic notion of seeing all that this place has to offer in anything approaching the usual time frame of a normal vacation. Retirees no longer punching the clock, college students who want to take a couple of semesters off, backpackers on a global journey of exploration: these are the kinds of travelers that India seems made for.

But what about the rest of us who are limited to one or two weeks of vacation a year? Is India completely beyond our grasp?

In a word, no. Even sampling the tiniest geographical crumb of India over a period of 7 to 10 days can be a satisfying travel experience.

Quite rightly, no one wants to miss the Taj Mahal, especially on a first visit, so our suggested route pivots around that Platonic ideal of tourist attractions. Spending a couple of days first in the nearby capital of New Delhi — a strange patchwork of imperial Mughal monuments, bustling urban villages, leafy British Raj-era avenues and expanding middle-class housing colonies — is bound to give you a good taste of urban India. Still, some two-thirds of Indians live outside the nation's cities. With that in mind, this route, after passing through Agra, site of the Taj, and the ruins and palaces of Gwalior, culminates in Orchha, a riverside village well-stocked with palaces, tombs, Hindu temples and ordinary village life.

Rajasthan? That fascinating, tourist-infested merry-go-round has been deliberately omitted, though it is a place worth coming back to when you have time to explore its less overdeveloped pockets. The hiking trails of the Himalayas and the beaches of Goa? Next time.
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Read the rest of the article here.

Picture: Available on Wikipedia with a GPL license.

The transformaton of Iraqi Kurdistan

Michael Totten has an incredible post (with lots of pics) on the change sweeping Iraqi Kurdistan.

Fourteen months ago I flew to Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, from Beirut, Lebanon, on the dubiously named Flying Carpet Airlines. Flying Carpet’s entire fleet is one small noisy plane with propellers, cramped seats, and thin cabin pressure. Only nineteen passengers joined me on that once-a-week flight. Everyone but me was a Lebanese businessman. They were paranoid of me and of each other. What kind of crazy person books a flight to Iraq, even if it is to the safe and relatively prosperous Kurdistan region? I felt completely bereft of sense going to Iraq without a gun and without any bodyguards, and it took a week for my on-again off-again twitchiness to subside.

Last week I flew to Erbil from Vienna on Austrian Airlines to work for a few weeks as a private sector consultant with my colleague Patrick Lasswell. This time I didn’t feel anything like a fool. Almost half the passengers were women. Children played on their seats and in the aisle with toys handed out by the crew. We watched an in-flight movie and ate the usual airline lunch fare served by an attractive long legged stewardess
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Read the full post here.