View Workout (Matthew Simonson)

Return to Log

Crazy Highland Adventure

October 12, 2018 (Morning)

Exercise Type: Run

Comments:
Aisha and I ran from her house up into the hills. We stopped for about 10 minutes to pet a very friendly cat which even let us pick it up. After she turned around for home, I headed up into the woods hoping to loop back to a rocky outcrop with some radio towers with a great view of the city that I’d picked out as a goal when the run began. After 20 minutes of a pretty, though of course uphill, trail ( all trails here are uphill both ways...) through lush vegetation, I emerged at a Austro-Hungarian fortress hidden in the woods. Eventually, after an hour and a half of adventures I reached the radio towers and found that they were accompanied by a Muslim memorial to soldiers who died defending the city during the last war. There was also a museum dedicated to their battalion housed in a small white fortress that had been used and partly destroyed in the 1992-5 siege by Bosnian Serb forces. It was decently translated and actually had some very useful maps of the siege lines which will be very helpful for my interviews with survivors since they’re constantly mentioning places I’ve heard of but I’m never sure which side controlled them and when. I left after half an hour and headed down a steep rocky slope where I passed a father and son riding a horse tied to two donkeys. Amazing to see something like that just blocks from a urban modern looking European city with cars and paved roads. Definitely one of the things I really like about Sarajevo.