20 February 2016

Jajce - Sundays in My City

I visited Jajce, which is located in central Bosnia and Herzegovina a couple years ago.  I mentioned it briefly in an earlier post. I had read about the beautiful waterfall in this town and decided to pay a visit while touring the Balkans. So I took a bus from Zagreb, Croatia.  The waterfall is beautiful but the town is very tiny and, having come by bus, I had no way to go anywhere else and my ticket back to Zagreb wasn't until the next day.  I took hundreds of pictures of the waterfall, walked around the town 6 or 7 times, took some more pictures of the waterfall, walked around the town a few more times...that's how I spent my time there.

Good lucky trying to pronounce any of the places mentioned here.  There seems to be a lack of necessary vowels!  My spell check is going crazy.

Jajce was first built in the 14th century and served as the capital of the independent Kingdom of Bosnia during its time. The town has gates as fortifications, as well as a castle with walls which lead to the various gates around the town.

The town is famous for its beautiful waterfall where the Pliva River meets the river Vrbas. It was thirty meters high, but during the Bosnian war, the area was flooded and the waterfall is now 20 meters high. The flooding may have been due to an earthquake and/or attacks on the hydroelectric power plant further up the river.

Jajce is situated in the mountains, there is a beautiful countryside near the city, rivers such as the Vrbas and Pliva, lakes like Pliva lake, which is also a popular destination for the local people and some tourists. This lake is called Brana in the local parlance. Not far from Jajce there are mountains that are over two thousand meters high like Vlasic near the city of Travnik. Travelling through the mountain roads to the city may not sit well with some visitors, because the roads are in poor condition, but the scenery is picturesque.                                         [Source] 








 




Went back to see it at night because...what else was there to do :)

The town was picturesque and the weather was beautiful but had I known how small it was and how there really wasn't much else to see there except for the waterfall I would not have arrived so early or planned to stay so long. I would have made it a stop on the way somewhere instead of a destination all its own.  Lesson learned.

Have you over-estimated a destination?  What do you do when you get there and realize there really isn't much to see or do?

For other destinations, head over to Unknown Mami and check out the rest of the Sundays in My City posts.

Unknown Mami

8 comments:

  1. It's spectacular really. I would have loved to see some photographs of the little village and it's charms. I love the little details like decorative hinges, an unusual door or a pretty window box of flowers.

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    1. I love the little details as well. Looking back at my pictures I didn't take very many of the village and seem to remember many more modern-looking buildings. It's possible many of the old ones were destroyed in the war that broke up Yugoslavia.

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  2. We'd love to travel the countries of former Yugoslavia. Thanks for sharing your pictures of this little town.

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  3. I hate it when that happens, but that's how we learn to adapt. Lovely waterfall.

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  4. What a lovely place!

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  5. I think the gorgeous waterfall makes up for the lack of vowels.

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  6. It's stunning! I think there is something too over-estimating a destination. I think that sometimes we need to quiet down our travel and being forced to really explore a small village even for a few hours longer makes us have a better idea of what it would be like to live there.

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  7. The waterfall is amazing! Recently I have been focusing on slowing down. It seems I don't realize how busy I am until something happens that forces me to slow down and then I appreciate the slowness. I would certainly have liked to slow down by that waterfall ;)

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