Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast.

It's Friday the 16th of February and I'm in the happy position of enjoying what's probably

the weirdest woodland walk in Europe.

Let me just place myself for you.

So I'm in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia. Actually,

I'm on a mountain to the south of that lovely city which fills the valley down to my left.

But specifically, I'm on the Nuge track for the 1984 Winter Olympics,

which were held in what was then Yugoslavia. And this is a channel created from concrete, which now has got the pattern of age, lots of moss attached to it.

And also it's very exciting because it's turned into a street art museum as well.

And walking up through mostly pine forest, the sun filtering through the needles and creating a sense that

here is an Olympic relic, which instead of people hurtling downhill at 60 miles an hour now has people who are just wandering through

the woodland here and enjoying the serenity of it all. There's a cable car just straight ahead.

That is in a short while going to take me down to the old town of Sarajevo

which is very much a Turkish location where you can see from the mosques and minarets

from the very human scale trading hub of this city has survived all the way through not just

the 45 years or so of communism, but also the grim civil war, which served so much destruction in Sarajevo.

11,500 people died in the siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995, about one in ten of those

were children. And it was actually from these hills looking down on the city that a lot of the mortar attacks were launched by the so-called Chetniks, the Serbian Nationalists.

And still Bosnia is divided just over half into the Federation of Bosnia, which is largely Muslim nation and the Republica Serbska,

which is controlled by the Serbians. And there's also pockets of Croatians towards the south of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

So a very complex ethnic makeup.

But I've now walked up to where there's a clearing in the trees for the cable car and

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