Glad you enjoyed the pictures Peter. My sense is that Bosnia is sealocked, as you suggest, because there is no straightline path to the open sea; too many Croatian islands are blocking the way. At this point, Neum doesn't have a shipping port, so the only types of sea access are small-scale fishing and recreation anyway. As I mentioned before, while there are official border stations at the Neum crossings in both directions, there was no stopping in either direction for me anyway. Here's how the trip went.
In April-May 2001, two of my colleagues and I took the bus from Split to Dubrovnik. It was a Croatian bus. At the border going south, the bus didn't even slow down. I barely caught a glimpse of the sign and customs post. In Neum (which is only about 15km or so of BiH territory), the bus stopped at a regular bus stop and picked up a woman who boarded the bus and went on to Dubrovnik. On the southern border of Neum, there was no stopping either going back into Croatia by either country. On the return, we traveled from Dubrovnik to Sarajevo by hired taxi--the driver was a Croatian rebel during the war--and we crossed back through Neum to get the the main border crossing that would take us up to Sarajevo. At the first crossing heading north into Neum, the driver pulled to the side to take his TAXI sign off the roof because he was not official in Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the border I asked him to pull over so I could get out and take a picture. On the northern Neum border the traffic slowed down, and a tour bus from Hungary was inspected by the Croatian border police, which gave me time to jump out of the taxi and snap a picture. We weren't stopped at all, probably because we had Croatian licence plates. Past Neum going north, the highway turns inward and goes about 15km before it crossed the BiH-Croatia border again. There was a more militarized setup there, with UN flags and vehicles, together with Bosnian and Croatian immigration officials, but still not stopping either direction. Very interesting experience. On the way out of Bosnia after a couple of days in Sarajevo, I asked the driver to stop at the border so I could get a passport stamp. He did, at the Bosnia border police were very cooperative and even answered some questions I had. No stopping would have been required coming back into Croatia if hadn't asked to pull over.
Anyway, an interesting border experience on a very recent and dynamic border in the Balkans!
Dallen
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Smaardijk [mailto:smaardijk@...]
Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2001 1:55 PM
To: BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [BoundaryPoint] Neum
You don't look for a just day or so on your computer, and you get a
real avalanche of beautiful pictures! Brilliant stuff, Dallen.
The Croatian/Bosnian border got me wondering once again: the Bosnian
salt water is probably internal, and surrounded by internal waters of
Croatia as well, because the sea inlet is most probably shut off by a
(Croatian) base line. Does this make the Croatian state a continuous
one in this respect, and Bosnia landlocked? I'd say it does, legally.
Nicely coloured border posts, in the colours of the new flag! Looks
like you can get your soft drinks there, too. This flag is the second
one of B&H, the first one was a white flag with a coat-of-arms. This
new one was designed by the Spanish E.U. envoy to B&H C. Westendorp,
or so I heard, and is nicknamed "the corn flakes flag", because the
design is said to resemble that on a package of the cereal...
Peter S.
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