Reservations open for an eight night Sarajevo and Neretva trip in Bosnia, run in spring and autumn

From a valley floor at 520 metres to the gorge

Sarajevo lies at about 520 metres on a narrow valley floor, with Trebevic at 1,629 metres directly above it and Bjelasnica and Igman to the southwest. The built city has nowhere to spread, so it runs east to west in a strip and then climbs the sides. Four nights are spent there. The old quarter was laid out from 1462, the mosque at its centre was finished in 1531, and a single line set into the Ferhadija pavement marks where the Ottoman town stops and the Austro Hungarian one starts.

The other four nights are down the Neretva. Road and rail follow the river for 130 kilometres, through Konjic and Jablanica, into the gorge under Prenj and Cvrsnica, and out at Mostar. The train takes a little over two hours and stays beside the water almost the whole way.

The river runs at about eleven degrees in June

The Neretva rises near Lebrsnik at around 1,095 metres and reaches the sea in Croatia, 225 kilometres later. Most of its water arrives from karst springs rather than from surface run off, so it stays cold. Ten to twelve degrees in high summer is normal. It is also very clear, and the colour people photograph comes from depth and limestone, not from anything added to it.

The upper canyon between Ulog and Konjic is one of the last long undammed stretches in Europe, and there are live proposals to change that. Downstream the river is already worked. Jablanica was dammed in 1955, and three more dams sit between there and Mostar.

At Blagaj, near the end, the Buna comes straight out of the base of a 200 metre cliff at an average of about thirty cubic metres a second. A dervish lodge from around 1520 stands on the rock beside it, with water running under the floor.

Stand on the Stari Most and look at the joints

The bridge was finished in 1566, a single arch of about 29 metres, standing some 21 metres above the summer river. It was built from tenelija, a soft local limestone that hardens in air, in blocks pinned to each other with iron cramps set in lead. The deck is ribbed with raised stone strips because it is steep and slick when wet.

It stood for 427 years. On 9 November 1993 it was shelled down. The rebuild used the same quarry, the same jointing method, and blocks lifted back out of the river. It reopened on 23 July 2004.

Look at the arch from the west bank. New stone and recovered stone weather at different rates, so it reads in two tones and will for decades yet. Men jump from the parapet for money in summer, as they have done since the seventeenth century, into water at about eleven degrees.

Nobody here will let the war be background

The siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days, from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996. Around eleven thousand people were killed in the city. The tunnel dug under the airport runway in 1993 was 800 metres long and 1.6 metres high, and a section of it is open to walk through. Shell scars filled with red resin are set into pavements all over the centre. Every guide has a personal account, and by day four that accumulates.

Mostar is still divided in practice. The city held no local election between 2008 and 2020, and children of the same age go through separate school systems inside the same buildings.

Mines remain in roughly two percent of the country, marked with yellow tape and metal signs. The rule is simple and absolute: stay on made paths and tarmac in the hills. In June and September the valley also passes 35 degrees by mid afternoon, and the old town at Mostar is shoulder to shoulder between eleven and four.

Where $2,410 else goes

This departure sits on the $2,410 rung, and it is not alone there. The office keeps every trip at that figure on one page so the number can be seen doing different work in different parts of the world. It does not rank them and will not tell you which is the better buy, because that is not a judgement a figure supports.

• The whole of the $2,410 rung
• All eight figures side by side
• Every departure in one table