Hotel Quarantine

 

'Welcome to the Hotel Quarantine' - A Pilgrimage during a Pandemic

Life under “Lockdown” – A London to Tokyo, via Yokohama Diary #8

 

A global pandemic is not the most ideal time to emigrate. But life goes on. By increments we are all, hopefully, progressing inch by inch closer to a new normality. After the last year and a half, I couldn’t imagine life becoming any more dystopian. Surreal memories of finding myself to be the only pedestrian walking through a deserted Canary Wharf, the heart of London’s financial district eerily devoid of traffic, in the middle of the day in the middle of the working week was weird enough, invoking recollections of disaster movies, such as 28 Days Later and I am Legend.

 

Checking in for an international flight, just a few weeks ago, in a near empty Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow Airport comes perhaps a close second. Everyone, at all points of the process, strangely anonymised, wearing face masks. Everyone ritually disinfecting hands as they pass by a succession of sentinel hand-sanitizer posts, as though genuflecting at the Stations of the Cross, embarking on some bizarre Sci-Fi-like modern pilgrimage – perhaps fleeing from (or towards?) Armageddon. Normal questions about hazardous articles in luggage now taking second place to questions about the state of your health and requests to see the sheafs of certification concerning Covid-19 tests and other medical declarations, as required by the Governments at your intended destination.

The weeks leading up to my departure were a recurring nightmare of fears: fears that I might have overlooked a crucial piece of necessary bureaucracy; fears that I might not get the certificate attesting to my double-jabbed vaccination status in time; fears that I might not make it to my “72 hours prior to travel” Covid-19 test because, of all the weekends on which I’d chosen to fly – inevitably – this one was one of those weirdly normalised London weekends when the entire Piccadilly Line was closed for never-ending engineering works; fears that I might get a positive test result, thus voiding all my plans and intentions entirely, not to mention the vast expenditure of it all. By comparison, the formalities of actually getting a visa and the attendant documentation required for the granting of resident status in Japan when the Embassy finally reopened back in May seemed a doddle. Hence, the moment I placed my boarding pass on the scanner and the security gates magically parted seemed unreal in the extreme.

Stopover in Anchorage, Alaska - 2004

Fortunately for me, my previous career, having spent the last 20+ years ferrying international touring exhibitions around the world for the British Museum, was ample preparation for all of this oddness. I’ve spent a large proportion of my time navigating my way through unusual situations in airports across four different continents. I’ve also spent many hours waiting in such places, having wrangled with many different visa systems and the associated processes which enable an air traveller to get from A to B with the correct permissions, stamps, finger prints, facial scans, metal detector checks, airway bills, customs paperwork, and the like. The key to the whole scenario is to keep a nimble eye on what is happening and being prepared to act quickly at the required moment should anything appear to be in danger of going awry; that, along with a hefty portion of patience, knowing that more often than not these long-haul journeys will inevitably be punctuated by interminable stretches of waiting, the long hours in which you are powerlessly held in thrall to the system which you are simply passing through.

 

Sitting in the Departures Hall, I couldn’t help reflecting on many of the strangest journeys I’ve made, such as: circumnavigating the globe from London to Tokyo to London, via Anchorage Alaska; or, crossing the equator for the first time after a 24-hour stopover in Hong Kong on the eve of the first umbrella protest. I’ve done some decidedly long journeys too. I once flew from London to Beijing, where I stayed less than 24 hours, before flying back to London, only to fly from London to Seoul just a day or two later. But I think my longest single journey was flying from Tokyo to Mexico City, via Krasnoyarsk, Frankfurt, and Chicago (a strange scenario which means I have entry stamps in my passport for both Chicago and Mexico City issued on the same day).

 

En Route : LHR >> HKG >> SYD >> MEL - 2014

Flying over the Ukraine in a cargo plane the day before flight MH17 was blown from the sky was a sobering experience (TV News reports the following day, speculating that it had “probably been a mistake shooting down an airliner” and that “they were more likely aiming to shoot down a cargo plane instead”, seemed to overlook the crucial fact that cargo planes have people on board too!). I was once on a flight which was struck by lightning as we were crossing the English Channel. I saw a white flash swiftly pass through the cabin like an ethereal ghost hurrying to the rear of the plane (I did briefly wonder at the time, if, like the Highlander, this might have made me immortal?).

 

On several cargo flights I was lucky enough to sit in the cockpit with the pilots during take-off and landings in different airports, such as: Mexico City, Chicago, Krasnoyarsk, and Taipei. One of the best was Hong Kong. Watching as we weaved between clumps of clouds which were flickering with summer lightning like incandescent candyfloss. With Victoria Harbour passing by so close below, it felt like if I reached out I’d be able to touch the tall buildings, all of them lit up brightly, sparkling in the dark warmth of the night.

Loading Cargo at Incheon, South Korea, 2011

I’ve also spent many an hour sitting in airports as they have slowly emptied of passengers with all the shops closing down for the night. It’s quite an eerie and sometimes unnerving experience. You hope that your contacts won’t forget you, or that when the time comes you won’t miss meeting your aircrew. There was one occasion in Luxembourg when we met a pilot and his co-pilot, who were both happy to find they’d have some company on their flight. It was only after we’d been chatting for about ten minutes that we discovered they and we were flying to different destinations entirely – thus we very narrowly avoided following the wrong aircrew onto the wrong flight! – If this had happened, once on-board, I’m sure the aircrew would have checked their paperwork more closely and realised we weren’t meant to fly with them before we got underway; but the delay this unintended misdirection would have caused would probably have meant we’d have missed our intended flight because the aircrews of cargo planes don’t tend to hang around for late running passengers – as I found out once, just in the nick of time, when clambering up the ladder to board a cargo plane which was just about to close its door and get underway!

 

In some ways though, it’s a real joy to pass through a near empty airport. The place feels less fraught. There’s less of that nervous jockeying to get a spot on the shuttle train between the terminals. Less stressing over squeezing into the lifts crammed with unwieldy baggage trolleys. There’s more time to step back and assess, to realise that you are heading in the right (or wrong!) direction. And the queues for the loos are mercifully shorter or non-existent. The shop staff in the Duty Free shops, if they are still open, look decidedly bored. My flight to Japan had been delayed by four hours which meant we were either the last or last-but-one passenger flight to depart Heathrow T5 that night. The passengers on my plane were all well-spaced out across the rows of seating, as 'socially distanced' as the cramped Economy Class cabin would permit. First and Business Class were both almost entirely empty. Everyone wore face masks throughout the duration of the flight, only taking them off briefly to eat.

 

I’d read about the exacting processes to be expected on arrival in Japan, and this information turned out to be accurate. It was a long gauntlet which needed to be run as each part of every traveller’s paperwork was checked thoroughly and then double-checked again at desk after desk. Unlike at Heathrow where the Covid-19 test was a nasal swab which made my eyes water involuntarily, here at Haneda we had to spit into a test tube – a process which feels a lot less invasive and a lot less uncomfortable, but each passenger was ushered into a small booth in which to spit more discreetly. The tedious paperwork processes actually alleviated some of the long wait for this test to be processed, but there were still long interminable stretches of waiting too. On the whole the few children who were travelling with their parents were remarkably well behaved; only a few whined quietly at their parent’s elbows due to a very forgivable combination of boredom and extreme tiredness.

 

Once our test results were returned (happily mine was still negative) we were led through to Immigration, which rather comfortingly was dealt with far more informally than usual. Stewards remained close at hand throughout to direct us travellers at all points with friendly deferential but decisively firm instructions, marching us back and forth along a beguiling maze of ribbon-barriered corridors. Once all my paperwork was at last in order and with my residence permit now reassuringly in hand, I passed through the last of all these checks where a Customs officer looked at my passport and then, returning it, looked up over his facemask and said warmly “Okaeri nasai” (Welcome home) instead of the usual “Yokoso Nihon” (Welcome to Japan).

 

But I wasn’t home just yet. My fellow passengers and I were then marshalled down to a bus, where we were in for another long wait. Eventually though, the bus moved off into the night. Winding through the near empty streets it took us to a hotel in Yokohama. Again, here in the lobby, another long process of form filling ensued and instructions were relayed and affirmed. Once again, the staff were faultlessly polite and friendly throughout. I was issued with a thermometer and a boxed meal. I was then led to my room on the 28^th floor, where at 3am – a full seven hours after landing, and almost 24 hours total in transit – I was able to collapse into bed with no further obligations until I awoke later that morning.

 

For the next 6 days I was required to live in this small hotel room like a monk in his cell. Isolated, no going out whatsoever. A meal box (Obento) delivered three times a day: for breakfast, lunch and dinner. With a bottle of water each time (no alcohol was allowed). My daily rituals required taking and reporting my body temperature to reception each morning, and answering the random spot checks on my location demanded by the Japan Government’s panopticon-like mobile phone App, which also wanted to know how I was feeling each day. My own phone was too old to support the App, so I had to rent a rather expensive one expressly for this purpose from the Government, to be returned on the first day of my eventual release from quarantine. I didn’t regret the expense too much though, because the staff very helpfully set the whole thing up for me (which, watching them, I feared would have been well beyond my Luddite-like capabilities had it been left solely up to me), and also because, unlike for anyone arriving in the UK, here in Japan the cost of bed and board in the quarantine hotel was borne entirely by the Japanese Government (Arigatou, Nihon).

 

Akarenga Soko & the Hikawa Maru, Yokohama

The hotel was much more comfortable than I had been expecting. Plus, opening the curtains when I woke up later that morning, I found I had a wonderful view of the seafront at Yokohama, overlooking the landmarks of Akarenga Sōko, the red brick warehouses built by Western traders in the nineteenth century, plus the old NYK Hikawa maru ocean liner. I’d walked along that promenade many times before with friends and family, but for now all I could do was watch it from my solitary confinement in my hermetically sealed room. I had six days to seek spiritual satori, and to sleep off my jetlag. Keeping myself busy with my PhD studies, messaging my family and friends, meditating upon the transience of the boats coming and going from my window’s high vantage.

 

NYK Hikawa Maru - Yokohama

I joked via social media with my former colleagues at the BM who asked how I was coping with life under quarantine, saying that all of my life for the last twenty years – spending most of my time living for long periods in hotels – was the perfect preparation for this. It was in fact my moment. As if, all my life, I’d been in training for exactly this – as though this was my own personal Olympics. A lot of people had asked me before I left the UK if I might get to see any of the Tokyo 2020 Games when I reached Japan, and I’d replied: ‘probably not.’ But from my hotel window I could see one of the venues, Yokohama Baseball Stadium, lit up at night with a sprinkling of spectators in the stands. At Haneda Airport too, I’d seen the Cuban and Moroccan Olympic teams arriving. The TV was wall-to-wall with seemingly non-stop coverage, exclusively focussed on the team of the host nation. There was absolutely no escaping the Olympic Games, just as I’d experienced previously in Britain in 2012, and in China in 2008.

 

Yokohama Baseball Stadium - 'Tokyo 2020' Olympic Games

The monotony of life in my hotel room wasn’t too bad though. After the prolonged periods of living alone through the last two ‘lockdowns’ in London, long periods of solitary study were now a routine normality for me. Reading books and articles, updating my bibliography, or watching history documentaries (such as my perennial favourite, John Romer’s Testament) helped to pass the time. The view from the window was an unexpected pleasure too. I’d assumed I’d end up with some non-descript view of an office block wall or something similarly dull, but watching the maritime activity in the harbour as well as the sunrise each morning was wonderfully relaxing. Outside it was clearly baking hot during the daytime. The air con system kept me from roasting when my room caught the full blaze of the midday sun. But, by day five I was getting a little desperate for some fresh air and the opportunity to stretch my legs properly. The thing that surprised me the most though was the bento box meals – no two of them were ever the same! – They were delivered three times a day. And there was never any choice. You ate whatever you were given, and, even though I was asked what allergies I had on arrival, I was simply told not to eat those things if they appeared in the boxed meals(!).

 

Breakfast 'Obento'

Covid-19 tests were taken early in the morning on days three and six; once again, mercifully, they were the spitting into a test tube kind, the same as at the airport. ‘Holiday camp’-like tannoy announcements reminded you each meal time to wear your facemask and to be careful not to lock yourself out of your room when you opened your door to take in your bento box which had been hung silently on your door knob. It was an odd way too live, strangely Sci-Fi in many respects – but I still can’t decide if it was more like something out of the imagination of J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, or Stanley Kubrick. It was a kind of ‘Silent Runnings’ meets ‘The Andromeda Strain’, I suppose – with visits on test days from a group of medical personnel swathed head to toe in anonymising PPE.

 

The result of my final test came via the hotel telephone just after lunch. I was still negative. I’d already readied my luggage in optimistic anticipation of this moment, and so I was out of the room an instant later, riding the lift down to the lobby. Handing back my thermometer, my luggage was stowed under the bus as I quickly climbed aboard. Ten minutes later the bus was rolling rapidly through the streets, heading back to the airport, crossing the suspension bridge over Yokohama harbour which I’d spent so much of the last few days wistfully viewing from the close confines of my tiny room in the quarantine hotel. My family met me at the airport – the first time I’d seen them in over a year and a half – a happy reunion full of hugs, grins and happy tears. We then drove home, as I was still not allowed to use the public transport system. Finally reaching home I still wasn’t free, I had 8 more days of quarantine ahead of me. Life in ‘lockdown’ once again, but this time on the other side of the globe in a city where the infection rate was rapidly rising. Mercifully for me, however, there was now more space for me to move around in, plus a balcony on which I could stand and at last breathe fresh air once again. And, of course, most important of all, I could now relax in the long-missed company of my nearest and dearest. Watching the sunset together behind the beautiful silhouette of sacred Mount Fuji.

 

Sunrise over Yokohama

Though I was now home at last, I was still under surveillance – required to report my state of health each morning and answer the random spot checks on my current location which either came in the form of push-notification ‘pings’ or actual phone calls. These phone calls were either AI operated video calls in which I had to stare into the camera with my background clearly visible while my phone’s silent mechanical eye recorded for 30 seconds. I’ve no idea if these visual recordings were checked by people or computers, but I waved politely cheerful from time-to-time just in case it was an actual living breathing human being who had to watch back half a minute’s worth of footage of me staring at them like a bug-eyed goldfish stuck in a glass bowl. The other kind of phone call came from an actual person, speaking either in Japanese or English, asking me where I was and if I was unwell. Nevertheless, these video calls were oddly ‘big brother’-like because I could see myself, but the screen I was talking to was completely black, so I could not see the caller. This always reminded me of the scene in both the old 1953 and more recent 2005 film versions of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in which the Martian’s cobra-headed mechanical eye snakes around the basement of the building in search of hiding humans. Mercifully, these calls were always fairly quick, but it was the uncertainty of when they might call which became somewhat wearing if not quite so unnerving as a probing alien mechanical eye. Each day I’d receive several locator pings and an AI recorded phone call, and usually a human operator phone call as well. This meant the phone needed to sit by my side at all times during the day, though calls and pings rarely ever came much before 8:30am, or later than 6pm. Such dystopian surveillance seemed politely civilised in this respect, but I was very glad to get shot of the infernal device as soon as I could when the 15 days of quarantine were done.

 

The thin line of Mount Fuji traced on the haze of the horizon

On my first day of freedom, proving the old adage that ‘only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun’, I went for a stroll on the hottest day of the year so far in Tokyo. “The mercury topped somewhere around 36°C”, as the over-dubbed TV News channels here like to say. But it was a real relief to stretch my legs at last. I noticed that everyone here in Tokyo is wearing their facemasks. This isn’t so unusual. You often see people on the trains here wearing them throughout the year. It’s long been the custom in Japan for those with a bit of a sniffle to wear them, mostly out of politeness more than anything else. So this wasn’t unusual, but what was different now was the fact that people were wearing them at all times, even whilst walking down empty streets. An entire metropolis anonymised. And, though there were still plenty of people out and about, there did seem to be fewer people commuting – but it would take a keen eye to spot the difference, because the trains were just as crowded as the pre-pandemic rush hour on the Tube in London. Tokyo might currently be under ‘a state of emergency’, but on the face of things, apart from wearing facemasks at all times, life in the city seems to be going on much as it always has. A less perceptible pandemic than in the UK perhaps?

 

I thought it only proper that the first place I visit should be the local Shinto shrine. To say ‘hello’ to the local Gods. Here though there were subtle indicators that all was not well with the world. The chōzuya, the place where you should ritually cleanse your hands and mouth when entering the shrine, was dry and without its attendant utensils. Instead, stood sentinel beside it was one of the now ubiquitous hand-sanitizer stands found at every point of entry and exit in our daily lives. Plus ringing the bell to attract the Gods’ attention when praying at the shrine was now no longer allowed. One just had to hope that the ritual three hand claps would suffice to attract their favourable hearing. While I was there a few other visitors came and went, throwing their coins, clapping their hands and saying a silent prayer each. I’m sure all of us each made the same request alongside whatever else we were hoping for divine assistance with – that request being, of course, an end to this interminable pandemic soon.

 

The Buddhist Temple next door was almost entirely deserted. I saw just one other person coming and then going; a young girl who evidently had gone to pick her younger sister up from the nearby kindergarten, both of them, hand-in-hand, returning home. It was nice to sit for a moment under the dappled light shed by the dense canopy of green maple leaves overhead. But it was really far too hot to linger long. The loud rhythmic noise of the cicadas rasping, rising fast and falling slow all around me. I couldn’t help reflecting how the pandemic and the periods of ‘lockdown’ and quarantine I’ve had to live through over the last year and a half has slowed life down a lot. Though these times have been punctuated by periods of almost frenetic activity, attempting to catch up with the world as it continues to turn. Life’s tempo is undoubtedly all out of kilter, but I hope we learn from these experiences of upheaval and uncertainty, so that when life does return back to some sort of normality we can improve upon the way we lived before – so that we can all live in a new world made fresh once again. A world hopefully with more balance, with the good things in life shared more equitably, and a greater emphasis on care and calmness.

 

I hope, too, that sooner rather than later, I can stop writing these pieces, because I really don’t want to write any more entries here in this seemingly never-ending ‘lockdown diary’ of mine. But, such is life, sadly – shikata ga nai, ne.

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The Old Bridge at Mostar

 

Crossing international borders always has a funny feel to it, for me, at least. I’m not sure why. I know borders are simply manmade concepts. Arbitrary lines on maps that only apply to human beings. Animals, plants, breezes, sunshine, rain, rivers, oceans don’t seem to pay them any heed at all. But to people they can and often do mean and make a world of difference. Crossing international borders by air or by sea, arguably, feels somewhat more normal than crossing land boundaries. There’s something solid about making such a transition, passing through another element to get to your destination. Crossing the ether, or crossing the water, really does feel like a making a leap from one place to another. Land borders on the other hand – to me at any rate – have always felt somewhat more fuzzy, and sometimes far more sinister and forbidding.

 

I guess it has something to do with the checkpoints, with their barbed wire fences, their red and white swing-arm barriers, their uniforms, their guns, etc. Being asked to surrender your passport, especially when it is physically taken away from you and disappears somewhere out of sight in response to the ‘requirements’ of unseen checks and procedures. Similarly, hearing the loud clunk of the stamp being hammered into your passport when you have been cleared and approved is the quintessential sound of your arrival. It’s a very definite sound, it’s the sign that you can proceed, you can step over that invisible line, cross that threshold, pass through the boundary from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ Affirmative. You may proceed. Welcome to wherever you are.

 

I was quite young when I made my first land border crossing. It was on a trip to Amsterdam. We’d crossed the Channel by hovercraft – an oddly antiquated-yet-futuristic (and very sea-sickening) means of transport at the time, but now utterly defunct. We then travelled onwards by coach through France and Belgium to Holland. It was pre-Schengen era, so we stopped at each border and a very severe-no-nonsense-looking policeman boarded the coach and walked down the centre aisle. He collected up everyone’s passport and then exited the bus for a while. We all had to sit there and wait. It all felt very John Le Carré. The policeman later got back on-board, now accompanied by a fellow officer, and asked two young men sitting at the back of the bus, two British servicemen travelling in uniform (RAF, I think), to get off the bus for “further checks.” They eventually came back looking rather disgruntled and murmured that it was something which “happened every time.”

 

A local lad describing the daring tradition of bridge diving

As I was then still only a kid, seeing the heavy handguns hanging from these border policemen’s belts impressed me greatly. Back then, in the UK, you didn’t see many armed policemen. But something I recall equally vividly was looking out of the coach window when we were allowed to resume our journey. The bus motoring on, I keenly scrutinised the scenery as it began to slip past the window, trying to see what was different on this side of the border compared to the side we’d just left behind. In truth, I couldn’t see much of a difference at all. It all looked very boringly the same to me. It had been raining in France, and it was still raining here in Belgium.

 

That trip, and that very thought, came back to me many years later whilst I was on another overland trip. This time I was travelling from France to Spain; we crossed the border in the high Pyrenees mountains. There was no stopping for any border checkpoint due to Schengen. The only thing which told me we’d crossed the border from one country into another was a sign on the side of the road, but I noticed something far more distinctly, and that was a dramatic change in the style of the buildings. They were suddenly shaped very differently; their style and colour of roofing material was completely different too. Street signs looked different; different colours, different fonts, different sounding words, place names, different ideograms. Removing borders doesn’t always remove differences. There are satellite photos of Berlin taken at night which still, thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, distinctly show the area which used to be known as ‘West Berlin’ because the street lights there still use a different sort of lightbulb, which means the street lighting is a different colour to the rest of the city.

 

I’ve crossed other land borders, from the UK into France (via the Channel Tunnel); from France into Switzerland; from the USA into Canada; but there was something different about crossing the land border from Croatia into Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2016. I suppose in some ways it was akin to when I crossed over from West Germany into East Germany, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The civil war in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s was now some 25 years ago. Both of these newly independent states were once part of that defunct Federation, but only Croatia has since joined the EU. Schengen doesn’t apply here. And so, our passports needed to be collected up and handed over. This time, thankfully though, it wasn’t an armed policeman eyeing us all suspiciously, but rather it was our tour guide, cheerily apologising for the inconvenience.

 

The border here is a bit strange, because there is a short stretch of coast which is Bosnia-Herzegovina and which cuts through the longer coastline of Croatia – hence a deal has been struck on certain stretches of the coast road to allow Croatians (and their visiting tourists) to get from one part of their country to the other without the need for passport checks. Here though we tourists were crossing the border proper and turning right, heading away from the sea, motoring inland for the day to visit the town of Mostar. Our tour guide shuffled back down the aisle, returning our passports. Opening them, we were each slightly disappointed to find we hadn’t acquired a stamp that read “Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Despite the border checkpoint, us day-trippers are exempt – on the condition that we leave by the same point of entry before the end of the day. It might feel like a merely arbitrary line on a map, but the point is that it’s a line which is a closely monitored one.

 

As we motored on, I looked out of the window and I remembered once again those border crossing thoughts I first had as a kid on my way to Amsterdam, and then once again many years later when I crossed over from France into Spain, because here too I can see a distinct difference. The houses are different, the roads look different, and, because we are heading inland, the scenery begins to look a little different too. There are genuine cultural differences here though. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a largely Muslim country (whereas Croatia is predominantly Christian). Orthodox and Catholic Christians form the next sizable religious group. And, like several other formerly Ottoman controlled Balkan states, its population is ethnically diverse – predominantly home to Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats. Relationships between these different groups historically has been fraught, especially in the wake of the collapse of the Yugoslav state in 1991, hence the bloody civil war which was fought here until 1996. In many respects the town of Mostar is a symbol of that mix and those tensions.

 

Mostar was symbolic before the Bosnian war, as a town divided between Muslims and Christians, and a town divided by a river, but with both sides united by a remarkable bridge of stunning architectural grace and beauty. It took nine years to build and was completed sometime around 1566-1567. Commissioned by the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, it was intended to be a more durable replacement for a wooden suspension bridge. The building works were overseen by a man named Mimar Hayruddin or Mimar Hajrudin. Some stories state that Hajrudin was commissioned under pain of death should the bridge fail, and that he ran away on the day that the scaffolding was removed, such was his fear that the bridge would not hold. But it did hold – and in fact it stood for more than 400 years; until on the 9^th November 1993 it was deliberately destroyed by the Christian Bosnian-Croat artillery who were perched on the high ground of the steep hill overlooking the town.

 

The hill from which the Old Bridge was destroyed by artillery fire in 1993

The smaller Ottoman bridge at Mostar

Hajrudin’s achievement was an unparalleled feat of engineering at the time. Some 30 metres in length and its soffit around 20 metres in height from the beautiful turquoise waters of the River Neretva below, it was then the largest single span stone arch which had ever been constructed. A smaller bridge of the same design can be found close by to the main bridge at Mostar, which some people believe was constructed in order to test out the practical application of the theory behind this type of bridge construction technique – an architectural form which was subsequently used in other extant bridges in various parts of the Ottoman Empire (see here). As is often the way, when such things of great age and beauty are destroyed, that destruction enables us to better understand the mysteries as to how exactly they were built – much like the monumental stone Buddha statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 (see here). But, unlike the Bamiyan Buddhas, the “Old Bridge” (Stari Most) at Mostar has been rebuilt.

 

Its destruction was a highly symbolic act, hence so too was its reconstruction. At the time there was no military tactical or defensive reason for destroying the bridge, other than to symbolically break that cross-cultural unity which the bridge itself represented. Rebuilding it was seen as more than just a physical reconstruction project. To reinstate the bridge as accurately as it had been before was widely seen to be a matter of the utmost importance. Consequently, an international cooperative effort was mobilised to make it happen, with several countries – including Italy, Turkey, Hungary, the Netherlands, as well as the Croatian and Bosnian governments – contributing funds, equipment, expertise and manpower to the project. As many of the original stones as possible were recovered and reused from the riverbed. And a lot was learned in the process, particularly regarding the three types of stone (soft local Tenelija limestone, harder Dolomite limestone, and local Breca, a porous conglomerate) which were utilised for their differing properties, as well as the metallurgical materials and methods, using iron swallow-tailed clamps, pins and molten lead, which were used to brace, hold and lock the stonework firmly into place, plus the unique type of mortar which was used to cement the masonry – an unusual pink coloured mortar which was thought to have been the main reason why the river ran red like the Old Bridge itself was bleeding once it had been felled.

 

Some of the original stones from the Old Bridge which were not reused

It took three years to rebuild the Old Bridge, re-opening some eleven years after its destruction in 2004. The timeless elegance of that perfectly circular arch which had previously withstood four centuries, unchanging while various rulers came a went, from the Ottomans to the collapse of the Communist Eastern Bloc, really does appear to have defied the passage of time; especially now, having arisen once more like a phoenix from the ashes of a bitterly divisive civil war. Photographs of the bridge before and after the recent conflict look almost indistinguishable. And rather poignantly, a rooftop nearby in the heart of the old town overlooking the riverbank is painted with large letters which read: “Don’t forget, but do forgive forever.”

 

Mostar is a very beautiful town. There are many things to see here besides the famous Old Bridge and its smaller, and more secluded identical-twin which escaped the recent war unscathed – there are mosques, churches, caves, old cobbled streets and little craft shops, restaurants and cafes. To see Mostar now it is hard to believe such terrible things could have happened here so recently. But crossing such a bridge is a reminder that boundaries are all around us – not just the borders which separate nation from nation, nor the ideas and beliefs which separate cultures and religions, but the phases of peace and war, of one political form of governance from its predecessor and its successor, for these are both the seen and unseen boundaries by which we measure the stretches of time which mark off in our collective social conscious. It’s such boundaries, both temporal and geographical, which demarcate our lives and the lives of those who have gone before us. But how we choose to cross those boundaries and connect the two sides of these cognitive or imaginary divides is what shapes our worlds as well as the futures which we bequeath to those who come after us.

 

On some levels, maintaining borders and boundaries may well be a necessary fact of life, but surely acknowledging such borders and boundaries whilst also facilitating and enabling safe and easy passage, mending broken bridges, and allowing everyone to cross them without bias or favour, without fear or discrimination, is by far a better means of healing such divides and rifts. Unity and diversity needn’t be mutually exclusive – because, like the Old Bridge at Mostar, they are the twinned opposites which join together the two ends of a perfect circle. Boundaries and borders are, in fact, the places where we meet, cross over, merge, and return.

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