The guide throughout my time in Mostar has been one of those supermodels I was telling you about back in Croatia - the ones who seem to make up at least 50 percent of the population of Eastern Europe and serve mainly to ensure that all visitors feel immediately inferior upon arrival. It's not just the women, either - even the male tour guides seem to resemble, well, insert the name of your favourite male movie star here. I'm not altogether sure of this, but I don't believe they allow anybody in Mostar to become a tour guide unless they can prove that they've previously spent at least two years as a catwalk model. This is in order to ensure that all the men in the group are paying complete attention as they lead you around the city telling you war stories. The women in the group, on the other hand, spend most of their time glaring at their husbands while trying to decide just how hard to kick them in the nuts when they get back to the hotel.

Naturally, this method of garnering attention often tends to backfire - nearly all the notes I've written about Mostar, for example, appear to be punctuated with childish innuendo about how hot the guide was, as if I actually thought I'd be writing any of this up for public consumption. For this reason, I'm sure you'll forgive me if I check some of my facts against Wikipedia to make sure I was actually paying full attention. Then, you'll have to excuse me a bit longer while I check Wikipedia's facts against several other reliable sources to make sure they actually know what they're talking about. Which they usually don't - because, let's face it, letting other people edit your website just isn't such a hot idea. In the days before Wikipedia, it tended to be obvious if somebody had been interfering with your encyclopaedia - if you happened to open your paper copy of the Encyclopaedia Britanica to "Sexual Intercourse" one morning and find that the entire section had been ripped out and replaced by a couple of sheets of note paper covered in crayon and adorned with pornographic illustrations, you might have been slightly suspicious that everything was perhaps not quite as it should be. These days, you're just expected to accept that whatever you read on the internet hasn't been written by an adolescent child surrounded by sniggering friends. I actually have a screenshot on my computer back home of a page from Wikipedia explaining the curious American concept of "The right to bear arms", which I was researching for a book. Without going into too much detail, let's just say that the article isn't entirely accurate, unless the US Senate really has recently ratified a radical change to the constitution in order to allow gun carrying Americans to carry out unnatural sexual acts on unsuspecting strangers in the street.

I believe, having checked and double checked my facts against several credible sources, that Mostar boasts a population of a little over 126,000, making it the fifth largest city in the country. This is a little misleading, however, because only Sarajevo and Banja Luka, which I'll hazard a guess you've never heard of because they rarely mentioned it on the news during the war, have populations above 200,000 - so nowhere here is exactly overflowing with people. Mostar's claim to fame, however, is that it has quickly become one of the more popular destinations on the Bosnian tourist trail, due not only to its proximity to Croatia but also to the picture postcard image of narrow cobbled streets, beautiful bridges and Mosques which it conjures in most people's minds. Almost every image you find of Mostar proudly depicts either Stari Most - the old bridge - or the streets of the old town bustling with life and filled with exotic bazaars and lively street pedlars. You should probably be prepared, then, for a bit of a shock when you arrive to find that the entire city isn't, in fact, like this. Not that this is in any way a criticism of Mostar - in fact, if you really think about it, you wouldn't expect anything else. In the modern world, any city comprising nothing more than a maze of medieval alleyways populated by market tradesmen selling lamps and coffee is unlikely to stand out as a city destined for a bright future. We may all dream of waking up in a Harry Potter world of twisting alleys and mysterious curio shops, but just how long do you think it would actually be before you began to miss Tesco or the local multiplex cinema? Also, I don't think anyone at Hogwarts actually knows how to service a 42 inch plasma television.

Brochures and TV travel shows, when they could be bothered to feature Bosnia at all, do rather tend to concentrate on the romanticism of the old town, so please try not to be too surprised when you find that Mostar has developed outward somewhat since the middle ages and that there is now far more to the new city than there is to the old. The irony, however, is that much of the new city was destroyed in the war and that many of the buildings now stand derelict or in imminent danger of collapse, surrounded by high fences and warning signs. In many places, the cordoned off remains seem reminiscent of some of the monasteries destroyed in England during Henry VIII's mad rant at the church, and this can cause you to momentarily forget which part of the city you're actually in. As you head into the old city, you pass the Razvitak department store, one of the finest examples of this you will encounter - now cordoned off and boarded up, this magnificent building is unique in that its facade is clad not in modern brickwork or aluminium panels but in intricate carved concrete slabs depicting surreal misshapen people with huge hands and feet along with horses, antelopes and other assorted animals. The effect is very much like that of the hieroglyphics on the walls of the great pyramids, and really draws the attention of anyone walking past. The Razvitak department store, dark, crumbling and empty, stands as a poignant reminder of what was lost all those years ago, when the bombs fell.

When looking at photographs of Mostar, you may well have done what many have before you and gazed at the magnificent Stari Most, the arched Ottoman bridge spanning the Neretva river, and told yourself what a miracle it was that such an important piece of history managed to make it through the war unscathed - and indeed it would be, if only it were true. Commissioned in 1557 by Suleiman I, a man known throughout the west by the slightly less formal title of Suleiman the Magnificent, the bridge managed to stand unmolested in the same place for well over 400 years before it was suddenly and finally razed to the ground by Croat forces looking to make an effective point on the 9th November 1993. Well, I say finally - of course, plans were drawn up almost immediately for a massive reconstruction project, and just over ten years later the new Stari Most was unveiled, looking exactly like the old one in every tiny detail. The fact that it took ten years to rebuild is perhaps something of a testament to the skill of the original builder, an artisan by the name of Mimar Hayruddin who managed to do it in nine in the days when every piece had to be carefully crafted and lifted into place by hand. To this day, nobody quite knows how the bridge ever came to exist in the first place, as the task seems quite impossible without the aid of technology. If you ask the locals how the scaffolding was constructed, or how the pieces were joined to each other in situ without the whole thing crumbling into the river under its own weight, or how any number of other impossible things came to pass, they'll just shrug their shoulders and ask if you want to buy a fridge magnet - although, now I come to think about it, this may simply be because they don't speak English and haven't got a clue what you're on about. Reconstruction of Stari Most was set back for quite some time by the fact that nobody could work out how to do any of these things, even with a world of modern technology at their fingertips and the greatest architectural minds on the planet at their beck and call. The fact that Mimar Hayruddin managed to pull it off 400 years previously with nothing at his disposal but a set square and a couple of ladders still has people scratching their heads to this day, although he may well have been helped by the fact that he was commanded to do it under pain of death and probably saw this as an incentive to really put his mind into it. According to legend - although legends are, of course, just that - Hayruddin was so convinced that he had made a right royal cock-up of the whole project that he actively began making preparations for his own funeral as the unveiling ceremony approached, presumably drawing more than a sigh of relief when Suleiman clasped him warmly by the hand and proclaimed that he had done a good job and that his execution had, for now, been postponed. In the version of the story favoured by local guides, on the basis that it contains a little more romance and slightly less pain of death, Hayruddin tried several times to build the bridge at different points along the river, becoming more and more desperate as each time his work crumbled into the water and was washed away downstream. One night, sleeping a troubled sleep, he was told in a dream that he should build the bridge over two lovers so that their love would keep it strong. Quite how he managed to get the lovers to stay in one place for nine years while he did this isn't actually mentioned in the story, but apparently that's what he did and as a result the bridge remained strong for 400 years until one sad day in 1993 when somebody on the other side of the river decided they needed to make a point. C'est la guerre, as the French say.

Another thing worth mentioning about Stari Most is that it has become one of those stupidity magnets to which every extreme sport enthusiast in the world is inexplicably drawn, apparently because the thought of going through their entire lives without ever having thrown themselves from the top of a stone arch into a shallow river seven metres below is just too much to contemplate - and for anyone surviving the jump, there's still the temperature of the water to contend with, which is just cold enough to ensure they die of hyperthermia shortly afterwards. It has now become something of a tradition for the young men of Mostar - the name actually means "Bridge keeper", by the way - to throw themselves from Stari Most at every opportunity. In fact, since 1968, people have flocked here from all over the world to take part in an annual diving competition, in which 100 people have been known to launch themselves into the river in a single day. These people trouble me deeply. If they really want to kill themselves so much, why can't they just do us all a favour and find a tall building to jump off, or just casually stroll up to Charles Bronson and tell him he's a bit of a sissy girly boy. That ought to do it. If they don't want to kill themselves, on the other hand, then why do these people seem to spend so much of their time doing things which hold such a high probability of death? I mean, if Superman can turn himself into a quadriplegic by simply falling off a horse, then what hope has anyone got BASE jumping from the Eiffel Tower with a parachute that doesn't open until ten feet from the ground? Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour or sky diving and bungee jumping and all those other pastimes where at least one person is sane enough to have thought to bring along some safety equipment - it's just the hurling yourself twenty feet onto concrete or poking a bull with a sharp stick and then letting it chase you through the streets of Pampola I have a problem with. These people's relatives must lead massively stressful lives, spending every waking moment scanning the obituaries and watching the evening news for reports of their loved ones having been sliced into several pieces by a combine harvester while playing chicken in a cornfield. This is definitely natural selection at its finest.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.