[wzslider]Edis Jašarević has created a promising trend on Twitter that continues to evolve, called #OvoJeBIH. It is an idea whose purpose is to reveal the natural beauty and wonders in B&H, to attract more attention to what B&H has to offer to its own citizens as well as to tourists. In a country in which it is easy to be pessimistic, Edis wants to illustrate an image of the country that can serve to influence people in re-conceptualizing how they see B&H, their place in the country and what they are able to offer as well. This is a collaborative and long-term project, one that is already showing promise in uncovering the breathtaking places all over B&H and the personal stories that add a layer of profundity and meaning.
1.Can you tell us more about the idea behind #OvoJeBiH, how you came up with the idea and what was the motivation behind it?
It is an idea that has been growing for a couple of months now. At first, it was something different than what it looks like now. I was driving on the road from Sarajevo to Tuzla, and, because I was in no hurry, I decided to take a drive and to see “Muška voda” spring because it is well known. There are a few legends about that place, and I said to myself let’s see what it look’s like. I found beautiful nature and a completely abandoned hotel complex. There was no one there and everything was open. I took few pictures of the place, and put it on Twitter. People found it just as interesting as I did. So, I decided to make a story about it for MuskiPortal.com, due to the connection with name, and because it looks like an interesting story to tell people. But, I decided first to gather information and come back some time later, during nice weather, with my friend photographer Munever Salihovic. But in meantime I was thinking, “How many such beautiful places are there in Bosnia & Herzegovina?
At the same time I had something like a problem: whenever I want to go somewhere on the weekends with my child, we ended up in some crowded place around the town. There are so many beautiful place and people are focusing on just few. With so many people in the crowd, I did not find it relaxing. In fact, instead of having a relaxing time with my family I was searching for parking, driving trough traffic jams on the Olympic Mountains, etc. But in places like Muška Voda, there were no people. And it is only an 80-minute drive from Sarajevo. I talked with people and realized, that in fact people don’t know that they can go visit such places, and that they can actually enjoy nature spots that are not so far from town. These are amazing nature spots.
So my first idea was to have a vacation with my child traveling around B&H and tweeting about it, writing a blog about travel so that my kid someday will have these moments in the form of an online blog. I wanted to plan some route, and travel around 10-15 days, and for that I needed help from Munever. He is a photographer, whom I knew was spending a lot of time taking photos of breathtaking spots in B&H. I asked for his help and invited him to go with me, but during planning, we realized that there are so many places to visit and to see, that it impossible to cover it all in 2 weeks.
So again, I started thinking about it, and realized that we need to make a project, make a website, and go with a project as a micro site under MuskiPortal.com to promote the destinations, culture and heritage of B&H. We decided to have a tour for 3-4 weeks, cover as much locations as we could, handpick them, give true information such as their distance, information that an average tourist will need to know in order to visit places we are going to write about.
While the idea grew with how and what to do with “Ovo Je BiH”, winter came, then protests… which took me a lot of time (I do not regret that, however). We took time to think about everything, plan a little bit more, and realize that we need to go with a bigger project that will be some kind of website where you can easily find handpicked information about B&H and illustrate it with amazing photos that Munever already took around BiH, and plus the one we will take on tour.
The name “Ovo Je BiH”, or “This is Bosnia&Herzegovina” came to me, because as a journalist I traveled to a lot of countries, saw a lot of nice places, but when I look at all the nature that B&H can offer, I realized that B&H underestimated its own nice places and heritage. I want to change it. I want to, as a priority, to give information to Bosnians-Herzegovinians that they can have a nice vacation in B&H without going to exotic places to see places that are not better looking than what you can find few hours drive from your home in B&H. So it was short, hitting a target heavily, and it kind of sounds like “This is Sparta”, a growing feeling of national pride in people.
So I started preparations with the website, and decided to share some photos on Twitter. And BOOM. It became so popular in just a few hours that it was trending on Twitter for Bosnia&Herzegovina. People were sending photos from all around B&H showing amazing places and scenes, and it continues to trend on Twitter for weeks now.
Again, I realize this project has its own life, and we decided to follow where it will take us. So instead of launching our website with our articles (they are prepared, waiting for publishing) we decided to give people the opportunity to share and enjoy. That is why we created Pogledaj.OvoJeBiH.com as a community for users where they can publish their material. This is still a work in progress, so it is not perfect but we will improve our service over time.
In the meantime, we will launch our project soon, which will look like a map with spots. Every spot on the map will have information about it with a photo and video gallery. At first we will publish only a few spots, and as we are traveling we will fill that article with information, which will be handpicked, meaning that we will visit all the places and write what is worth visiting and all the information you need, with a bit of a personal touch.
We could gather information like in books and just display them, but we are not going do that. Every story must be personal in a way. Our team members must experience the place, feel it and write about it.
We are going re-discover B&H, together with social network communities because we want their input and we want to do this with people on networks, so that everybody can be a part of the project if they want.
This is a long story and I hope not too bothering to read. OvojeBiH is an evolution of an idea that I have for my child, and it is continuing to evolve. To be honest, I don’t know what will happen in the future, but we will adapt. What I know for sure is that we are publishing the main part of the website OvoJeBiH.com before May, because in May we are going to travel a lot and make stories about places in B&H. Now it is not going to be project that will last for a couple of weeks. It will take a lot more to cover what we are planning to do now.
2.How do you want to promote tourism in B&H? Do you have a focus on promoting local communities and how they contribute in sustainable development, preserving the natural wonders of B&H, etc…?
Preserving natural wonder is something that we want to direct the attention of people in B&H, and we will focus a lot of on showing places that need to be preserved (also species). With publishing stories and photos about it we hope that we will influence people to take care about their environment. At the same time, we want to help local communities and direct tourist to their places, and help them to get the attention they need for touristic attractions in their area. It is hard to find information in place, so we want to do that, to give possible tourists all information they need and how to find wonderful places in B&H, plus to tell them stories about it from personal experience.
3.Do you think that B&H tourism can contribute to alleviating poverty in B&H?
If something can help, then it is tourism. Now, in fact, we have a lot of tourists who are staying here for a day or two, so they are not spending a lot. And tourist agents are showing them just a few things. They take them to Mostar, give them a tour around Sarajevo, talk to them about the war, take them to Međugorje and that is about it. These tourists never see the amazing Konjuh, breathtaking scenes on rivers in Krajina, Jajce waterfalls and the lake nearby, and a lot of other places. I think that somebody must show, not only tourists abroad, but also to Bosnian-Herzegovinians what they have around, and we hope that this can make a higher turnover in tourism. We like guests. Bosnian-Herzegovinian people are kind to foreigners. We have so many destinations where you can spend weeks visiting them, but that is not happening right now. If we want to live from tourism, we need to change it and adapt. Yes, we have a lot of industries, and other businesses, but we are so small that we can never compete with bigger countries in that (my personal opinion). So our only chance is in tourism. B&H is attractive. But we, Bosnian-Herzegovinian’s are the first ones that need to re-discover it, and then show it to tourists.
4.Do you see the promotion of tourism in B&H as connected to other areas as well, in contributing to preservation of culture and heritage, ecotourism, agrotourism, etc…?
Tourism must be followed by preservation of culture heritage and ecotourism. That is what it should be. You would be surprised that a lot of work is actually done on this, especially in the last couple of years, but that is not enough. Nobody is promoting this in the right way. Information is not arriving to end-users.
5.In what ways do other people contribute to your mission?
OvoJeBiH project is open for everybody. We invite everybody to join and re-discover B&H together. A part of our website is Pogledaj.OvoJeBiH.com and is meant to share pictures with social networks, but we also want to use it as a crowd sourcing platform. To find places we don’t know about, and to publish a story about it. When I say everybody I mean everybody, not just Bosnian-Herzegovinians, but also foreigners who live here, people whom I can see love this country more than people who were born here. All articles will be also written in English, and we are hopping that we will find people who will join and do some help translating it in other languages.
To achieve all of this, of course we need to cover finance, and we hope that companies and the government will see the potential in this. For now, Toyota is our first supporter, and they are going to provide vehicles and fuel for our travels, but we are hopping that other companies will find interest to help us build the best tourist information source in B&H.