A hotel room with a view into Bosnia's war-torn history

Warmth of reception at Holiday Inn makes up for lack of heating in a hotel that used to be regularly hit by shells and peppered with bullets throughout the bloody three-year siege of Sarajevo, writes Liam Mackey.

Hunched over the laptop in my room in Sarajevo the other night, wrapped up in layers to ward off the all enveloping chill, I found myself unexpectedly yearning for the quirky motel in Orlando where I was billeted for a spell during the 1994 World Cup in the United States.

It was a place where the ancient air conditioning malfunctioned to such an extent that it caused my prototype laptop, a wheezing, whirring monster of a yoke, to embark on a go-slow, the keys depressing as if embedded in treacle.