Heaven IS a place on Earth and it’s called Montenegro. It is
simply beautiful and not in the clichéd travel-brochure ways. It’s dramatic,
with enormous, impossibly rough, rocky mountains that look unclimbable, even if
their lower slopes are tree speckled. It’s green, with an abundance of pine and
palm trees, and scrub and dense forest, but it’s also hot in that southern
Mediterranean way….
Podgorica airport had ferocious-looking border
security, who looked like extras from a well-cast 1990s-set film about a Balkin
war. The car rental was a mini-saga all unto itself: Alamo had never heard of
our booking or that of another couple who had also booked through the same
third-party company (Atlas Choice, in case you’re interested. I don’t yet know
who is at fault: Alamo or Atlas Choice, so am reluctant to point fingers, but
to be on the safe side perhaps best not to book a rental car through either
until I get to the bottom of it…). As Alamo simply didn’t have any cars there
for us to rent – booking or no – various expensive phone calls to the UK help
center ensued. Atlas Choice finally said go ahead and get a rental from someone
else, and we will reimburse you and get Alamo to fund the difference. As the
chap from the other couple affected said, “It sounds good, but I’ll be amazed
if it ever happens…”
So, hello Budget car rental!
And here I came across the first major difference between most European
countries and Montenegro. They wanted payment upfront and in cash. Really?!
Wow, OK… Well, I suppose it keeps things simple and, to be honest, I’m not keen
on credit cards anyway, so it kind of suited me, but is unusual in this day and
age, especially as there was no credit card info taken against damage or my
running off with their vehicle. Was sort of trusting in a nice way.
Our blue car is a make we’ve
never heard of: Dacia. Am sure some car geek out there knows if this is the
Montenegrin version of, say, a Datsun or whether it’s simply made by a Balkin
car firm, but personally? I’m not bothered. Is a cute, tinny little car that
goes a treat.
And so on to the notorious
Montenegrin roads. Can I just say: whatever you’ve read, the driving here is
actually totally fine. Sure, if you’ve only driven in, say, rural Somerset or
the back roads of Maine, you might find it challenging, but if you’ve ever
driven in Paris, Rome, New York or London, trust me, you won’t notice much
difference. What I think is, everybody is used to the style of driving in the
country they live. When they go somewhere else and don’t understand the style
there, they rail and cry, “What crazy, terrible driving!”, while the natives
rail in their cars and think, “These foreigners! What crazy, terrible drivers!”
The challenge for me,
though, was that I’d had maybe three hours sleep tops, had got up at 2.30am to
catch the 6.30am flight from Stansted, and was in new territory. As anyone who
reads this blog may have noticed, I never name anyone, but I will share that I
am traveling with my son and his generation can’t read maps. Don’t believe me?
OK, get in a car in a strange place with someone in their early 20s, pass them
a map and ask them to navigate. Then we’ll talk.
Fortunately, there aren’t
too many roads here. It’s a big, empty place with a population of roughly
600,000 give or take 30,000. That’s the whole country. Yep, and you know what?
It’s bliss to be somewhere where you’re not jostled and crowded all the time. I
guess I’m old enough to remember when the world wasn’t as packed as it is now,
and this country reminds me how nice it was when you could actually find some
space to be alone.
However! Those who are here
are mostly along the coast, so when we hit it, bang, there was the rampant
development, the sardine-tin packed beaches, the tourists in all its tic-tac
glory. We carried on though and, after a few exceedingly dark, fumy tunnels
(“Are my lights on? How come I can barely see?”), we came out into an
astonishing bay. Huge, rugged, Mordor-like mountains rise up on all sides and
in the middle teal-colored water. “Oh. My. Wow,” was all I could say. Along the
rim of the water are mostly little stone-built houses, with the occasional
newer development but, thankfully, nothing too hideous or eye-catching. It’s
like popping out into another time and place altogether, and I held my breath
that our apartment would live up to all this promise.
Don’t start throwing things
at me, but it’s totally blissful. A terrace overlooking the bay, so that we can
watch the boats come and go and, in the evenings, keep an eye on the dribble of
traffic that passes below. We are near enough to the town of Kotor to see it
across the water and be able to walk (20 minutes) or drive there (5 minutes)
whenever we feel like a bit of ancient action – it’s a perfectly preserved, 9th-century
fortified town with stone ramparts we will walk one evening. But we are nicely
just far enough away from it to enjoy its beauty without having to know
anything about its day-tripper hoards.
Yesterday, after a late
start (cheese ‘mumlette’ for brekkers), we took Lonely Planet’s advice and
headed to Plava Horizant, allegedly a contender for ‘best beach in Montenegro,
but get there soon before it’s developed’. I can report back that it is indeed
a lovely crescent of white sand bounded on both sides by pine forest and with
handy concessions selling bottled water, beer and soft drinks; plus a
restaurant serving pizza, French fries and food of that ilk, as well as
providing decent toilets. Also? No music nor the now often-ubiquitous beach
club. Cheers all round. Three euros to park all day made it a bargain as well
and we stayed until 7.15pm, at which point it was still warm enough to swim,
but I was ready to begin the evening activities: salad and tapas-style small
plates on our terrace with plenty of the very drinkable local red, Vranac,
until about 12.30, over which we talked and played cards and talked some more).
I fell asleep thinking how
much I’ve missed my son (he moved out a couple of months ago) and how very
lucky I was to be with him in quite possibly the nicest place I’ve ever been.
OK, have just remembered a couple few other places that are also contenders for
Nicest Place I’ve Ever Been, but trust me, it’s in the top five.
Montenegro, you’ve exceeded
expectation.
We were fortunate to see both a humpback and her calf (you spot them by looking for the blow and then they surface, usually three times in each sequence), and the front runners of a pod of Orcas. My pictures simply don't do justice to these animals or to how close we were to them at various points. They travel in a large family group (so we learned) and I guess we saw maybe the first six to 10 of them, though we were told there are about 40 in this family.
That was Saturday's adventure, but on Sunday we got up to the farmers' market in the Upper Town area of PT, and that was pretty amazing too. An abundance of vegetables in great piles of different colors and textures as beautiful as any floral display. I spied some of my favorite things, like fennel and summer squash, which for some reason I've only ever seen in the USA, though it's just as easy to grow as zucchini (or courgettes, as they're called back in England) in the UK (I know, because I've grown them there). 
There were some very nice touches, like the four different colored potatoes – red, black, brown and white – all sold together; and the mixed organic salad leaves that included nasturtium flowers.
We grazed as we went along. I had papusa, a South American thick, soft cornflour tortilla stuff with a melted white cheese and topped with a cabbage salsa and green chilli sauce. Scrumptious, but one was not quite enough, so I had a homemade bagel with cream cheese as well. This isn't the place to stick to any kind of slimming regime! 
This is such a pretty area: the snow-capped Olympic Mountain range in the distance, the San Juan Islands in the sound and the Victorian houses spread up the hillside all adding to the visuals. I came for a reunion of college friends – a uniquely special group of people who are my tribe – that is, the people I am most at home with. So hard in this world to find that and I send my thanks to them for being them. And, also, for showing me their home towns so that I have a great excuse to explore more corners of the world. So long PT! You've been wonderful beyond words. 
