On Montenegro

Our bus driver is too angry for seven in the morning. Well, maybe he’s angry because it’s seven in the morning, but when I tell him I don’t have any Euros for the baggage and ask if he can take card, he yells at me and throws our bags on the ground.

Grace scurries off to find an atm to get cash out and gets slugged with an 18% transaction fee. I take pity on the other guy who also just had his bag thrown on the ground and we cover his bag fee too. Then we climb aboard for what is meant to be a five hour bus trip (spoiler alert, it wasn’t).

The first hour of the trip is glorious, driving along the Croatian coast-line from Dubrovnik to Montenegro. When we get close to the border we run into some hectic traffic and the bus driver puts the bus in park on the middle of the freeway and walks off down the road. We sit there for a bit wondering if we should follow him, or wait, or take the chance to wee while we can, but he comes back and the bus edges along again, taking almost an hour to cover the last kilometre of Croatia.

At the border crossing the bus driver mumbles something in Croatian and then gets off. I see him drop his passport in the middle of the road, and someone else on the bus takes that as a cue. We all pile off the bus and stand in the thirty five degree heat. We get ‘stamped out’ of Croatia by a guy in a mirrored box on the side of the road. You can’t see him because the hole is down at waist height and small enough to only allow one hand with a passport in, so I push my passport in and strain my ears for a response. I look at myself in the mirror. I hear the clunk of a stamp and my passport gets pushed back out. I go to find a toilet.

I have the worst toilet experience of my life. I don’t want to describe it, but I’ve spent the last fifteen years playing at festivals, and dealing with shit-stained port-a-potties on day five of Glastonbury had nothing on the Croatia-Montenegro border crossing experience. I come back a little shell-shocked and tell Grace ‘that was a bit dire’. She decides she can hold it.

We get back on the bus and ten minutes later it stops at another border crossing. The bus driver mumbles, we all get off, we push our passports in to the box, the box clunks and pushes our passports out again. I debate checking the toilets here. We get back on the bus. I fall asleep.

Grace wakes me to ask for pizza. In a stroke of brilliance we had pizza last night and saved half of it for today’s journey. It’s upside in a cardboard box inside a bag which has been sitting under my backpack for the last couple of hours. Still delicious. By now the bus is rolling along the edge of the Bay of Kotor. I’ve napped for a couple of hours. The bus airconditioning is working overtime. People jetski in the bay below us.

There’s now a second bus driver on board, he stomps up and down the aisle asking people for tickets. This bus travels from Croatia to Albania with three stops in Montenegro in between, and it’s his job to make sure people get on and off at the right point. This is accomplished with a lot of yelling. Budva Budva Budva! He yells. A handful of people get off at Budva, a small beach town on the bay of Kotor. A lot more people get on. There isn’t enough seats for all of them. A a passenger yells at him. He yells back. A young child is made to sit on their mum’s lap so the passenger can have a seat. I finish the rest of the pizza.

Three hours later we arrive in Montenegro’s capital Podgorica and it’s just in the nick of time. Our five hour bus trip has slowly turned into seven and a half. We’re dangerously low on snacks. We need to wee, but to get into the bus station costs a Euro each, and to use the toilet costs another Euro. We are all Euro’d out, so we strap our bags on and walk towards our accommodation. We somehow find our way into ‘the Mall of Montenegro’ where Grace tries to use the toilet but its locked shut with a PIN code entry. We keep walking.

Montenegro is really pretty but it doesn’t have the shine of Hungary or the terra-cotta tiles of Croatia. It feels like Serbia’s younger, slightly less complete cousin. There are stacks of apartment buildings with bits missing, concrete blocks with floors that have people living in them, topped by floors that don’t have windows, walls or roofs.

I’m flashing back to childhood in Yemen where it seemed like most of the city was incomplete.

The story I remember is that if you came into money you’d spend it quickly so that no-one could ask to borrow it from you. If your family was in need, culturally you’d need to help provide for them, so buildings would go up in stages, each level built quickly when the money was available and then left to wait incomplete until more money was available. There was always concrete pillars and iron rebar sticking out the top of each house, on the off-chance that more money would appear somewhere and the work could continue. Montenegro isn’t quite at this level, but there’s a stronger sense of everything is in flux than any of the other places we’ve been.

The apartment we’re staying at is on level five of a building that looks like its been here since the 1950s. On the ground floor we get into the lift and press the button for level five but it refuses to move, and when the door closes the lift shudders and none of the button lights come on. We manage to pry the door open and start walking up the stairs.

At level three all of the lights in the building go off and we’re stuck in the stairwell in complete darkness. I pull my phone out of my pocket and turn the torch on, find a light switch on the wall and flip the lights back on. We notice there’s a light switch every two meters up the stairwell, every two meters on each level. The lights for the entire building are on a timer that automatically turns itself off every thirty seconds, so our entire time in Podgorica we spend clicking each light switch as we go past to reset the timer.

After a little nap we head to Pod Volat, a ‘traditional Montenegran’ restaurant, where an extremely charming man brings us the mixed meat platter, a giant plate with fried liver, tripe and assorted Montenegran sausages. It’s a tradition now, so we order a Shopska salad, but it doesn’t hit quite as hard as the Serbian version. It’s a little less state-sanctioned, a little more slapped-together, but it’s the only veggies we’re going to see here, so we’ll eat it.

It’s a Thursday night and I’ve done some research into the live music scene in Podgorica. It seems like its mostly one DJ named Dejan (shout-out to our Serbian host). There’s billboards for Dejan everywhere. He’s some mega superstar in the Podgorica DJ scene. I’m tempted to go clubbing, but not really sure what it entails, so instead we go to the Blues Bar, which has no blues but does have a nice poster of Jimi Hendrix on the wall and cheap home-brewed beer. Then we try the ‘Ethno Jazz Bar’ which offers live music but doesn’t open until 10 pm on Thursday, so we wander on to the Itaka Library Bar which is not actually a Library but is instead a pumping outdoor club underneath a bridge. We get ‘Montenegronis’ which are Negronis with a handful of coffee beans floating on the top. Delicious.

Grace has been Google Translating every menu everywhere we go, and I’ve been just pointing at random things on the menu and trusting the universe. The next drink I pick is not a winner. The bartender tells me its ‘not a good summer drink’ (I find out later its like a mulled wine, probably not the best for these 30 degree nights), and suggests I get a Yuzu Mule instead. Delicious. Icy. Perfect.

We walk the quiet streets home to our apartment, stamp up up five flights of stairs, clicking the light switch timer at level and go to bed.