19. I touched the rain down in Africa
Trip Start
Jun 17, ????
1
23
36
Trip End
Ongoing
Budva,
Serbia and Montenegro
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Anyway, one of the fun things about visiting Montenegro is the look on people's faces when you tell that that's where you're going and they struggle manfully to locate some scrap of knowledge about the country so that they can make an intelligent comment. Most of them ask where abouts in Africa it is, although a reasonable number opted for South America. There was general astonishment to the idea that it was just over the water (The Adriatic) from Italy. At least when I mentioned that it was part of the former Yugoslavia, most people were able to drag up the odd fact about Tito or Kosovo, so at least we aren't friends with complete thickies
Mr MS in his favourite bar
.We actually flew into Dubrovnik (Croatia) and were transported to Budva by private taxi. Although there is an airport in Montenegro about half an hour from Budva, you have to fly from Heathrow and this is something that I avoid wherever possible.
Montenegrins subscribe to the Italian habit of an evening perambulation. Mr MS and I would head out to a beach side bar after dinner and sit there watching hundreds of people just walk by over the course of the evening. It must be very annoying indeed for the owners of the half empty bars that all these people get dressed up just to walk past and never pop in for so much as a swift half. For the first few evenings we assumed that we had simply selected an unfashionable bar, so mid-week, we stepped out with the crowd and walked the entire length of the bay to see where they were all going. We passed hundreds of half empty bars (and popped into a couple of the funkier looking ones). Most people though, just kept walking. Crazy.
The hotel had a private beach, but it was a bit too "sun-beds in line" for our liking. There were a lot of Russians about in clunky gold jewellery - you could easily imagine yourself in Romford, if you know what I'm saying
Bay of Kotorska
.The old town is gorgeous. I had such a good time exploring little stone alleyways - sweet shops, pleasant cafes and a really interesting museum. In one cafe overlooking the sea, they serves frozen strawberry maragaritas. If you ask me, that's reason enough to let them into the EU. All that fuss over missing war criminals and relicencing of cars stolen from elsewhere in Europe seems a lot of something and nothng when you get a swinging seat in a shady cafe. We were able to travel from where we were staying into the old town for the princely sum of one euro on a marvellous little train thing.
You might wonder why a non-EU country is using the Euro. Montenegro sought to control inflation by using the German Mark, which was, of course, replaced by the Euro in 2002.
