What is it like to travel on a holiday in Montenegro?

It was great!

I’ve just spent ten days in Montenegro, in two completely different regions of the country and I found it a fascinating experience overall.

First of all I came by car via Serbia over the mountains, so I can’t speak to the airports or anything.

I had never traveled in either country and there were a lot of similarities between the two.

The Serb/Montenegrin border we crossed at, which is located in a mountain pass, was pretty dead on the day we came over. There were no cars waiting. The bored looking guards at the border laconically stamped our passports and we entered. Having spent four hours the day before in a long queue at the Hungarian-Serb border, in 36 degree weather, this came as a great relief.

It was a bit rainy the day we we came in, which was also a relief after the dry heat of the day before. We stopped at a small pub up in the restaurants and ordered something to eat.

The menu was very limited: they seemed to mostly offer eggs with meat: ham, or bacon or these small little sausage links. I ordered the sausage links, a local specialty, which were delicious. The toilet in the place (and indeed in most of the places we visited in Montenegro) were adequately cleaned and well-stocked. The service was adequate.

The country in many ways is still not fully developed. Coming from the Czech Republic, it seemed like going back fifteen or twenty years back in time.

Public areas and many gardens were extremely weedy; many homes are plainly not finished, consisting of unpainted blocks without insulation or facade. Some of them are lived in; others seem completely abandoned.

More than a few houses seemed to have been destroyed long ago by fire or other calamity. Long houses with roofs caved in.

There were a lot of barns and some of them, frankly, looked in better condition than the houses, if no other reason that you expect a barn to look rustic and dilapidated.

Even in the town we stayed in, which is a tourist centre, there was a shabby, dishevelled appearance about the place — weeds everywhere.

Some of the buildings were almost fine but there was a lack of attention to detail that you often see in Eastern Europe: and there were a lot of unfinished houses; or houses made with untreated, unpainted and quickly rotting wood. Having travelled through south-western Serbia on the same day, which was much the same it made for a slightly disturbing first impression. There was one house in particular that we drove by every day on the way to our cabin up on a mountain meadow. It was a huge mansion of a house that seemed to have been put together in the most shabby manner imaginable and painted a hideous garish green — on one side. the other sides were simply bare concrete.

AS we drove past on the first day, a ravishing girl in short shorts lazily observed us from the first floor balcony, which, like many balconies I saw there, did not have any sort of a guard rail.

These pictures hardly do justice to the sheet imposition of the building, the awesome weight of dread that it imparts: it is simply huge and, located as it is a good twenty feet over the road, it simply looms. Next to it(unpictured) is a series of unfinished garages in naked crumbling brick, filled with rubble and with a fading “Na prodeje”(For Sale) sign draped across it.

I asked my wife, who is Czech, if the Czech Republic had been so shabby-looking when she was growing up. Because I dimly remembered it being shabbier than it is now when I first moved here in 2003.

She said that she supposed it had — it had certainly been shabbier than it was now; but it was hard to compare because when growing up she hadn’t had had anything to compare it to to she hadn’t thought of it as shabby.

We reflected that the Czech Republic probably appears shabby to visitors from say, Western Germany, or parts of America; and I remembered with a little shame how run down some rural parts of the US had looked the summer before on our massive 10 000 km roadtrip through the States.

Still this was on a different level: at first it was quite unpleasant to see. As an American, looking through American eyes, one always sees crumbling, shoddily constructed homes homes and interprets them as being indicative of danger. Indeed, that is what it would mean in the USA.

AS always in Europe, though looks are deceiving. In fact, the violent crime rate in Montenegro is quite low. You have to remind youself that the country is still coming out of a messed up bit of history: when communism fell and Yugoslavia dissolved into a civil war.

In the end, all this was probably for me the most fascinating experience of the trip. I took many pictures of these buildings in both Montenegro and Serbia and I would have liked to take hundreds more. Not only unfinished houses, but communist-built buildings are always kind of fascinating to me: they are always so monstrously ugly and yet there they are: part of the psychological landscape for decades.

In the Czech Republic they are usually painted and maintained well-enough that they approach a facsimile of attractiveness or at least tidiness; down in the Balkans they are still in their natural, pure state, smudged, dirty, with mis-matched windows and uneven looking construction: draped with clothes lines, cigarette smoke snaking from every balcony.

They fascinate me.

I’ve never seen a more beautiful-ugly-eerie sight than the towering blocks of Belgrade under heavy clouds, lit by shafts of sunlight: frowning canyons of grim concrete: yet you know that in the city people live their lives; create art; go to discos; babies are born and men woo women with flowers. You know there are historical parts of the city which have survived the centuries in beauty and grace.

The inhuman architecture Kruschev so loved, deliberately futuristic and void of all individuality seems to claim that human beings are nothing but carbon-based units serving the greater good: but you know they never erase humanity.

It will be interesting to go back there in a decade and see how the face of the country has changed.

Because you do get the impression that Montenegro is changing.

Montenegro joined NATO earlier this year, and the stakes were high enough that Putin’s Russia attempted an assassination and a coup d’etat to keep it from happening. It seems reasonable that Montenegro will eventually join its fellow Yugoslav countries Croatia and Slovenia in the EU.

And when I say it is not fully developed, I ought to point out that water is drinkable and I never once worried about food or anything. And it is safe.its not undeveloped. Its just not quite finished.

It’s also worth pointing out that the warm climate makes for some delicious locally grown tomatoes and peaches, terrifically juicy and packed with flavor which can be bought at supermarkets or at the many roadside stands in the country. My mouth is watering at the thought of them now! In Central Europe the tomatoes and peaches are never really that good — the climate isn’t right and the corporatized nature of the EU ensures that the good vegetables go to bigger markets in Western Europe.

We also bought some amazingly thick home-made honey (beehives are everywhere in the Montenegrin mountains). It wasn’t particularly cheap, but natural thick honey like that is hard to find in much of the relatively corporatized and overregulated EU.

AS for the landscape, you couldn’t wish for a more beautiful countryside if you like hiking. Seriously, I have hiked in the Rockies, in the High and Low Tatras, in the Beskid Mountains, the Appallachians, the Mala Fatras in Slovakia and the Alps of Austria. Bearing in mind that I only had a few days in the Balkans, I would put the Balkans at the top of the list.

They are gorgeous: filled with wonderful, hidden mountain meadows dotted with wild strawberries and bilberries for the picking; beautiful wild flowers and butterflies; amazingly untrafficked in places; rugged, yet accessible to both the young and old: the members of our party ranged from an energetic six to a hale 75.

Walking the high mountain paths, climbing the grassy walls of secret high valleys was great exercise but you don’t have to be a professional survivalist to get through it. And the views of the lowlands were plentiful and stunning.

There are also some lovely glacial tarns that one can swim in; and the many ski-lifts attest to the fact that winter sport is a thing there.

There is also a stunning canyon, the deepest in Europe: breathtaking views. you can take a zipline over the clear and green shaded river below, soaring like a bird for over a kilometer all for a mere twenty euros.

It's also possible to go rafting on the river, but, sadly, we ran out of time and didn't get a chance to try this.

We also spent a week on the Montenegrin coast. In many ways, the architecture by the sea is different: it has that Meditterranean feeling to it, like Greece or Croatia or Italy. As in the mountains, you get the impression that it is still under development in parts: abandoned unkempt buildings next to stunning Italianate villas; some incredibly ugly Communist resorts.

The more touristed areas are probably the best looking. However, the less frequented beaches are frankly a little messy looking and slightly littered; even in the touristed areas you see the occasional glaring blemish.

however the sea, as always in the Balkans, is crystal clear and refreshing.

This was “our” beach for the week. Not quite as nice as the touristy ones, but still pleasant and uncrowded. All the heads in the water are part of my own family.

The beaches are pebbled and thus sea slippers are recommended. The beaches of Montenegro don't compare with the world class beaches of neighboring Croatia; but, again, I expect that in a decade or two the coast will be on a par with much of Croatia, although Montenegro will always be smaller and thus offer less, of course.

WE also spent a a few hours in the lovely UNESCO site of Kotor (as well as a nearby village almost as picturesque.)

There I sneaked one of the most delicious slices of pizza that I have ever had: sprinkled with a lovely parmesan-like cheese and dripping with lucious oil.

One of the things that I love about the Balkans is the mixture of Western and Eastern styles: Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity and Islam; ,the place where the Roman, Byzantine, Russian, Ottoman and Austrian-Hungarian empires meet; Latin, Greek, Slavic and Turkish cultures mixing in interesting ways.
It makes for a volatile history I suppose, but a fascinating psychological landscape.

Overall we had one negative experience and that was in our choice of eating establishments. We generally rent apartments when travelling and do our own cooking with local food; occasionally enjoying local fast food, making a point to eat at a restaurant only once or twice a week. (Which is a good deal more than we do at home.) We happened to choose badly, eating at an outdoor patio of a restaurant in the otherwise lovely old town of Budva. The food was quite highly priced compared to others (we found out later) and the quality of the cooking was very low. I spent a 110 Euros for five people; acceptable price, but the quality of the cooking was really, really low. Perhaps the cook was sick that day. To be sure, there were many restaurants that advertised much cheaper prices. I have to conclude we were simply unlucky. It was a huge disappointment.

AS I mentioned, I really feel that the face of the place is changing: I will be very surprised if Montenegro doesn’t have a commercialized, touristic gloss in the coming decades that it lacks now.

AS it is, I’m glad I visited in this time though, when Montenegro is still outside the EU and still relatively uncorporatized, when lovely girls still offer tomatoes at roadside stands in the hot sun and young, tanned boys hold out jars of hand-picked mountain berries for sale; when scoops of icecream are 50 cents and large slices of pizza, dripping with flavor, go for a mere euro fifty apiece.