Month: August 2014

Categories
Montenegero

What is the capital of Montenegero ?

What is the capital of Montenegero ?

Should you be so clever as to know the answer you are certainly more knowledgeable than I was before I started planning this trip. For everyone else, just wait. I am presently in this city and just back from seeing the sights in about 34% heat. Since the last communication I have been in Mostar and Trebinji in Bosnia and Kotor, Cetije and ? in Motenegro and tomorrow I am off to Kosovo.

The six bus trips in the last week have almost all been through and over very rugged mountainous country with the highlight being Sarajevo to Mostar. Most of this one was down a steep river gorge with the high whitish mountains on either side, mostly covered in scrubby bush, and the river, which was dammed four times, a blue turquoise colour. It was a beautiful day as well, as it has been all the time so far. The other days travel has been similar – there are little random villages all with orange tiled buildings and quite often livestock on the road. It has been obvious there are not many tourists on these buses because they come with curtains and most people are busy keeping the sun out and I am busy looking out.

I got to Mostar in the middle of the afternoon and my hotel was right in the middle of the tourist frenzy that surrounds Stari Most, the Old Bridge . My google map had me walking with my bag down a road to the bridge which was actually a tourist stall lined alley way, and then over the bridge. So I did, annoying a lot of people with cameras in the process and learning that the bridge is pretty steep. Like Sarajevo, Mostar endured a siege during the war. This time the guys with the artillery up in the hills were Croats and one of the things they did was put about 60 shells into this bridge which had stood there since 1566, and it broke. Since rebuilt, I think it is one of the few buildings that are better to see live than in pictures, being bigger and higher than I thought, as well as steeper. It is also testament to the skill of whoever designed it because it is very graceful. The siege had a moslem v catholic front line down the main transit road and when I walked along it wasn’t hard to get a feeling for what it was like because there are still plenty of wrecked and pockmarked buildings. The town is today largely divided the same in terms of who lives where. If you lined up a bunch of the Serb Bosnian and Croat people and tried to tell which was which I think you would have a very hard time. The differences are not in the way they look but in what they believe, so religion once again has plenty to answer for here. Even the churches and mosques are political symbols – in Mostar the catholics have built a bell tower that is higher than the tallest mosque minaret. No doubt the moslems are working on a bigger one. And every where there are orthodox monasteries on the top of isolated high points letting the others around know who would be boss..

Trebinji is in the Srpska Republic which is the Serb part of Bonsnia, so it didn’t have any direct involvement in the war and is lovely town with lots of history and a cool old hotel called Hotel Platiini. I knew it was in the central paved area but couldn’t see any signs so I popped into the tourist info and asked, to find I was right beside it and foiled by cryllic script again. The next morning I had the same problem when my bus didn’t have any intelligible words on it. All of the towns and cities have huge numbers of cafes with heaps of outside seating where locals sit, talk, smoke, and make one drink last for three hours. It all looks very alluring but don’t think you can get a proper feed at these places. They do cakes and ice creams and it can be extremely frustrating when you are hungry and looking for somewhere that has the magic word “Restaran”. The other food word I know is Pekara which means bakery and they have good stuff.

Also very frustrating was the night I decided to use my unsmart phone as an alarm for a 5.30 wake up. I turned it on so the alarm would work and at 2.15 someone with an unknown number rang me, three times. I figured it was probably costing me a fortune and that I would wake anyhow so turned it off. That is how I learnt it doesn’t need to be on for the alarm to work.

Crossing from Bosnia to Montenegro was easy – we drove out of Trebinje up a mountain, went through the 2 borders in less than half an hour and then down a mountain to the coast of the Adriatic Sea. The town I went to was Kotor and it is the summer season in spades. This place has everything needed to be a tourist hotspot with the mountains coming nearly directly into the sea, fortresses up in the hills, an old walled town, lots of mini-liners at the wharf, so called beaches, a new cruise ship each day, criminals in flash cars and heaps of hot, thirsty and hungry tourists. I stayed a little way from the old town and got in a early start to climb up to the top fortress, explore the old town and go for a swim. I hate swimming at “beaches” that have nasty stones and gravel because I find it hard to get in and out with and style and grace, and this was not an exception. All the local old men were fatter and more tanned than me and wore budgie smugglers, and the corresponding women of course defied gravity in bikinis. Next stop was inland over the usual mountain range to Cetinje, another lovely old historic place. It’s main claims to fame being that some 1800s prince built a room for billiards which was an unknown and very progressive thing, so the building is known as Biljarda, and that in the local monastery is St John the Baptist’s right hand. This relic has a complicated provenance which sounds really believable and once in a while people can look at it and marvel. Dan Brown could write a book about it. After seeing all that heavy stuff I decided I deserved what was described as a Gourmet Hamburger for lunch. It took a while and turned out to be a very large frisbee of meat sitting on a bed of chips with a slice of tomatoe on the side. That was probably payback for a meal I had in Kotor. I asked my hosts for a good place to eat and was recommended to get a taxi and go a little way down the coast to a restaurant called Forza Mare. I checked the taxi fare with them and went off to interview five taxi drivers who all wanted to rob me, but finally found a reasonable one. When she pulled up outside this place I knew immediately I was in for financial hiding – it was gorgeous, on its own low jetty, beautiful everything, fawning staff. no menus, and views everywhere. A few years ago I would have run away, but folks, I have changed and I enjoyed it. I admit I didn’t order the lobster or the recommended E100 wine but it was still the single most expensive meal I have paid for.

Montenegro looks a bit more prosperous than the two previous countries. Probably because it didn’t get beaten up in the last war as it only made itself independent from Serbia in 2006, and it has money making tourism on the coast. It has a population of less than 700,000 and a capital called Podgorica. Which is a place unlikely to be on a list of the 1000 most interesting places to visit when it’s listed sights are on old clock tower, the crumbling remains of a small fort and a big orthodox church. All of which you can walk around in less than two hours which includes a very nice long lunch at a suburban Italian place.

Life on the public transport road is now quite settled for me. I know that it costs E1 to have your bag stowed although I never offer and today I wasn’t asked, so maybe that isn’t done around here. I know you can just jump on the bus and pay without getting a ticket first. I have found the taxi drivers around the terminals are great sources of happily imparted information and there is a really good website I have found that has accurate timetables. Most smaller towns have no written information at all. I am in the routine of getting detailed map info if I am walking to my hotel, although this isn’t always perfect when faced with no street signs and no street numbers, which is usual. Or if there is a sign it is in cryllic that does not have any resemblance to the name on the map. All my hotel bookings have been ok, so far, and only one place didn’t have an english speaker and they covered that by handing out a glass of the local fire water. The gaps in my itinerary that I needed to sort on the spot have been a breeze – but I am still worried about my crossing to Albania. I must be a very trustworthy looking person (don’t laugh) because locals keep stopping me and asking unintelligible things which I assume to be for directions or what is the time, or maybe have I got a spare fag. I make an effort to try and have a bit of a conversation with someone each day but in obscure places like Podgorica that is not easy. I haven’t had to get grumpy or look severely at anyone, although I nearly did at a women who demanded I give up my bus seat when there were local kids seated all around me. Some unimportant things are a bit of a nuisance such as I am having a run of hotels that don’t provide nice little soaps – the stuff that squirts out of bottles is not fun for digitally challenged people. I get my own back by using lots of it to wash my shirts. On the other hand there are good little things like 200 mill bottles of acceptable wine for about E1 which make a nice glass full, about now.

Zbogom.

Dennis.

Categories
Bosnia Serbia

Times of Misfortune.

One of the reasons I wanted to come to the Balkans is the history, where about every fifty years the various nationalities seem to need to start killing each other for a while. I remember watching TV during the 1990s Balkan wars and seeing people who looked like us being bombed and shot at, when usually it was somewhere African or Asian and thinking why do they have to do that. I have read a fair bit about it and understand the basics but going on a tour yesterday in Sarajevo called Times of Misfortunes was a rather chilling experience.

The guide who owns the business was 18 when the siege of Sarajevo started in 1992 and it ended in 1996. He fought in it and has a scary scar on his thigh from shrapnel as a souvenir. He told us he would only tell us his experiences and not go into the political complexities, but that is impossible and there was plenty of political stuff. The one thing he repeatedly referred to is that Sarajevo has always been and still is a mixture of orthodox (Serbs), moslems (Bosnians and the majority), catholics (Croats), Jews, and few others that have all existed together. When the war started and the city divided itself into armed zones between the first two it wasn’t just a religious and ethnic divide but families divided as well. I found this tour very moving and it has certainly left an impression on me. A few illustrations follow.

Sarajevo is basically in a valley surrounded by high hills and when all the fighting started the Yugoslavian army became the Serbian forces and they had plenty of heavy artillery and sat up in the hills and tried to destroy what was below them – anything of cultural significance to the Bosnians and the people. When you stand on the high ground at the end of town and look how close the guns must have been it is scary.

There are cemeteries all through Sarajevo and the ones from the siege are in unusual places because they had to have somewhere to bury people while the war was going on. One is where a football stadium was. One contains 11,000 plus Bosnian soldiers (Serbs lost about 1600) and the leader of the time whose grave is now guarded because some “terrorists” blew it up a while ago.

The guide was continually pointing out places that were no man’s land as the lines came into the city itself. There are still lots of holes and explosion marks on buildings.

During the siege the airport was controlled by Nato and the Bosnians controlled either side of it, with one side being the only route they had out of the area to Croatia (which changed sides twice during the conflict) where all food, weapons, and supplies of every type had to come from. The problem was the only way into Sarajevo was across the airport runway, about 1000 metres and initially this was done by guys running across with packs. 800 deaths later there was a tunnel built secretly which the Serbs knew about but didn’t know exactly where. We went to what is left of it

Going down Sniper Alley and seeing how close the action was bought to life a couple of novels I have read.

One doesn’t want to be boring so let’s just say the Serbians’ actions branded them as a rather undesirable lot and it’s a pity the leaders that have been dragged to the International Court can’t get the death penalty. And the Bosnians will never forget or forgive and I certainly don’t disagree with them. One wonders about the future of their country which is a federation with just under a half of it populated by Serbs who politically don’t show much desire to be part of it.

Going back to when I was in Serbia, I occasionally got to ask carefully about the 1990s and the answers generally expressed puzzlement about the politics and why it all happened. When I was in a lovely small town outside Novi Sad famous for making orthodox priests and wine I met a 25 year old law student who summarised her position more clearly – she hated what her country had done and was desperate to leave. As a tourist Belgrade and Nov Sad are excellent places to visit with nice old town centres, plenty to see and it is a really cheap country to visit. There are still a few bits of evidence of the war – I walked across the Danube in Novi Sad to visit a fortress and there was a small plaque on a rock that said the bridge was destroyed by Nato in 1999 and gave the name of a man unlucky enough to have been on it and killed. I recall thinking that 1999 wasn’t so long ago. Of course no mention was made of why Nato was bombing Serbia then.

Everyone smokes, or so it seems, and someone told me that is because Balkan people need danger in their lives. A smoke free restaurant is very rare. Bus drivers smoke. Graffiti is nearly everywhere, some includes two short Anglo-Saxon words. The Cryllic script is also everywhere which makes sorting out where you are and reading menus fun, but in the main centres English is spoken widely. It is different in small places and getting information at bus terminals there is a challenge. One small town I went to in Serbia was proving impossible until I found a taxi driver who spoke just enough English so I hired him on the spot and his last job after visiting the sights was to sort out what time the next bus left town.

I have taken one train journey and before we left was delighted to see two men with long handled hammers tapping all the wheels on the train. Very reassuring. The train was punctual, old and scruffy which is to be expected because everything owned by the Serbian state is like that. It is a poor place, not third world, but also not the first. The average monthly wage is about 350 euros. I saw mostly the northern part of it which is a big plain and the agriculture is small scale with lots of maize, sunflowers and Massey Ferguson rules. Getting up into the hills into Bosnia, farming looks almost subsistence stuff with little conical hay stacks, and Maurice will like to know that big tasty water melons are for sale beside the road for about 15 cents each.

As an ageing male on his own I have to admit that there is one delight to sitting around in the busy nice parts of Serbian towns and because I don’t want to openly admit to political incorrectness I shall cunningly tell you that Anna Ivanovic twins are everywhere.

The drive to Bosnia had everything possible except a ferry crossing – motorways, average roads, bad roads, switchbacks, mountain passes, viaducts, two border crossings, lots of stops, about twenty tunnels, and abandoned and bullet holed houses just over the border in Bosnia. This is in the Serbian populated part and apparently left over from ethnic cleansing. The best parts of getting to Sarajevo after ten hours of travel were twofold: firstly, I had had been to sleep for a while early on and after that was using the bus clock to work out how long things were taking, and when we finally got to the terminal I found out it was two hours earlier than the clock said; and the road in from the east goes up over a pass and you are in the city, just like that. No nasty industrial suburbs. The less nice part is that things cost more in Bosnia despite the wages and high unemployment rates being the same as Serbia.

The last word is about local wine – after lots of testing I can tell you the whites are boring and the reds can be ok. So far.

Dennis.