Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is our second full day in Petrovac, Montenegro.  It was cloudy this morning.  I was up before eight and decided that since everyone was asleep that I would go out for a morning walk and explore town a little before we all got started on the day.

I walked to the north of town and climbed up above the last building on the promenade and found the Word War II memorial that is located up there which has commanding views of the village.  It is a really neat little spot.  While I was up there I saw that there was a trail leading up above the village to the north above the hotels in the back row of the village.

I decided to work my way through town and find the head of the trail.  I did, it was located by some of the hotels in the back of town at the back of their parking areas.  It was a city trail and was nicely paved.  So I took it.  It led moderately steeply up the rocks above town and afforded me some excellent views of the little village of Petrovac.

At the top the trail turned away and led north away from the village along the sea.  I met one woman who was up there walking the trail for exercise while I was going down it, but it felt very desolate.  I am guessing that in the high season that the trail is very popular.  The views are excellent and it is a great place to go for a morning constitutional.  Today it felt like I had fallen off of the face of the earth, but the trail was well maintained, had lights for night time and had trash receptacles along it so was not abandoned by any stretch.

At the end of the trail it came to a tunnel carved into the rock of the mountain side.  This was a tunnel made for a person, not a car or something of that nature.  There was an iron gate that goes over the tunnel entrance but that was opened.  The tunnel was incredibly dark but appeared to be there for people to walk into.  It was very, very strange; I have never encountered anything like this.  So, of course, I had to investigate.

The tunnel was so dark that I had to use the flashlight on my iPhone just to be able to see the ground to know if it was safe to step forward.  The tunnel was not long, but long enough that the other end was not visible and I had to go in on faith.  There were two very, very dim electric lights attached to the ceiling and they were lit, so this gave me quite a bit of confidence that someone felt that this was supposed to be open, accessed and leading somewhere and I knew that I could watch the electrical line attached to the ceiling to know that I was still somehow connected to where I had come from.

Along the length of the tunnel there was an opening on the left, but it was covered in rocks from a rock slide and there was no way out there, but a bit of sunlight filtered through.  A new cut of the tunnel went off to the right and following that I popped out on a tiny trail running along the side of the cliff with a precipitous view down onto a small, totally inaccessible beach far below.  Very cool.

Continuing on from the spot with the isolated beach below me the trail went right into another totally dark tunnel!  This is a little like entering the mines of Moria.  The rocks of the tunnel or cave system are roughly hewn like they were dug by hand and only to stop some rocks from falling are there cement braces from time to time.  These feel like very old tunnels.

This tunnel was not as long and led down for a ways before opening out to another trail and after just a short bit into a much bigger tunnel.  This is all very odd.  The trail through the tunnels was sloping down as I went.  I felt a bit as though I should have had a marchwiggle as a guide and worried that I might find and underground lake and an enchanted prince.  But no silver chairs were found and I was safe.  This tunnel had a little door on the side that you could walk out and see another view from above the water, but went nowhere.  Just two feet to a cliff edge.  Why did someone bother to build that?

Towards the end of this tunnel a hole was cut in the side of the mountain and it was clear that you had to exit here because going forward there was no light at all and even my iPhone could illuminate nothing at all and the way was filled with trash.  Up until now everything had been clear. This was trash as if it was meant to block the passage.  Very strange.

So I took the exit and popped out at sea level, or just a few feet above it, on a rocky point covered in huge, jagged rocks (maybe this is where they dumped the chips when they made these tunnels?) and walking out away from the tiny hole in the giant rock face that I had just emerged from I found a secluded beach where a massive new resort was being built!

It was clear now why the tunnel had needed to be filled in and the new exit cut in the side of the mountain – the old tunnel was now running into the wall of the resort that was being built right into the rock face here.  This is a resort so large that it must come close to being the size of every available room to rent from apartment spaces to hotel spaces in all of Petrovac combined.  This was mammoth.  The biggest hotel in Petrovac is three or four floors.  This one was fifteen!  And enormously wide and with every single floor have unfettered views of the sea and the front entrance emptying directly onto the beach.

This was rather an interesting find.  This location is so remote that it would appear that it is as of yet unknown.  There was only one person around and they were operating some heavy machinery.  There is a lot to do before this place will be ready to be used, but boy is it going to be something when that time comes.  This will change the village here rather a bit and hopefully they will do some improvements to the tunnel system.  With good markings and good lighting and some safety measures that tunnel system could be a really cool walking system for getting people from this secluded resort area over to the Petrovac promenade and all of its restaurants and shopping and entertainment and for Petrovac visitors to get over to the restaurants that I assume will be being built into this massive resort.  There is a lot of potential here.

I turned around and headed back to Petrovac through the tunnels and back up the cliff.  This was a most interesting and surprising morning walk if I do say so!  By the time that I got back to the apartment I had done four and a half kilometres.  A good start to the day.

Once back it was time to procure coffee.  We tried a new place down the way to the south today, maybe one “block” down the beach.  The girls took their beach toys with them and tried to hang out on the beach but did not manage to hang out for too long.  Dominica and I got coffee and discovered that this restaurant, like so many others, that there was no real food here.  We managed to get a little bit of cake and had that with our coffee.

Later on in the morning we went for a stroll up the board walk and found a restaurant called Oskar that had a huge menu and we were told was doing real food by some of the other restaurants on the strip as so many of them are still only open for coffee for another month yet, we are told!  What a weird culture here, the whole place only “exists” for a few months of the year and otherwise, nothing is open at all.  It’s like the whole place ceases to exist.

Lunch at Oskar was awesome.  Very big menu and excellent food.  Staff was great, too.  Like everywhere that we go here, we were the only people there other than the staff.  We all really enjoyed our meals.  If we were here for any length of time this is a place that we would definitely be frequenting often.

After lunch it was time to get in the car and deal with some necessary logistics.  On our way out of Bosnia we had lost three out of four headlights and we have to get that fixed right away.  We decided to hold off dealing with it in Croatia because that was going to just be way too much work, but it cannot wait any longer now.

We got a tip from the owner of our apartment that we could find a little auto shop on the side of the road near the next town to the south.  So we headed out and actually were able to find the place pretty easily.  I definitely caught the kid who was there washing a car by surprise when I pulled over and asked about getting the headlights fixed.  He was pretty shocked and said that he had to call his boss who came out in just a minute.

He took a look at the car and asked if we had a light bulb.  We said no and he took off on his motorcycle going who knows where for maybe ten or fifteen minutes at most.  Then he reappeared with a new bulb, replaced it and suddenly we went from one working light to four working lights!  That was rather surprising.  A very simple fix.  One light bulb died and the whole headlight system on the Ford Focus had gone out.  He charges us only five Euros in total for the bulb and the service!  Amazing.

Since that went so quickly and we had been anticipating that it was going to take a while we decided to go out for a little bit of a drive with our new found headlights!

We drove down the Montenegrin coast down as far as Bar which is a city that we were really interested in learning more about.  Bar is a larger city and not a resort town, it is really focused around the port there.  We did not stay in town but just did a loop of downtown and headed back up north.  We were not looking to spend much time but did want to get a feel for what the city was like because Dominica had found a lot of affordable property down there and this explained why.  It appears to be a nice city, but a small one and not a place for tourists, really.

On the way back north we stopped at Sutomore which, from driving by, looked very promising.  We made our way down to the beach, parked and walked around a bit.  What we figured out was that this town has some potential but has executed very poorly and will have a major struggle to turn itself into something really great.  Everything was closed, even though it was a much larger town than Petrovac.  There was far less to do even with the beach being much larger.

We got back in the car and went north again.  Before getting all of the way back we stopped at a small village just on the other side of a giant rock from Petrovac to the south.  It had a lot of potential and looked really interesting.  Currently there is really little more there than a pizza place, another few restaurants and a whole lot of RV parking and camping with no one using any of it.  Very strange.

It was getting dark when we got back to Petrovac.

Originally today was going to be our only full day in Petrovac, Montenegro but we are enjoying the location and it is not very expensive and moving from town to town quickly makes it hard for us to do things that we need to do with normal life so we decided to extend through much of the week and we will actually be staying for four nights in Petrovac instead of two.  We have been moving so quickly for the last several days that the idea of relaxing by the sea for a few extra days sounds pretty awesome.

I got to try out the shower at the apartment this morning since I was up nice and early.  This is the first time that I’ve gotten to use a modern shower with the full body spray, rain shower head and such.  We never get things like this when travelling.  We don’t even get them back in the US.  This is quite a treat for us.  Most of our showers are rather pathetic affairs at best.  We’ve not had a really good shower for months.

Before everyone was up and moving I went out for a little walk down the promenade and hit up the bakery there to get some treats for the morning.  Dominica and I started the day with a croissant and I got donuts for the girls but they were not interested.

We had coffee this morning from Cuba Caffe which is basically part of the apartment.  The coffee is decent here in town, but nothing amazing.  The Balkans seem to lack the extreme coffee culture that we tend to enjoy.  It is warm and bright on the sea today.

We had to wait at the apartment for a while because the handyman was coming to deal with the lock.  Originally we thought that he was going to come early this morning but it ended up that he was only able to come around noon.  So a little disruptive but we really were not going to go anywhere today.

The car has three of its four headlights out, so getting that dealt with is a bit of a major concern.  But we are going to deal with that tomorrow, hopefully.  We have no idea how we will deal with that, but we will figure that out.  That was a key reason for us thinking that we would stay here in Petrovac longer than we had originally planned so that we would have time to address that issue.

We started the afternoon by walking about a block down the promenade to a place that does coffee and smoothies and sat out having coffee while the girls went out onto the beach to play in the “sand.”  It isn’t really a sandy beach but is actually lots of tiny pebbles, but still pretty decent.  The sun was out and the pebbles were hot and the girls did not want to play for very long.  Luciana’s sandals are not well suited to the beach and so she tried to go barefoot but ended up burning her feet and being unhappy.  Liesl played a little longer but was not that into it.  Dominica had gone shopping yesterday to get a plastic bucket and some shovels and rakes for the beach.

So the beach time was rather short today.  We tried ordering food but discovered that this restaurant, like so many others here, is not actually open and they are just running on skeleton staff and serving drinks.  Petrovac is really dead and today is a Monday so it is a fraction of the people that we saw yesterday.  There is almost no one out and about and just on one getting food.  We were able to get cakes, a least, to have with our coffee; but that was it.

After the beach time we came back to the apartment and the girls were happy to spend the afternoon using their Kindle Fire tablets and just watching their shows or whatever.  Being at the apartment gave me time to work on catching up with writing and posting and some lab stuff, so that was good.  I put in a long day, actually, totally burning through my laptop battery a full two times today which means that I was at the computer for about eleven hours.

This evening we wanted to do something simple.  We went for a walk on the promenade around six.  We learned from last night that if we try to eat on our normal schedule that everything is shutting down by the time that we got out and we will be the only people out eating.  As it is now Monday and not a weekend day any longer, this will likely be even more pronounced.

We went down and checked out the Lazeret Pizzeria at the north end of the promenade and sat out under the umbrellas by the water and ordered dinner.  The girls split a pizza, Dominica got pasta with veggies and I was the brave one who decided to try what was described as a tuna pancake.

The girls loved their pizza, Luciana ate half of a large pizza all by herself!  But the big winner at dinner was me.  The tuna pancake was amazing.  It was actually closer to a tuna burrito.  It was in a crepe that was deep fried or something like that, and topped with sour cream and cheese.  It was delicious!

We stopped and got ice cream on the walk home.  None of us are super impressed with the ice cream here. The selection is tiny and the quality is so so.  The price is right, though.  The whole family gets ice cream cones on the promenade for well under three dollars!

The girls were anxious to get back home, they mostly just want to use their tablets.  Luciana lost hers for the night (and maybe tomorrow) though, because she had a temper tantrum and threw her headphones.

We were back home between eight and nine and it was a quiet evening after that point.  Luciana was asleep well before ten.  Liesl stayed awake with me while I did some work until about one thirty in the morning.  That got her off to bed about two hours before normal, which was pretty good.

 

I woke up this morning at twenty past seven. The bright light off of the sea and getting to bed before midnight helped to get me moving. Dominica was up soon thereafter and even Luciana, who had fallen asleep the earliest, was awake just after nine. Liesl, always the sleepyhead, was the only one who slept in for very long.

Just before ten I walked down the hill to get to the Hotel Excelsior where they have an ATM as I needed some cash to pay for our apartment. That was not a long walk and I was able to take out exactly what we needed to pay for our apartment so that we would have no left over Croatia money (Kuna) at all. Perfect.

I walked back up the hill getting a decent amount of morning exercise. Once back I showered and got myself ready to go while Dominica worked on getting the girls ready. We wanted to be on the road on the early side, we don’t want anything going wrong with the drive today given that we don’t have working headlights at this point.

We were out of the Villa Odak at ten thirty and were on the road. The drive out of Dubrovnik was easy and the drive south through the last bits of Croatia was very nice. We were surprised to find just how large the Dubrovnik enclave is and the large, wide valley that supports the region surrounded by sheer mountain faces to the east was really interesting.

Before long we were exiting Croatia and found ourselves at the Montenegrin border. Montenegro border control informed us, not surprisingly, that while Montenegro was listed on our green card for our car that a copy of the green card is not valid and so we would, once again, need to purchase additional insurance at the border. A pain but it was only fifteen Euros so not a big deal. Border control was friendly and helpful.

Once into Montenegro we took the scenic route to cling to the Adriatic shoreline and see as much of the coast as we could on our drive as who knows when we will be driving through this way again. Before long we were at the Bay of Kotor, one of Montenegro’s more famous locations. We took the very long drive along the bay which was very interesting as a huge amount of Montenegro’s coastline is against the Bay and not against the Adriatic. Nice little villages along here and Kotor itself, with an imposing Venetian fortress, was really neat. Kotor is also famously the site of the Casino Royale, of James Bond fame, even though the movie was not filmed in this part of the world and they made the movie nothing like the region.

After the Bay of Kotor the speed of our drive picked up considerably and before long we were coming into Budva. Prior to Budva, Montenegro was mostly outdated and small villages, not quite what we were expecting being seafront coast line, there were hotels and some resort like areas but they were small and mostly quite old. The difference from Croatia was dramatic. Getting to Budva, suddenly we turned from a somewhat desolate, old school Adriatic region into an endless sea of billboards that made you feel like you had been transported to the heart of trashy Florida – it was absolutely awful. Thirty seconds of driving into Budva we knew that this part of Montenegro was clearly something we had no interest in and needed to do no more than drive through and put behind us. Montenegro needs to pass some laws about billboards or they are going to destroy their country. Budva, beyond the billboards, was the worst couple of kilometres of the Adriatic coast that we have seen. Very much worth avoiding.

We did not make it all of the way through Budva before we hit stopped traffic. There was major construction going on on the only road leading south from the city so we were stuck.  We sat for maybe twenty minutes without any cars moving when a taxi driver behind us got out and convinced several cars to shift so that he could make a u-turn and go back into Budva.  We followed suit and went in search of lunch since we had been planning to tackle that once we had arrived in our village.  This seemed like an opportune time to deal with that and hopefully the traffic would clear by the time that we returned.  Dominica and thought that we could bypass the city but once we turned around she realized that the bypass loop was actually right where we had turned around and that it would not bypass the issue at all.

We had seen a restaurant, high on a bluff overlooking the sea, that looked awesome before we got to the trashy disaster that is Budva, so we decided to drive all of the way back through the city up north to find it again.

It was a short drive and we found El Rey, a cute and apparently very popular sea view restaurant.  We found parking and had to sit inside as every outside table was taken.  This wasn’t bad as the girls did not want to be outside and the restaurant was all glass so the views were still very good.  We found food that everyone wanted and ordered and had an amazing meal, highly recommended.  I had the best salmon penne pasta that I think I have ever had and we had our best coffee that we have had (and would have) for a while.  We were very happy with our meal and our decision to drive so far back to get it.

We continued on and found that traffic was still stopped, but was not backed up as far as it was when we were there earlier so we knew that things moved from time to time.  We sat for probably five or ten minutes without any movement then we were able to go.  Not too bad and we were glad that we had taken the hour or longer break to get a nice lunch while we had the chance.

Once we were past the traffic jam we made good time and were in Petrovac, our village for the next few days, quite quickly.  Getting into the village was quite easy and we found a parking lot in the middle of town and the grocery store, Voli, that our apartment was supposed to be right behind, but we could not see the apartment.  Dominica sent me on driving some and we went to the north and to a dead end in town where I could barely turn around and we really did not fit very easily.  Driving can get to be rather challenging in these little towns.  So we returned to the parking lot and Dominica set off on foot to see what she could find out about our apartment.

Ten or fifteen minutes of searching on foot and Dominica had no idea where the apartment was.  So she returned to the car and we called from my phone (as hers never seems to work) and got a description of where to go, which was directly behind the Voli super market and we were able to park and got right into our apartment.

Our Montenegrin apartment in Petrovac is a super modern refurbished apartment in an old stone building one building behind the boardwalk of the village.  Our front entrance touches the back of the Voli, which is very handy for getting supplies, and our back terrace goes directly into the back side of the Cuba Caffe Bar so that we can get drinks and pizza without even leaving the apartment, which is neat.  And from that entrance we spill out directly onto the boardwalk which touches the beach.  So even though we are not exactly water front we have a small Adriatic view from the back door and window and we can get to the bar, boardwalk and beach without ever coming close to a road.  We are right in the centre of everything.

We got settled in, got the Internet access up and running and set out to get some mojitos and relax with the view of the sea.  The mojitos were good but definitely not as good as the ones from Dubrovnik yesterday, those were the best ever.

We decided to walk the boardwalk and explore.  I did a little walking on my own to get a quick feel of where we could go then we all went and did a long walk to most of the entire board walk and got ice cream while we were out.  We had to leave the apartment unlocked as the back door lock was broken so we texted the apartment owners and they came over after we had ice cream to work on it.

The apartment owner and I were able to get the lock working enough to get us through the day but a handy man is going to come over in the morning to get it working reliably.  All of these logistics got us to nearly dinner time.

At eight thirty, after we were settled, had relaxed, and dealt with stuff at the house, after I had made a grocery run to get some necessities and such, we set out in search of dinner.  There are at least a dozen restaurants on the boardwalk, mostly seafood and pizza.  We looked for a while but had seen one, the Mediterranio, that looked great on our earlier walk so we headed there.

We learned from this experience that we eat much later than Montenegrins do and we were starting dinner about when the last people in town were finishing.  We were likely the last diners out on the entire boardwalk!  And we were the only ones with kids, too.

Dinner was awesome.  Liesl and Luciana split an order of fried calamari, which they really liked.  Dominica got Dalmation style fish and I went for a seafood risotto which was mostly octopus and mussels and was very delicious.  The whole dinner was really, really good.  We felt bad keeping them open until ten thirty, they likely would have closed up and gone home at least an hour earlier if we had not been there, but we were easily half of all of their business for the evening so we could only feel so bad.

After dinner we did a little walking on the boardwalk in the dark, although the boardwalk is well lit, and then went back to the apartment to call it a night.  We were all ready for bed and nearly asleep before midnight.

There were only a small number of people out and about today in Petrovac.  Many of the restaurants and bars are only serving limited menus, or only drinks, because it is still the middle of the shoulder season and there are very few tourists around.  Our selection is rather limited for a lot of things, it would appear.

The village itself is gorgeous.  An old village with a mix of old stone buildings and modern construction.  Lots of things going up currently as Montenegro is a hot bed of building.  The sea views are excellent and the boardwalk is really nice.  The town has a lot of potential and we are going to enjoy getting to relax here.  Our plan is to be here for two nights, so some time to get to enjoy town.

The girls really like it here and are looking forward to hitting the beach in the morning, tomorrow.  There are several places that do coffee right against the beach so it will be easy for Dominica and I to relax with coffee while the girls play on the beach.  We found a bakery down the way as well.

It is Saturday and today is our day for exploring Dubrovnik, Croatia.  I was awake first to the right, Adriatic sunlight pouring in through the windows and set off for a long walk to explore the old city before anyone else woke up.  The girls were fast asleep when I left and Dominica was only awake enough to let her know that I was leaving but she was still in bed.

It was a really nice morning and I enjoyed the walk down to the fortress and I put in easily two hours walking around the old streets.  Lots of tourists were already there by the time that I got there and more just kept coming.  I learned later that Dubrovnik has recently become famous for being a key filming location for Game of Thrones which I have never seen and have no interest in, which explains the extremely high ratio of American tourists in an Eastern European location.  I also learned that Star Wars VIII has been filming here, which will make tourism increase that much more.  This means that last year, in Spain, we got to see one major Star Wars filming location and now we are seeing another and we are considering seeing yet another in the fall – none of which was intentional nor are we into those things.  We just keep stumbling upon them.

I looked around and found neat areas to bring the family and checked out the food options.  I managed to find a place that looked like it would be good for breakfast and let Dominica know.  The girls had woken up.  It was nine thirty.  So Dominica started getting them ready and I hoofed it back up the hill to the apartment so that I could meet them and help walk back down to the fortress.  Plus I had the keys and was needed to lock up the apartment before they could leave.

Even though the girls were awake at nine thirty it was still a bit of a race to get the entire family ready and all of the way down to the fortress in time to get to the restaurant before elven when they would stop serving breakfast.  We made it, though, with a good ten minutes to spare.

We sat out on the main square of Dubrovnik’s old town and had a wonderful breakfast.  Luciana was so hungry that she ordered a giant omelet, a chocolate filled croissant and a cheese sandwich!  We all really enjoyed our food and the coffee was awesome so we sat, relaxed and enjoyed that for a while.  It was a great way to start the day.

From there we hit the farmer’s market or whatever was going on in the square.  We got a few small things, but nothing much.  Then we spent an hour or so wandering the old streets.  It is a gorgeous old town, really something to see, and really extensive.  The scale of it is part of what is just so cool.  You cannot see it quickly.

Sadly a lot of it has been given over to television and movie themed souvenir shops that have nothing to do with the city at all.  Like so many touristy places, Chinese-made junk with the city’s logo printed on it is taking centre stage and the local stuff and the reasons for going there are fading.  Dubrovnik is not that bad yet, but it is very obvious that the last couple of years have turned something amazingly historic and awesome into something that most people see as gimmicky and cheap.  And nearly every overheard conversation is not someone talking about the history of Adriatic empires or the history of the seafaring people or how the fortifications work or how the city survived the famous siege only a few years ago or how the reconstruction is going; but rather nearly every conversation is someone talking about how they binged on an HBO show and which episode was filmed where.  It’s so sad to see such an important historical and living location to be thought of in those terms. Now it is just a place where cruise ships drop off loads of day trippers out to see where their favourite fiction show set up their cameras, instead of where actual history took place.

The city is a bit tough to walk with the kids.  There are a lot of cobblestones and a lot of elevation changes and steps.  The girls wanted to get candy so we ended up at Pirate Candy, which is a nice, but oddly themed American pirate candy store with barrels of candy and treasure chests hanging on the walls and such.  Why an American pirate theme in Croatia, I have no idea.  But the candy looked really good and the girls found some things that they wanted.

After a lot of walking around the girls were tired so we found an open square where people had vacated and the stalls closed up because the wind had picked up and was blowing tables over and let the girls just play for a bit.  They did well for twenty minutes but just as we were getting ready to go Liesl came from the bright sun of the square into the shadows where we were sitting, didn’t see a big rock and fell and hurt her knee badly.  She didn’t cut it or even cut her tights but it hurt a lot.  It will likely be a big bruise later.   So I had to carry her for quite a while and help her walk for a  long time.

That was it for the Miller family in the old city today.  We worked out way towards the way back, did some quick shopping, took a few last pictures and were on the way back up the hill.  We only went a little bit, though, because we have been promising Luciana for days that we would take her to the beach and there is a decent pebble beach on the north side of the fortress.  I had seen it last night and scoped it out on the walk this morning and figured out that it is a public beach and that we could go there.  We ended up entering the beach through a new restaurant, lounge and club that has been built on it, BanjeBeach.  We figured out that this, probably the best and most expensive restaurant in Dubrovnik (mostly guessing there, but it is a very reasonable guess if you saw the place) just opened last week!  It wasn’t busy as we were early so we sat on the tables just off of the beach and let the girls go play while we sat enjoying mojitos.  It was nice to get a chance to just sit with some drinks on the Adriatic.  The sun was out, the waves were nice, there was people watching to do and the girls were endlessly entertained by picking rocks out of the sand and building a wall and playing some game of their imaginations that we will never understand.  They easily put in an hour or two at this elaborate and very effortful game while we just relaxed.

We would have stayed longer, as we were really enjoying the break and the girls were having so much fun, but the place was booked for a wedding and we were going to be in the way.  I took each of the girls down and let them put their “toes in the sea”, which was way too cold for anything more, and we were off to walk back to the apartment.  We stopped quickly to pick up pastries and pizza to eat at the apartment which would be far cheaper than going out again and much less effort.

Back at the apartment we discovered that the Internet was out there and would remain off for the rest of the day.  So while we have basic communications via our cell phones with have unlimited and moderately fast 3G, we don’t have Internet access for our computers to do anything much.  So no uploading the pictures from the Nikon or getting things posted to SGL or doing any sort of work even though we are back at the apartment early and had been planning on doing some of that stuff.  And we had planned on really putting in some time looking for places to stay as we are leaving Croatia in the morning and need a place to head to in Montenegro, but don’t even know what city we are headed for, yet.

I was hot and tired so took a shower, I had not taken one earlier this morning, and when I was done the kids were tired.  We went down to the public area and took over the outside terrace (there is only one other room occupied at the facility and they were not in so we could spread out all that we wanted) with the girls at one table and Dominica and I at another and ate our dinner from the bakery.  Pizza, that we had to remove the ham from as no one sells anything without meat here, and some cakes and such.  It wasn’t bad.  Could have been better and less effort if they were not so crazy about not making a single thing without meat added to it.

We kept hoping that the Internet would come back so that we could do travel research, but it never did.  We sat outside using the one cell phone that was working, mine, and tried to find places in Montenegro that looked like they would be good for us.  We probably did that for about an hour with the girls having gone back up to the room so that they could watch recorded shows on their Kindle Fire tablets (they want to watch YouTube but that is not working) before they came down to tell us that they were lonely and wanted us to hang out with them.

I had set up my laptop out on the terrace and started working on getting caught up on writing about our trip around the Balkans which I will try to post once we get somewhere with Internet again.  Then I brought it up to the room and set up on the table in the middle of Dominica and my room and wrote from there most of the evening until a little after eleven while Dominica worked on finding our next place to stay.  She managed to book us a place in Montenegro for two nights, so we know that we are able to get up in the morning and head south and have a destination to get to and we know that we get to chill there for two nights again.  That will be nice.  Another day, another country.  We did some research on places to stay in Albania but have yet to come up with what region of the country we even want to get to visit.  And I need to do some research on getting into Macedonia with the car or how we can get around to Kosovo by train and I need to talk to friends there but without Internet access tonight that was a bit hard.  So that will wait until tomorrow.

We talked to the owner of the apartment about getting the car fixed here and he said that the nearest place to do so would be at the airport, which sits on the Montenegrin border thirty five kilometres away.  Dubrovnik is expensive and difficult to deal with things because it is such a tourist area so we are hesitant to try to get the car fixed here.  It seems like it makes more sense to do it in cheaper, easier, more laid back Montenegro than to do it here.  So our current plan is to try to swing by the Ford dealer near the airport as we go by tomorrow in the hopes that they can just get us in and fix whatever is wrong.  If they cannot then we continue on to Montenegro in the bright sun of day and figure things out from there.

It was a very busy day and Luciana was asleep long before ten.  Liesl was asleep just after ten.  And Dominica was nearly asleep at eleven.  I wrote more then ten thousand words before turning in for the night.  That is a good chunk of catching up.

Even getting to bed on the late side, around two in the morning, we were up at eight today.  Dominica had the idea that we would lug the luggage up the hill on the early side so that we could get that out of the way and be able to check out of the apartment and then be free to see Sarajevo while the car was still parked.  That was we would not be rushed and not miss things that we wanted to see.  This made sense to me and felt like it would make the day a bit more relaxed so we did that.

Getting the luggage all packed and up the hill was no small thing.  The luggage is heavy, we have one of the large suitcases, packed to over twenty five kilograms, and the smaller red suitcase, the giant purple backpack loaded to the hilt and the sling bag.  It is a lot to carry and going up the steep hill was exhausting.  But when it was done I was very glad that we had done it.  We were able to go back and check out of the apartment and be footloose and fancy free early on, making it very easy to explore the old town.

It was after nine, but not late at all, when we set out to explore the city.  We walked around the amazing old town for a while.  Sarajevo in the daylight is just as exciting and awesome as we felt like it was last night in the dark.  What a cool city.  The old town is almost entirely pedestrian with all of the expected shops, restaurants, cafes, gelaterias, twisting old streets, mosques, churches and museums that you expect in a place like this.

Our two biggest thing that we wanted to see this morning are the bridge where Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated and where World War I began, and to find someplace to get breakfast.  There are tons and tons of street cafes in Sarajevo but finding something with the kind of breakfast that we wanted was pretty hard to do.  We ended up walking around for a while and finding the bridge where the duke was killed before we found a place to eat.

We settled on an empty restaurant on a back street for some food.  Turns out that it was empty for a reason, the food was not very good.  The owner was friendly but the food was all just like frozen vegetables heated up for us and such.  No one really liked their meals but I got a salmon steak that was actually quite good.  So I made out well while everyone else got a cheap, frozen meal at best.  It was fine, just not what we were hoping for eating on the street in Sarajevo’s old town.

We did not stay for long, we have a very busy day with a lot of driving to do ahead of us.  So by half past twelve we had hiked back up the hill to find our car.

When we went to get into the car we noticed that the passenger window was wide open.  Dominica had jumped out so quickly last night that she had forgotten to close it and Mohammad and driven it and parked it for us in the tight space and had not closed it either.  I had just been handed the keys and had not inspected the car after we unloaded the luggage.  And somehow we did not notice the window being wide open (wide open is harder to spot than half open) when we loaded the car up with luggage this morning.  So it has sat all night and all morning being wide open and no one messed with it at all. And while this is a back street, it is a busy one with foot and car traffic constantly.

The drive out of Sarajevo was an awesome one.  We got to do the length of the city down in the valley so went out of the old town and into the new parts of the city and got to see a lot of different style areas and neighbourhoods including the government buildings (including the famous one in the pictures that was destroyed by artillery fire during the war.)  Even the new parts of Sarajevo seem like a really cool city.  This seems like the kind of city that you would really want to live in.

Going out of the city we followed the train for a bit and then headed back up into the mountains.  It was another nice drive, but not as nice as last night, but tons of mountains and beautiful areas.  It was only a few hours and we were down to Mostar.

Mostar is famous for its Stari Most or old bridge which is very old and rather unique and famous for people jumping off of it.  There is an old town (Stari Grad) near the bridge which is very quaint and cool, too.  Rick Steves has covered Mostar quite a bit so we know it well from his show.  Mostar is the big travel destination in Bosnia and was on our route to southern Croatia so we wanted to be sure to get to see it while we were in the area.  It would have been a shame to have missed it.  From Rick Steve’s Best of Europe I always had the impression that Mostar was a small place but it is one of the largest cities in Bosnia and rather large.

The terrain down in Mostar is completely different from that around Sarajevo or north.  Those areas are green and lush in high mountains.  The Mostar area has much lower mountains and it is very dry looking more like the drier areas of Spain, for example, or of Crete.

It took a bit of driving around to figure out how to get to the old bridge area.  Once we were there, though, it was easy with municipal parking guiding us as to where to go.  Parking was about five Euros for an hour, which was all that we figured that we would need.

From the parking the walk to the bridge was really quick.  We went into the old town and discovered that it had been turned into a horrible tourist trap complete with hawkers and kids begging for money (kids who were not poor, just begging because that’s what kids do in tourist areas.)  It’s awful.  It’s uncomfortable being there and completely pointless.  Sure the old town is gorgeous and old and really neat, but they have done such a terrible job letting it turn into an endless tourist trap and not having the necessary tourism police like Morocco does to deal with the “tourism begging” problem and not keeping hawkers from harassing people there is no reason to be there.  The place is packed with tourists all there to see people pretend to jump off of a bridge (people really do jump, but not very often and most people just get tricked into waiting or paying for something that never happens.)  Someone did jump while we were there, but we had gotten lucky.

We walked on the bridge, took a picture, grabbed ice cream, shooed away some beggar kids who, not getting much from us after much yelling “hey chico, hey chico… “ and a hand out demanding that I give him money, immediately went over and bought themselves ice cream and treats because, in reality, they aren’t poor but are rich off of foolish tourists.  I was not impressed.

We got back to the car, the whole trip having taken about forty five minutes, and drove out of Mostar.  My impression of it is that it is really just famous for being famous and there is no reason to really come here.  I have no idea why guidebooks even mention it and I’m a bit disappointed that Rick Steves made such a point of it as to put it in his show.  This isn’t the best of Europe, this is literally the worst little patch of Bosnia that we were able to find.  We drove across the entire country, it was all wonderful and gorgeous except for right here – the one place that everyone tells you to go.  Why?  The bridge is neat and historic, definitely, but worth a special trip?  Heck no.  You are lucky if it is worth getting out of your car to see.

Of course Mostar is somewhat famous for being the site of some of the most brutal fighting of the Bosnian Civil War and the bridge that we came to see, the Stari Most, was actually blown up and the one that is here now is a recent recreation (making it all the less sensible to take the time to go and see it.)  It’s awesome that the recreated it like exactly as it was before, but the sad fact is that it is still just an excellent recreation and not the real thing.  It’s terrible that Mostar lost its landmark, but their tourism system is so bad that I don’t feel as badly as I should about the whole thing.  We did get to see several houses that were still riddled with bullet holes and holes left from artillery rounds.  For the past twenty years this has been the calling card of Bosnia but much of the country has managed to patch this up and this face of the country is starting to disappear.  Around Mostar, much of it remains.  Why, we don’t know.  But from the little we have seen of the country our guess is that most of the country wants to fix what is broken, clean things up and move on to a bright future as a peaceful, wonderful country and Mostar feels like it might be leaving the scars of the war in place to draw attention to itself and try to capitalize on the human drama making war a tourist attraction.

My recommendation is to come see Bosnia, it’s amazing, but bypass Mostar.  Even if you are in the region, drive on by.  Go see the wine country, don’t join the throngs of tourists looking at recreations and people jumping into a river.  It’s just a silly way to spend your time.  Don’t waste your time in Bosnia on this.
We stopped at a gas station as we left town because Luciana had to use the facilities.  We fueled up while we were there.  When we went to leave we had a terrible discovery – our low beams no longer worked.  The car was actually throwing an error that the low beams were gone.  I got out and checked them out and discovered that it was worse than that… the low beams are gone completely and the high beams have one light out!  How did this happen?  Three lights going out in an hour?  We had four lights driving last night, no errors until now and the first error that we get and three of four lights are no longer functioning?  This is crazy.

Thank goodness that we had decided to do everything today on an early schedule in the hopes of getting to Dubrovnik early enough that we could scope it out, get to bed and get up early and see the city tomorrow.  This put us leaving Mostar at three in the afternoon, plenty of time to get to Dubrovnik before the sun goes down.  We cannot have the car looked at in Bosnia because we have no idea where or how to do that, we already have a place to stay in Croatia and if we attempt to stop somewhere we will easily get stuck with the sun going down and having an undriveable car.  This could get very bad, very quickly.

So we pulled out of Mostar and raced across western Bosnia to get to Croatia before it got dark.  We decided that we would put in two nights in Dubrovnik so that we would have time to figure things out as this makes everything a lot more complicated.  We have plenty of spare time built into our schedule so there is no problem spending extra time.  We have made good time thus far and we are really interested in seeing Dubrovnik so are not sad at all to spend extra time there.

We crossed the border into Croatia, our twenty fifth country, and the girls twenty third, around five but still had a very long drive along the coast left to go.  The border crossing was about the easiest ever.  It was a little station along an empty road.  We came upon it with no warning and even when we got there it was unclear that it was the border.  We only guessed that it was the border because there was a little guard station and sign that said “no pictures.”  Even going through Bosnian exit control and Croatian border control there was nothing obvious as to what was happening nor was anything said.  We handed over our passports to first Bosnia then to Croatia and they looked through them, approved them and handed them back waving us through.  That was it.  Not even a stamp in them.  Not even a welcome to Croatia or a thanks for visiting Bosnia.  Not a welcome sign or anything.  So weird.  And this was crossing from the independent Bosnian nation into the European Union, as well, but not the Schengen area.

Going into Croatia was interesting.  We first went along a river into a broad, flat valley surrounded by mountains and then climbed up the mountains to take the highway south along the river.  This is what I would call “Croatia Proper”, the mainland portion of Croatia rather than the enclave in which Dubrovnik sits.  We have to cross another strip of Bosnia before getting to that.  Bosnia and Croatia are very odd down in this area although if you really study a map it makes a little bit more sense when you realize that the mainland of Croatia and the enclave to the south are basically connected by the sea and there is a string of islands that hooks them all together.  Dubrovnik, if treated as being just another Croatian island, makes perfect sense.

Once we got up into the Croatian mountains the view back towards the valley was, to put mildly, epic.  This is one of the greatest views I have ever seen.  The mountains were high and circled this very large, flat valley with this neat river running through it to the Adriatic Sea.  So. Freaking. Cool.

The drive through the mountains was not too bad and the scenery was amazing.  This is our first time on the east side of the Adriatic.  We have been to Venice before, up in the north, but this is the eastern side with the amazing sunsets.  This is the part of the Adriatic that we are most interested in.  Italy might be the famous coast and the longest, but the Croatian and old Yugoslavian coast, as well as Albanian, has the better position along it.  And both does this drive show it off.  And so much of it was empty.  It was amazing how few settlements we found along some of the world’s great sea coast.

We thoroughly enjoyed this drive.  One of the things that is very worth noting is how incredibly different the landscapes of the three major Yugoslavian components are.  Serbia is almost entirely a flat plain of farmland.  Bosnia is all mountains. Croatia is all about the sea.  Each is totally unique.

We had to pass through a tiny sliver of Bosnia where that country touches the Adriatic itself.  Border control here was bigger, but just as simple, as our last passing into Croatia.  Two minutes and we were through.  Even Canada makes it harder than this.  Of course I’m sure that drugs, weapons and crime are far more common coming from the US than from Bosnia, so Canada has a lot more to worry about.

The Bosnian stretch along the sea feels weird just because it looks just like the most amazing seaside, clinging to the cliffs Adriatic villages that you picture in Italy and Croatia but is in Bosnia, a country that you do not picture with a coastline like this at all.

After the brief stretch in Bosnia we had one more border to do, back into Croatia and we were on our way down to Dubrovnik, Croatia’s most famous city.  This drive section would have gone much more quickly but the road is so windy that you realistically cannot pass on it and we got stuck behind a slow moving truck literally the entire way and right behind him were two cars without the balls to pass it making a line of three cars that was so much harder to pass than just the truck on its own would have been.  They were so problematic that they created a line of cars backed up for what was probably over a mile.  Amazing how one slow truck and one foolish car driver that follows too closely to him but will not pass can impact an entire highway.   They actually changed the flow of traffic into Dubrovnik for thirty minutes or so!

We finally got into the city and managed to get pretty close to the apartment that we have booked for tonight.  The city clings to the hillside against the sea so is all very tough streets and tight spaces.  We parked where we could find a space and Dominica sent me out to locate the apartment and, hopefully, a parking space before we moved the car closer and possibly got stuck looping around the city again.

I had a problem finding the place and ended up walking several kilometres down a steep hill, all of the way to the old city centre and then climbing some crazy stairs and coming back to the car from above. It was exhausting and took a lot of time to do.  I was looking for number sixteen and had managed to find fifteen and seventeen but not sixteen.  This was pretty awful.  At least I managed to get back to the car.

We did some calling, texting and Dominica walked down the hill and had the guy come out and wave and then coordinated moving the car down to where she was and we were able to park it.  It was getting dark at this point but I had gotten the fog lights working and there was light traffic and we were on well lit one way streets so the lights being out wasn’t an issue.  We only needed people to see the car from behind and the rear lights were fine.

We got parked and were thankful to be out of the car.  It is right across the street from the apartment so unloading the luggage was no problem at all this time.  We got moved in and everyone was ready to relax for a  while, but not for too long as we were all hungry.

The apartment is great.  The owner had two apartments available and so showed us both so that we could pick which would be a better fit for us.  As usual, the girls did the deciding and chose the first one that we were shown, a two bedroom, one bath apartment with one view directly onto the sea and another off to the side onto the old town.  It’s a gorgeous little place and downstairs in the common area is a really neat terrace sitting area that sits right on out the sea.  It’s a nice spot.

We decided that we all wanted to go eat dinner in the old town which is where the apartment owner recommended.  It is a bit of a walk, maybe fifteen minutes, down to the old town.  Walking to it is easy, it is all down hill.  Walking back is the fun bit.  A constant up hill march to return.

We got to the old city and entered the old fortress.  This is quite an amazing structure.   Dubrovnik was a contemporary and competitor with Venice and is one of the only cities strong enough to have managed to have fended off Venetian advances for hundreds of years and Ottoman advances for a long time as well.  The fortress of Dubrovnik was built originally to protect the city from the Venetians and the fortress as it stands was reinforced against the later Ottoman Turks.  It is massive and the entire old city is inside of its walls.  The entire structure remains intact, even after it was shelled by the Yugaslav army less then twenty five years ago.  The shelling of the city being the event that really brought global attention to the regional war of independence.

We started looking at restaurants as soon as we entered the fortress and found one pretty quickly that had some decent vegetarian options that would keep us happy so even though it was expensive and fancy we just decided to eat there, even with the kids.  We sat outside on the pier so we could see the sea and get fresh air.  It was quite nice and our dinner of sea bass, Dominica and I both got the same thing, and calamari for Luciana and penne with vegetables for Liesl went over quite well.  We did not feel like we were out late at all but we had the absolute only kids at dinner and by the time that we left the full restaurant with hundreds of diners only had one table of two women left when we left ourselves.  Apparently we just closed down Dubrovnik, with our little kids, on our first night here.

We walked back up to the apartment, which was a very tiring walk (especially as I have done this a couple of times now) and got ourselves settled in to bed.  We were off to sleep sometime around midnight.