Montenegro Simple
Carlow Nationalist June 2010
There's something about the tiny Adriatic country of Montenegro that I can't quite put my finger on. With its border less than an hour's drive from Croatia's Dubrovnik airport it should, I thought, have felt somehow more... more European. But Montenegro has its own unique flavour, as if its location on the crossroads of ancient trade and commerce has instilled upon it a sense of the cosmopolitan while still retaining a relaxed (very relaxed) Mediterranean manner of doing things.
The bus conductor had maybe five teeth at the most, but that was no reason not to smile. "Irske," he shouted along the bus, his face creased with the lines of one who is used to laughter. He held my harp-emblazoned passport in the air, "Irske" he said once more. I held my hand aloft. With great difficulty he man-handled his way along the weaving bus towards me. He was a big man with a swarthy complexion and a nest of black hair, in his fifties, but still beneath a loose blue shirt he retained the physical shape of a once powerful youth. Handing me my documents he smiled again revealing in his mouth a landscape like a pagan burial ground. "Liam Brady" he said and kicked an invisible football. "Liam Brady, Jackie Charlton," his smile broadened further. "Welcome to Montenegro." He slapped my shoulder. "Canada" he called next. A young girl, contorted in sleep across her seat like the dormouse at Alice's tea party, woke briefly to accept her documents. "Canada sleep too much," he said and laughed loudly.
Back in Croatia a bus conductor would never have made such a joke I think. Back there they are far more serious, far less amenable to sudden bouts of laughter once they don the necktie of officialdom and carry on their business in the face of the much-coveted tourist. Here, on the other side of the border, beneath the shadow of the black mountains which give the country their name, things appeared formal and much more spontaneous.
I had never before visited this small country, whose population numbers barely over six-hundred-thousand, and as we rounded another hair-pin bend which offered me my first glimpse of Kotor Bay I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why.
Kotor Bay lies like a sleeping pet at the foot of the soaring, grey mountains which dominate this country. Its shores are neck-laced by tiny, idyllic, waterside villages where pleasure craft rock gently on the surface of the flat, azure waters. At first view I thought somehow I had been magically transported to a Norwegian fjord, but the sun which burned with thirty degrees of early-summer heat told me otherwise. Although I'm sure that it's possible on rare summer days no Norwegian fjord I had ever seen reflected a sky of such intense blueness. No villages wore the colours of gently weathering stone in tones of soft yellow and brown. No roofs of red tile contrasted so brilliantly against their backdrop of sky and mountain. This was most definitely not Norway.
At a fifteen minute bus stop in the town of Risan, where the bus driver and conductor played a hand of cards with the locals and lazily waited for their espressos to arrive a young Russian couple disembarked and set about finding a taxi to take them to their hotel. I watched as they waved to a parked taxi. The taxi driver waved back but that was it. The young man waved again and once again the driver waved back. It was clear that they would have to make their way across the busy highway to where he sat contemplating the meaning of life. This would never have happened back there I thought.
Later, as we arrived at the bus station in the seaside town of Budva, I asked the conductor for directions to the Old Town, Stari Grad. He pointed and made some vague hand movements. When he saw I hadn't understood his efforts and as the bus came to a hissing, grinding halt, he pointed to the stations small bar. "Cold beer," he said, "...speak English." Again he patted my shoulder and laughed, I must have looked like I needed a cold beer, but then again don't I always.
Budva, I was to discover over the next two days, is a shrine to Summer. Along its miles of pebbly beach, where bars and restaurants respectfully vie for business, the Montenegrins pay homage to the blazing sun. Playing beach games, sitting under shady umbrellas or transporting their tanned athletic bodies into the waters for a moment of welcome coolness before returning to the family and friends left behind sharing food, conversation and large doses of laughter.
In the evenings as the sun begins to set and the walls of the old town take on a hue of golden light, the streets, which had been devoid of life during the day, come once again to life. Families stroll the 'corza' from restaurant to cafe to bar, an obligatory ice cream in one hand, the hand of a child in the other. Old friends greet each other with a kiss before sitting for a while to share a coffee and catch up on life. Later still as the night falls and music swings, croons and bellows from the clubs the atmosphere remains relaxed and jovial. I asked Colm Mitchell, the owner of the Irish bar Chest O'Shea's, why there were no 'lager louts', no outward signs of drunkenness? he answered simply. "It wouldn't be tolerated. In Montenegro family is central to everything and children are central to the family and nobody wants their children to witness such behaviour. Simple!"
Simple, that's the word I think I was looking for. I'm happy I finally visited Montenegro, but it still has an atmosphere I can't quite put my finger on. Looks like I'll have to go back again to find out just what it is.
AER LINGUS fly direct from Dublin to Dubrovnik www.aerlingus.com
Bus connections run from Dubrovnik Bus Station to Montenegro.