Montenegro

I got sick when we got to Montenegro.  We arrived late afternoon into Budva, so Sara walked us down to the beach and restaurant area, then took those who wanted to go over to the old town.  We had dinner and I believe that Kat may have gone for a swim, and then we went back to the hotel.

The next day we had an included excursion to Kotor.  The plan was to be ready early, so I got up with everyone else and went for breakfast, but by the time I ate half my meal I'd decided I was going back to bed.  Which was a shame, Kotor is meant to be beautiful.  So that was what happened.  I went and got back into my bed and nursed my horrible cold and even worse mood, and everyone else went on the local bus to Kotor and climbed 1300 stairs up to look out over the town.  It was pretty smoggy, so I was less concerned about missing out than I normally would have been.  I believe it was still a lovely view.

I did intend to take photos in Budva, but apparently I never did.  Hmm.  It was a very gross cold, one of those ones that make you cough like crazy before anything will move, even though your chest rattles with every breath.  Thank god it passed quickly, I came completely right again in five days.

Kylie and Kat came and collected me when they got back from Kotor at about 2pm.  They'd been for a walk over to the old town in Budva as well, which they said was better than most, and they'd tried to bring back some of their calamari for me but it had gone a bit manky in the meantime and been thrown out.  I didn't mind, it was such a nice thought.  And Kat had bought me some stamps when she got hers.  I felt very well cared for.  We went to the beach for the rest of the afternoon and dinner, but I didn't even go swimming because by the time we walked down there I had to have a sleep. 

The setup at Budva was quite cool.  You have beach, then promenade running parallel, then restaurants, then another bigger promenade with a whole lot of souvenir and food stalls.  We had quite a shop there, things were cheap.  I got a watch (the battery on mine went flat, I'll get it fixed when I get to Canada), a bracelet, and presents for Kim's and Sarah's birthdays.  Which are still in my bag.  Must post.

The following day we crowded back into our minivan.  Part of the problem was that we had four people who were six foot or over, and not enough "tall" seats to go around.  Some of the shortest people made a habit of getting on the bus first and taking all the single seats, where you could at least stick your legs in the aisle, which meant that those of us who were tall had to sit in seats that we literally didn't fit into.  Coming off one of those rides with bruises on your knees wasn't unheard of.  But we made it to Ostrog Monastery without too many bruises.

It was one of the places that I'd particularly wanted to see on this tour.  The upper monastery was built into the rock right up the top of a mountain, hundreds of years ago.  Even when we went up there by road, it seemed so inaccessable, and we couldn't figure out how they would have done it or where they would have found the resources.  The lower monastery is I think a bit newer, but still a very pretty church.

The lower monastery on the left; and the upper monastery.

We took the minibus to the upper monastery, wandered round there for 45minutes, took the minibus to the lower monastery, wandered round there, took the minibus back to the hotel, and spent the rest of the day lying around, which was good by me.  I was still sick and grumpy so sleeping and reading and lying around our cabin were about what I needed.

So really, the extent of our activites in Montenegro was sleeping, eating, and lying around.  Sweeeeeeeet times.

The water pipes coming down the side of the mountains, near Ostrog Monastery.

Albania

I know there were people in our group that disliked Albania quite intensely, but I was the total opposite – I loved it. From the moment we came across the border it was weird and fascinating and completely unlike anywhere else that we’d been.

We had a minibus to travel to Tirana from Lake Orhid. To those of you under five foot six this will sound like an excellent turn of events; those who are over (or who were there) will understand my pain.  I don't do grinning and bearing things very well.  I do do passive-agressive very well.  I feel that it's important to know and recognise my strengths.

Border crossings on this trip have been incredibly painless, in comparison to the Middle East, and this one was just the same.  It was amazing how completely different the landscape was, as soon as we entered the country.  I was vaguely aware we were high up when we were at Lake Orhid, and we only drove around the corner to get to the border (well, it was an hour or less).  When we crossed the border, we drove along the flat for a few minutes, then turned another corner and found ourselves at the top of what looked like a cliff.  We spent ages going up and down mountains, around these hairy corners and with really sheer drops off to the side.  I should also mention that Albanians are bloody terrible drivers.  They drive where they want, when they want, and I have no idea whether they even have many road rules, but if they do, people just ignore them anyway.  They even had a police officer directing traffic at a set of working traffic lights.  It was absolutely hair-raising.  Also, the landscape was very dry and yellow, where almost everywhere else we'd been had looked quite lush and green, even Sarajevo which was desperate for rain.  And the final, most wierd thing of all - they have these little bunkers absolutely everywhere, which were built by a past leader who was totally terrified of... something.  Nobody's quite sure what.  Invasion?  War?  These bunkers hold four people each, and enough were built to house the entire population of Albania at the time.  We heard a few very different estimates  of how many there are - anywhere between 60,000 and 700,000 could be right as far as I know.  They're made of solid concrete, and are half underground, and they're round with straight walls and dome roofs, so they look a bit like mushrooms.  And they are EVERYWHERE.  I saw them all through fields in the country, in people's yards, even on fence lines, with fences built over the top of them, and in the middle of the city, just randomly by the roadside.  They're apparently so solid that they're almost impossible to remove.  The story goes that the chief engineer was made to stand inside one while it was subjected to a full tank attack, so that they could make sure they would stand up to anything.  It did.

So weird.

We somehow made it to our hotel in Albania.  The driving really is pretty catastrophic.  It was pretty bad up around Russia and that area as well, but not as congested and uncontrolled in the cities.  Getting across any intersection, whether you're in a car or a pedestrian, is taking your life in your hands.  Part of that is probably to do with no Albanian being allowed to own a car until 20 years ago, when the communist government collapsed and the borders were opened.  There were only 400 cars in the country until then, and they were only for use by government officials.  So the roads they have were definitely not built to deal with the amount of traffic that they are dealing with, and there are traffic jams in every direction at any and all times of the day.

I quite liked the hotel we stayed in.  It was old and big and cool.  Our room had beds in two seperate rooms, with a door between, and a bathroom.  It was quite nice to not go sleep facing someone across the room.  They also still have problems with their electricity supply, and the power cut out twice before 1030pm that night.  Only for a few seconds each time, but it was also only the hotel that lost power, the street lights and all the buildings around us still had power.

We didn't do an awful lot in Tirana either.  There definitely weren't many tourists there, by the looks we were getting from the locals.  They weren't hostile, just curious.  We obviously stuck out for whatever reason.  The English there was still relatively good, everybody managed to make themselves understood.  The city was very hot and dirty and so smoggy.  That was a real shame in Macedonia too, it was quite smoggy, even at the lake.  Tirana was full of ongoing construction work too, like Scopje. 

Sara isn't allowed to guide in a lot of these places, so we all walked into town together and she pointed us in the direction of the sights, and then we took off by ourselves pretty quick.  Kylie, Kat and I left the group behind after the first mosque, which we walked past and said oh that's interesting, and the rest of the group then spent close to fifteen minutes inside of.  I lost patience pretty quick there.

There were only one or two things to see, so we walked down the main street and saw them.  The first was a big triangular building, which had originally been intended as I think a museum, but it didn't really work, so it is being used as something else but I've unfortunately forgotten what.

The only other thing we felt particularly inspired to go and see was the Mother Theresa roundabout, which, as we discovered, is literally a roundabout.  One of the buildings around it may have contained more information, but we didn't discover it.  I didn't even bother to take a photo, I'm sure most people have seen a roundabout before.

However, Tirana does have some very pretty parts, around the centre of the city.  These seem to mainly be the parts that were closed to the citizens for years, and only used by the government officials.  It's over an area of maybe nine blocks, and it's now the main restaurant area.

We went for a drink at the Sky Bar, a rotating bar at the top of one of the hotels.  It moves pretty slowly, it goes around only about once every hour.  There were nice views from up there though.

The town is completely surrounded by mountains, and it's hard to get a feel for how high the mountains are from a photo.  The city is almost completely flat, but it's growing up the hills.  You feel like the rest of the world might not exist outside of those mountains...  which probably wasn't a good feeling for the people who lived there twenty years ago.

We only stayed one night in Albania.  On the way to the border the next day (back in our squishy, legs-in-the-aisle style minibus) we stopped at Kruje, a town that's built almost vertically up the side of the mountain.  It's also very pretty, as most of these places are, and again the roading and driving were terrible.  In Kruje, we visited the local ethnographic museum, which was in a 250yr old Turkish house, and was actually pretty interesting.  It still had a lot of original decor, furnishings, machinery, and tools, and you get a guide included in the ticket price, who was very good.

Then we wandered through the souvenir shop-filled alleyways, back to the bus.  There was another museum, which was about the local hero, but according to the people who went, we didn't miss much by not going.

When we stopped at the border, there was a bunker that we could go and visit, which I think was probably the highlight of our time in Albania for a few people!!

Me in the bunker!  You just can't really see me...

Macedonia

We only had one afternoon in Skopje, but I thought that was long enough. It’s very cute and pretty, but there is a hell of a lot of construction work going on. They seem particularly keen on building things that look like they’ve always been there – lots of classical architecture. To their credit, even the construction is beautifully lit at night.

Also, they’re building random statues like there’s no tomorrow. In some places there are two or three within a few metres of each other. In the main square there’s a great big fountain, which is beautiful, and which we all assumed had been there for ages. But actually it was brand new, it’d only been there a month or so, and it’d only started playing three days before we got there. We were kind of wondering why so many people were so interested in it, when there didn’t appear to be too many tourists. They even had recorded music to go with the fountain, the kind of thing you’d play at concert band. The funniest thing about it was that the music played for about two minutes and then cut out. The first time I heard it I thought something had gone wrong with the speakers. But no, that’s just what happens. Then the fountain plays the rest of its circuit to the sound of silence, and when it gets back to the start the music starts again. You’d want to get yourself committed to the psychiatric ward if you worked anywhere near that fountain. The music played every seven minutes, exactly the same music every time. We sat and had a drink and people watched for half an hour or so, and by then we knew the tune.

There are very few tourist attractions in Skopje. We walked down the main pedestrianized street, past Mother Theresa’s picture (the Macedonians claim she was born in Skopje, the Albanians claim she was born in Tirana), to the museum. The museum has a clock on it that stopped when the museum was bombed. And that was about it for tourist attractions. It did fill in a good fifteen minutes though.

Skopje was the first town with a Turkish area, which had heaps and heaps of Turkish cafes. We went across the river to there and had dinner, then walked back and took lots of night photos of the new fountain and the surrounding square and buildings.

The pretty fountain.

And my favourite, the spewing lions.

Next we had a day and a half at Lake Orhid.  That was fantastic.  We were all worn out from being on the go all the time, and we all really enjoyed having somewhere beautiful to blob out and look at the water and swim.  When we arrived, Marsha was in her togs and in the water before most of us had even put our bags down.  The lake was really big, maybe about the same as Lake Taupo for all my NZ friends, and surrounded by mountains.  I liked that a third of the lake was in Albania.  And it was really calm and we had beautiful hot sunny weather.  A few people got pretty sunburnt, namely Cameron who managed to roast his belly pretty good.  There was also a nice little town but it was really very touristy.  We spent most of our time at the beach, being shown off to by a group of Macedonian guys.

And that was about it in Macedonia.

Bulgaria

We had another five hours on a train from Nis to Sofia. Apparently a lot of people try to get stuff across the border on the trains, like cigarettes and drugs. We had quite a long stop at the border, while customs officers searched all the nooks and crannies, up in the roof and all that. They did find someone who was trying to get cigarettes across, from what I heard from other people on our tour who were at the other end of the carriage. She had them all strapped around her waist.

Bulgaria is randomly one hour different to the rest of the area, we had to change our watches going into and leaving the country. It must be because it goes so much further east than the other countries we’re visiting on this leg of the tour.

We arrived in Sofia reasonably late that evening, so we went straight out for dinner. The closest of the places Sara recommended was called Happy Bar and Grill, and almost our entire group ended up there at various times that evening. It was a good meal, and cheap. I love Eastern Europe. Kat and I had dinner with Gloria and Sara and Kylie and Christopher, and Marsha and Cameron went straight to the bar. When we’d almost finished our meal (and we’d all had at least one drink each) Marsha and Cam sent shots of vodka to our table. So we drank those, and by the time I’d finished dessert I knew it was time I went home. Chris decided to come home too; everyone else was sitting at the bar with Marsha and Cam. Thank God I went home… I think Gloria and Kylie came home quite soon after we did, but the other four ended up having quite the night out. I believe Kat came home at 3am, and when she woke up in the morning it took an hour to locate her cellphone, which Cameron found in his pocket when he eventually woke up.

I liked our hotel in Sofia too – they brought breakfast to our rooms. We got warm croissants with jam and butter, coffee, and juice. I put chocolate in my croissant instead of jam and butter, and Kat gave me her coffee since she doesn’t drink it. Good times.  The hotel was also on a road with a food hall diagonally opposite us and shoe stores in both directions. Even better times.

Sofia is very beautiful and affluent looking, with lots of well-maintained huge square government buildings and wide roads. On our city walk the next morning, we looked at all the churches, saw the dinosaur skeleton at the natural history museum, and went to the markets. Which also describes our afternoon quite well.

And now for a pictorial interlude:

Origami cranes hanging in all the trees.

We met our new tour-mate in Sofia, her name is Loreta and she’s from the UK and does cancer research. She came market hopping with us in the afternoon. At the market just down the road from our hotel, we found raspberries for NZ $1.50 per kilo. And they were so good, they were perfectly ripe and not rotten underneath or anything.
We went for a drink before we went back to the hotel, at Happy’s again, which is across the road from a nice church. That church was turning around weddings quicker than Las Vegas, it was amazing. They literally queued up at one door, bride and groom and congregation all at once, went in, and five minutes later they came out another door and the next bridal party went in the first one. Then they’d have about four minutes to take photos on the stairs if they wanted them. You’d want to be pretty set on getting married in that church, they would’ve only had time for “I do”, “I do too” and “sign here please”.

Chris, Kylie, Gloria, Kat and I decided to go to a Bulgarian restaurant for dinner that night. Sara marked on a map where we needed to go, and Canadian Chris took charge of leading the rest of us to the restaurant. He got us most of the way there before we found ourselves on a corner with no restaurant in sight and no idea which way to go. In fairness, he got us to the corner Sara had marked, but she was a block away from where the restaurant actually was. We asked in a shop and they knew the place and sent us in the right direction.  While we were walking, we went past a rather nice looking young Bulgarian man.  We do occasionally fall into the trap of thinking people won't understand us when we talk in English, so Gloria said "ooh cute" as she walked in front of this young guy.  And he said "nice huh?".  Unexpected.

All the food around here is based on meat, lots and lots of meat. Lucky thing Kylie and Kat are here to help remember what we ate; I had a chicken breast. Not that exciting. It was pretty tasty though. They had a live band playing, with a drum, a guitar, and a piano accordion. They were very good, the accordion player in particular. I noticed that he was exempt from singing. They came over to our table and played an English song for us. The other funny thing in that restaurant was the toothbrush dispenser in the loo. You put your coin into the machine and you got a travel toothbrush out. Kat made me go and buy her one, but I was too embarrassed to do it while there was a queue and other people watching me. Luckily nobody was behind me in the queue so when I came out of the bathroom I had the perfect opportunity to sneakily buy a toothbrush.

There was no big night out that night, surprisingly. We were all home in bed by about 9pm!

Serbia - Belgrade and Nis

There are two things that will always remind me of the Serbian countryside. One is huge plains with fields and fields of sunflowers which have bloomed and dried up, so there are all these drooping heads crammed into each field. The other is the total opposite – gorges with sheer grey stone cliffs. The sunflowers were the north and the gorges were the south, and both were really beautiful.

Belgrade was pretty chilled. We’d been told by someone in Novy Sad that Belgrade wasn’t as nice as Novy Sad because it was much busier and had lots more people. Which was partly true, it was certainly busier and had more people. However, I quite liked it.

It’s much hillier than anywhere else we’ve been so far. It wasn’t actually very far from the train station to our hotel, but we got taxis because it was so hilly and the roads are so busy. There are also a lot more stray dogs than what I’m used to. There was one in particular that latched onto us at the railway station. It was a reasonably big dog. There was one taxi leaving, and Cameron was in the front seat talking out the window to this dog (hello doggy! Who’s a good boy?!), and I believe the dog was trying to get in his window. It was up on its hind legs with its front legs on the windowsill, even as the taxi drove off. When its back legs couldn’t keep up it dropped down and started running along behind the car. We completely expected to see the dog at the hotel when we got there, but evidently they lost it in the traffic.

The driving in this part of the world is… interesting. They don’t seem to be that fussed on road rules, not like we are in NZ where there’s a clear rule for every situation. They also don’t appear to be very patient. We were behind an old car that I think had stalled trying to do a hill start on this huge angle, and everybody was tooting and gesticulating out the windows and yelling and cutting around them, across whatever lane they feel like.

However, we made it to the hotel with all our limbs and baggage and without the dog.

That evening all we did was go into town and have dinner. Again, there’s a great big pedestrian mall in the centre of town, with pavement cafes all along it. I had dinner at one of them with Kat and Cameron and Marsha. Dinner was very relaxed, and Kat definitely won the competition for picking the best thing on the menu, although I don’t remember what she had, I just remember all of us being jealous of it. I think all we did after that was wander back along the pedestrian mall to the hotel.

The next morning, we went to the fortress (hmm, sounds familiar). We had a wander around the grounds which are quite large and park-like and have nice views over town, and through the military museum. Kat and I walked in one door, straight through and out the other; we’d had enough war stuff in the previous few countries. Some of the others on the tour thought it was very good though. They had a huge collection of weapons, including a bomb that was taller than me (and I’m no shorty).

  

I don’t think we did much for the afternoon. Sara took us on a city walk, and showed us the important churches and the site of the old public library which had been bombed and then fenced off without any rebuilding.

I went off with Kat to see a huge church that they’re in the middle of building, which is beautiful. The bits they have done are all draped in sheets so they don’t get damaged, which I had a great time taking photos of.

  

I believe that we then wandered over to have a look at the local market, which went for miles and sold everything you could ask for. We found a lovely man selling fruit who gave us a free plum each even though we hadn’t bought anything. We’d seen these plums around the place before then but hadn’t tried them. Their skin looks blue, but when we bit into them they had really yellow, sugary tasting flesh. So Kat went back to buy some and tried to give him the equivalent of about 50c, and he gave her two or three times the amount she wanted.

Then we went and found a coffee shop and enjoyed the air con and free wifi for a bit. After that I think all we did was go to the hotel for a nap, then meet Cameron and Marsha for dinner. We went to a tavern called “?”, which is reportedly the oldest tavern in the city. I ordered a hamburger. Hamburger over here doesn’t mean the same as hamburger at home. What I got was basically a huge meat patty on a plate. When we finished dinner we went back to the pedestrian mall and people watched and discussed the cows. The cows are everywhere through Belgrade, I think they must be some kind of art installation. I feel like I’ve seen them somewhere else previously.

We had 24hrs in Nis (it usually has an upside down hat over the s and is pronounced “nish”, to rhyme with fish). It took five hours on a train to get there from Belgrade. To be honest, I didn’t think it was a particularly worthwhile stop, I would’ve preferred to spend ten straight hours on the train and have the extra day somewhere else. However, I still enjoyed it. Kat and I spent lots of time with Kylie, and here is what we did:

1. Eat
2. Drink
3. Sleep
4. Repeat

It was pretty awesome. They also have a fortress and a big pedestrian mall through the centre of town. The main restaurant street is called Tinker’s Alley, and it’s also a pedestrian mall. We went there for lunch and dinner and drinking. There was also a concentration camp, and a monument decorated with human skulls. I did not go to either of them. I did walk into the fortress to find a Serbia postcard to send to Nana, but there wasn’t a lot to see. It’s basically a local park with stone walls now.

What was cool was that we were on the 14th floor of the hotel. I don’t think Kat’s forgiven me yet though. We were given a room with a double bed and a couch on the 8th floor, and the room was really nice and had a separate lounge room and a nice bathroom, but I didn’t see the two of us sharing the double bed or either of us wanting the couch, so I went and spoke to Sara who organised with the reception desk for us (and the other three pairs who’d had the same thing happen) to change to twin rooms. The twin rooms were pretty crap, which I think was the problem Kat had. And I do agree, it was pretty bullshit that the doubles were so nice and big and comfortable and the rooms they swapped us to were small and had hard beds and crap bathrooms, even though the mix-up was the hotel’s fault. I didn’t try lying on the couch but Sara said she sat down on the one in her room and it sank almost to the floor, so it would’ve been a very uncomfortable night.

So anyway, I loved our room on the top floor because the hotel was by far the highest building in town, and we could see for miles. Also there must’ve been an air force base somewhere nearby, because there were jets going around and around over the town all afternoon and into the evening. They’d fly for an hour or so, land, then go up again, two at a time. I think they were student pilots. When they came in to land they flew right over the top of our hotel. It was awesome.

Overall I really enjoyed Serbia.  It's definitely one of those places I never expected to find myself!