A land of absolute natural beauty
Montenegro has been in my head since 6 years ago a friend brought a bunch of delights from this country. The fabulous island of San Stefan, the huge mountains and the azure sea, I almost dreamed of. However, first I got acquainted with Croatia, I realized that the Adriatic is the love of a lifetime, and that's how it happened - I'm going to Montenegro.
The working mood disappeared immediately after the ticket was issued. The remaining three weeks before departure, I spent on the Internet, trying to learn as much as possible about the country and the cities that I was supposed to visit. Reading reviews has its pros and cons. Undoubtedly, it was positive that when I arrived in Budva for the first time, almost with my eyes closed I was able to find the right beach, market, supermarkets, bus stops and other important infrastructure elements for tourists. It is not very correct in reading reviews that you are influenced by other people's impressions and opinions, this greatly prevents you from discovering a new country and enjoying your own impressions. Therefore, having visited the restaurants, shops, beaches, sights recommended in the reviews, I often remained dissatisfied with their quality, and vice versa - having got into desecrated places, I found them very decent. I'm not going to name all sorts of good-bad places here, reviews of disco-restaurants can be easily found on the net and they are all more or less true. I will focus on my impressions of the country. In advance, we can say that the expectations from the trip were huge, and almost all of them were justified.
I chose Budva as a place of residence due to the presence of the Old Town, cultural events in the summer, close proximity to the Bay of Kotor, Dubrovnik and San Stefan - these places to visit interested me the most. General impression: Budva - the second Yalta - noisy, a lot of people for the most part Russian-speaking, sometimes dirty even on the beaches, in general, rest here is somewhat annoying (it doesn’t matter that there are only 4.5 thousand indigenous people in Budva, and 90 thousand in Yalta). ). Almost all tourists strive to visit Budva, in this they are also sisters with Yalta. In fact, this makes no sense, you can come here for an hour with a tour, see the city, and live somewhere in a quieter place. But still it cannot be said that I was dissatisfied with Budva. It is as beautiful here as on the entire Adriatic coast.
Local population, service and communication issues. Of course, I was aware of the slowness and regularity of the local population, but they understand the call to don’t worry, be happy more than literally and are trying to instill this view of the world in us - fussy tourists. The cashier in the markets does not care that 70% of the customers are non-Serbian-speaking tourists. The girl knocks out a check, sings through her teeth something like “prsht dvrzht sed” and understand it as you like (if you don’t see well, and the numbers are as inaccessible as the stars, then when paying, you have to rely solely on the intuition and honesty of this mamzel); a girl who fries pancakes on the street gives the impression of a person who did not come to work, the meaning of which is to sell more pancakes and serve customers faster, but a person who stands on the street and phlegmatically slaps the dough into the pan.
The sense of humor of the locals deserves special attention. If you ask a guide or a waiter a question, and in response you hear something incomprehensible, strange, suspicious - for sure, the interlocutor is joking. Well, it’s boring for them to answer for 4 months of the season that this fish is fried, not boiled, but the wine is still made from grapes, so they have fun as best they can. In addition, each waiter will readily confirm that he will be able to communicate in Russian or English, but when it comes to the communication process, you will understand that the interlocutor does not answer the question at all that you asked him, or simply answers without straining Serbian, and even worse, says that he understood, he accepted the order and brings a completely different dish than you ordered. An example of difficult communication in a wonderful restaurant of Mediterranean cuisine in San Stefan: I ordered fried squid, showed it in the menu in Russian, English, Italian, Serbian, brought - king prawn soup, delicious, of course, but I asked for squid... All the waiters are in collusion - they stubbornly did not want to understand what was required of them when they were asked to count the order for 2 accounts. In general, in ten days I ceased to be confident in my knowledge of at least some language already: no matter what you ask, they don’t understand, and if they understand and answer, the result is still the opposite. On the last day of the trip, I realized that the key to successful communication with local people is to communicate less verbally, do not strain yourself and do not strain people (it’s hard for them, they work), so as not to get an inadequate answer, it’s better to read the guide at home, but what you are interested - just show. As for the service in general, even the locals told us that they still have problems with this. Tourism is developing so fast that the service does not keep up with such a pace, and therefore lagged behind, rubbed its legs and is now lame. Spoiled by Turkeys and Egyptians, you need to roll up your lip on the gangway of the plane and enjoy the beauty of the country, it costs much more than the usual treatment of staff. The service is unobtrusive - and that's already good. The owners of our villa did not bother us with excessive courtesy and their presence, they cleaned regularly, changed towels, gave what you asked for - and that's good. Well, the bed was not understood even once in 10 days, well, well... Maybe I should have left money, but who knew. But the call of the guide to leave a tip to the bus driver turned out to be no joke at all. It is indeed accepted by them. Very strange.
I was very surprised by the organization of excursion services, even in comparison with the same Crimean, Bulgarian or Croatian. Groups are not formed on the basis of language. 1-3 buses of the same company with very international tourists can go on the route, this problem is easily solved by the guide (one for all 3 buses) - he will explain everything you need in the most necessary languages - Russian, Serbian, Italian, English, French, Germans, Poles and other exotics will have to accumulate their knowledge in all languages or just relax, which is what the Italians and French did on a panoramic tour of national parks - nature is so beautiful that explanations are superfluous, and a toilet can be found using any language. But still I want to put a credit to our Crimean guides - their excursions are mega-informative and super-informative, you can even learn what you don’t want. In July, half an hour on the road from Gurzuf to Alupka, I learned the full family tree of the Vorontsov counts, plus the history of the origin of each stone along the way (considering that I was in the Crimea for the eleventh time, the road to Alupka seemed very long this time). Compared to such work, Montenegrins simply relax on excursions themselves.
beauty. Having been in Montenegro, I understood where the plots for landscape puzzles come from - these are either the Alps or Montenegro. God rewarded this country with fantastically beautiful nature and ancient architecture, which is in perfect harmony with this nature. When you sail along the Bay of Kotor, you get the feeling that you are filming in some very beautiful and expensive film. Apparently, absolutely everyone has such a feeling, since even Yuri Luzhkov bought himself a piece of land on the slopes of the bay and built a rather big dacha not far from the villa of Catherine Zeta-Jones and the Schumacher brothers. The guide proudly points to both banks and says that the only naval base in the camp is located in the bay. The base is the remains of the Yugoslav military fleet - 1 rusty submarine and two of the same boats that Tito bought in the USSR in 1945. Um, compared to this squalor of the trough in Balaklava and Sevastopol, it’s just an invincible Armada. What to take from these guys, if there is no army in the country as such, there are police and a few contract soldiers. They simply do not need an army, with everyone they could, the hot mountain guys have already fought. By the way, there is a lot in this country in a single copy - one military base, one university, one sanatorium, one psychiatric hospital. I wonder if they have, for example, a zoo or a circus?
Cities and islands in the bay are worth a separate post. Huge regrets about the fact that it was not possible to climb the Kotor fortress. In general, a tour of the bay is definitely a must have. If I get to this country again, I will definitely ride around the bay again.
Two years ago, it was not possible to get to Dubrovnik, which I regretted more than once afterwards. And here is a ball opportunity - for only 35 euros, without a visa, 2.5 hours of travel and hello pearl of the Adriatic. From above and from the sea, the city is really beautiful, but in August it is simply suicidal pointless to go there with a group of tourists. I even regretted that I went, it was so unrealistically hot that it was out of the question to climb the fortress walls or sail on a boat around the city for 7 euros. I saved myself by moving from shop to shop, cooling off under air conditioners. As a result, I became numb from hundreds of thousands of the same type of souvenirs and became deaf from the screams of thousands of Italians (for some reason, in 3 hours I did not hear a single word in any other language). In Dubrovnik, I realized that my middle name was Chiara - some Italian mother followed me the whole street and called her daughter in such a way that I wanted to turn around and tell her in pure Russian: “Señ ora, I will be Chiara, just stop yelling at me in the ear. " In Dubrovnik, you need to learn one phrase in Italian “escuso, signora (signor)”, “excuse me, sorry, pardon, sorry” they don’t roll, you risk being misunderstood and trampled. However, not everything is so bad - I definitely liked the street of restaurants. It is located parallel to the main one, but you need to climb the stairs a little. The width of the street is no more than 3 meters, it is lined with beautifully set tables of different restaurants, you go along the street, you want one long restaurant and you can always turn up or down the stairs to the next street. There is a small confectionery shop on the main one - there is a place for those with a sweet tooth to roam, all sorts of goodies are sold here. In general, it’s better to go to Dubrovnik either on your own by car, or even better to go on vacation to Croatia right here or to neighboring Split, so that you can leisurely arrive early or late, when it’s not hot and there are fewer people. In general, I didn’t get from Dubrovnik what I was going for, I just ticked myself that I had been here, but no more. Will have to go again.
San Stefan or Sveti Stefan is a place that does not need long stories, you just have to be here, feel it, breathe this air. The island hotel itself is currently under renovation, but I suspect that even if I got there a few years ago, when cafes and shops were still working there, I might have been as disappointed with it as with Dubrovnik. From the inside, all the old Adriatic towns are similar to their twin streets. Without knowing, you can’t tell in the photo where Budva is, where Kotor is, where Dubrovnk, Pula or Ravin. But the mere contemplation of the unreal beauty and proximity of St. Stephen, its beaches and park was more than enough for me to feel happy right here and now. Unfortunately, I understand that even if I become very rich, it is unlikely that I will rent a villa on the island - for this it is not enough to be rich, you need to be a mega-star. Well, okay, but I swam on the same beaches that the kings and stars who lived here. They say that Vysotsky was very fond of this place and somewhere on the net there are videos where he reads his poems against the backdrop of San Stefan. Not that I am his passionate fan, but in this case I agree with him one hundred percent - such a place is conducive to love and poetry. Recently, a monument to Vladimir Semenovich was erected in Podgorica.
The canyons of the Tara and Morac rivers, the national parks Biograd and Durmitor give more than a complete picture of the beauties of inner Montenegro. Serpentines and sheer cliffs explain why the country's population is equal to half the population of a regional city with a million inhabitants in Ukraine. It is hard to imagine that the whole country is only half of Dnipropetrovsk in terms of population and less than Dnipropetrovsk region in terms of area. Montenegrins joke that if all the mountains are smoothed out, the area of the country will exceed the area of the whole of Europe. Contemplating impregnable peaks, you understand that somewhere it is the way it is. By the way, in these mountains, a fleeting deja vu did not disappoint - the local nature clearly served as the backdrop for the wonderful Soviet film "Captain Grant's Children". Throwing my head back, I remembered that Patagonia and the episode with the condor were filmed somewhere in these places. And a big respect to the builders of roads and tunnels. Yugoslav bridge and road builders were once invited to the USSR to improve our road spaces. If only it would help us.
I have never been to my native Ukrainian Carpathians, so the beauty of mountain forests and lakes can only be compared with the Tatras and Alps. They say that Black Lake is very similar to the Carpathian Synevyr. I haven’t been, I haven’t seen it, but the beauty and purity are incredible. But then again, the minus of all excursion programs is that you go to such places all day, and they give you time for a walk for half an hour, an hour, but it's not worth it. Here you need to spend two or three days to slowly travel around the forest on a bike, climb some mountain, eat food from local shepherds, take pictures of the forest and lakes at different times of the day, just breathe in the cleanest air and be in silence. Definitely, continental Montenegro must become as developed a resort as the coast. The only disadvantage of such a trip is that you are on the bus from 6 am to 11 pm, and they give very little time to explore the beauties.
I really liked the excursion called "fish picnic". We didn’t catch fish, but we spent the whole day at sea on a speedboat, sunbathing wherever we could, swimming several times in the open sea, jumping up to our heels from the side, looking at the coast from the sea, sailing around San Stefan, walking around the island of St. Nikolas, lying for two hours on an empty beach somewhere near Petrovac, effectively weaved between two rocks at a distance of only a couple of meters. The company was small - only 20 people and all Russian speakers plus the brave captain Peter (the girl from the agency advertised him as similar to Kevin Costner, she was mistaken - Kevin is far from him in all respects) and a couple of his assistants. The captain met us very effectively on his ship - at 9 in the morning he opened a bottle of rum and generously poured everyone a glass mixed with cola. Our ladies were blown away, and the Russian guys refused cola and slammed a glass of pure rum. I think Peter was smitten too. In the price of the trip, they also prepared an excellent lunch for us right on the on-board brazier - fish, steaks, sausages, vegetables, bread. After half a day of swimming and diving, it was great. The captain turned out to be a cheerful guy - he spent almost the whole day with us on deck, answering all questions, telling stories, flirting with Moscow blondes and generously pouring wine for everyone (also included in the price of the trip) until the evening. Our captain rolled us out so that at 5 pm everyone got on the benches and said - take us back, although according to the plan we had another hour and a half of time. During this walk, I finally relaxed, calmed down, forgot about everything and enjoyed the sea, salt spray, speed, sun, and wine to the fullest. In short, for my 40 euros I got a whole day of absolute happiness. On the shore all evening I was swaying like a real sailor. I don’t know about other firms, but Monteline honestly earned his money and even more.
Our people are ours everywhere. Just before leaving, I watched the vital and uncomplicated film “On the Sea” (dir. Ya. Chevazhevsky). Having spent a vacation in a popular resort, you understand that the script for this movie was not written in pain, but simply and easily on some beach or in a hotel. Only our people can take 14 bottles of vodka with them from Russia, send their ladies to the beach, lock themselves up in a villa for 3 days, and then go to the beach and say for representatives of all Europe to hear: “Listen, Seryoga, why are we not so did you take some vodka? ”, and after that take an umbrella for 3 euros, stick it closed in the sand and leave the beach until the evening to catch up with alcohol in the bars. Only our people can get off the bus on the ferry and take a puff of cigarettes under the “no smoking” signs on the bus together. Only our Vasya from Moscow can calmly read the book "Thief in Law" while the views of the most beautiful bay in the world flicker outside the window, and his wife is having a literary dispute about Dostoevsky's work with the boy guide Milos. Only our people can get up at 7 in the morning, pack half of their luggage on the beach, wake up all 5 villas in the area with shouts asking from the height of the 4th floor whether a certain Sergey Anatolyevich took a knife or not, but he did take a corkscrew. Only our women can torture the same Milos in Dubrovnik, take a swimsuit for them or leave it on the bus. Poor Milos, after talking about Russian literature, did not find an answer to this strange question. An uncle with the appearance of a lieutenant colonel, upon returning to Budva, began to loudly command the same poor student Milos - they say, is it possible to drive even closer to the Old Town (although it was no longer possible to get closer). But not only our people know how to surprise. Three marvelous Italian youths got out on an excursion to Dubrovnik and instead of a passport or identity card they took the rights to a scooter. The border guards were so disappointed with the impressiveness of the EU citizens that they sent them back to Budva for passports. Probably, the guys did not consider Croatia abroad at all.
In general, I want to take a break from our habits, but, unfortunately, in Montenegro this is definitely impossible for the reason that a third of the tourists are Russian speakers, and a third of all commercial real estate on the coast is bought up by Russians. I understand that very soon Montenegro will become the second Spain and Bulgaria for our people. And I would love to join them.
A few practical tips at the end. If you don’t go on excursions, come with your own umbrella and a supply of food for breakfast, eat in self-service, then it’s quite possible to live in Budva for 100 euros for 7-10 days. It is possible, but not necessary, so take the money as much as you like. What else to take? Definitely, a good camera, sun cream, panama hat and slippers from hedgehogs, diving goggles (the water is so salty that even a drop gets into the eye, a terrible burning sensation begins). Little things, of course, everything can be bought on the spot, but it’s better to come fully armed and not run around the stalls under the scorching sun. If you live in a villa without food and a kitchenette, feel free to take a kettle and a thermos. The boiler, a friend of the Soviet business traveler, helped out a lot, since there was no kettle on the horizon, and tea and coffee in the morning and evening on the balcony overlooking the mountains-sea, with fresh cheese, fruits, sausages, goes very well. A thermos is useful for you on excursions with early departures, when you want to sleep and have coffee. Of course the bus stops for breakfast type for half an hour for morning coffee. But it’s not at all a fact that you will reach the queue in a cafe, since caravans of tourists stop in such places, and there are at most 2 waiters at all. In this way, I overslept half the country, overslept the capital and woke up only in Biogradsky Park. I trotted to look for a restaurant and coffee, while our group admired the wonderful lake in the allotted half an hour of free time, otherwise I would have slept the rest of the way. For weak organisms, it’s good to grab pills for motion sickness, since boat trips and riding on serpentines will test the vestibular apparatus for strength to the fullest. It is also a good idea to always have pancreatin, festal or mezim tablets with you - an abundance of local tasty food and ordinary greed cause indigestion. What not to take - high expectations, claims, whims, bad mood, warm clothes and extra clothes in general (the most used of clothes turned out to be - 2 swimsuits, 2 panama hats, pareos, beach slippers, shorts, a T-shirt and a couple of promenade ensembles, well, you still need travel suit, you can’t get on a plane in a swimsuit ). It's all completely redundant, and you still can't change anything. You should not take a laptop and other other work, the atmosphere is conducive only to relaxation. You can work at home, watch movies and play games on long cold evenings.
Bottom line - Montenegro is quite worthy of coming here again, at least in order to go to Kotor again, swim in the bay, and perhaps even get to Albania. All this will be, but not next time. Now you need to visit a country with a famous service (at least for comparison).
