Montenegro

After enduring the 6 hour bus ride from Split to Dubrovnik and then the 3.5 hours or so the next day, I arrived in Budva, in Montenegro. Montenegro is a country of only around 650,000 people, 15,000 or so of whom live in Budva. The number of tourists vastly exceeds this and all the beaches are privately owned and absolutely rammed full at this time of year. Here's a section of beach to give you the idea:


Here's a shot of Budva's old town, with a beach on the left and the surrounding mountains in the background:


The hostel here, Hippo Hostel, is the only hostel in Montenegro and is really cool. Being off the beaten track a bit, it attracts a more interesting breed of traveler. Also, it has a convenience store across the road which is open 24/7 and sells cold beer. Perfect. I've spent 6 nights here in total and could easily spend longer, it's great fun even though the town itself isn't that brilliant.

Among the things I did during my first four-night stay here was go on a paddleboat expedition around Sveti Nicola, the island a kilometer or two offshore from Budva. The expedition was led by Dave, who together with his partner Nadja owns and runs Hippo. Here's a shot of our group taking quick refuge from the sun in a cave:


I also went on a daytrip excursion in which myself and 3 others were driven around by an English expat called Marcus. Among the places we visited were the immense Lake Skadar, a creepy and bat-infested old Austro-Hungarian barracks, a farm where we purchased and ate some local cheese, prosciutto and wine, and a village in the bottom of a valley, with no roads in or out, with a population of 4. And some goats. We bought a kilo of goat's cheese from them for 5 euro. At one point in the trip we also got a nice view of Kotor Bay:


I had received word the day I arrived in Montenegro that my planned three day rafting trip was cancelled. After some deliberating about whether I would be able to make it to Bosnia, which everyone I've talked to has been enthusiastic about, I decided it would not be possible and I would just have a couple of days in the north of Montenegro and the rest at Hippo Hostel. On Saturday the 16th I headed north to Zabljak (JAH-bluck, with a soft, French-style "j"), a small town located just near Durmitor National Park and the Tara Canyon. I had to go via the capital Podgorica, which would have to be one of the ugliest cities I have ever seen. I had the fortune to have made friends with Christina, a Canadian girl who headed up to Zabljak a day earlier and booked rafting and a shared room for us. Here she is with Zabljak in the background:


That night we headed out for a meal and ran into a Finnish couple who had been staying at Hippo. We all went out to a local bar, which was mostly full of Serbians. Montenegro is about the only country in the region which doesn't have a mutual animosity with Serbia. They were a loyal member of the former Yugoslavia, which eventually devolved into "Serbia and Montenegro", from which Montenegro became independent following a 55% vote in 2007. Montenegrins voted for independence not out of dislike for Serbia, but because they wanted to fast-track membership of the EU, towards which Serbia has a much more equivocal stance. Later in the night we were accosted by a good-humoured and extremely drunk Serbian man, who tried to impress on us that Serbia was not as imperialist and bloodthirsty as it might appear on CNN. "We HATE Albanians", he explained, "but a month ago I go on holiday to Albania. I do not kill them, they do not kill me. Great success!". I'm paraphrasing but that was the gist of his argument.

The next day Christina and I got up to go rafting on the Tara river.


I was well aware that there'd be no adrenalin thrill ride available. In fact, I was so sure that I wouldn't even get wet that I had my camera clipped to my lifejacket. What I was there for was sightseeing:




The country was nice enough, but I was expecting a canyon and what I got was essentially a valley. It was definitely not unmissable or anything like that and I think Slovenia has much more beautiful places to visit. It was nice enough though and the area surrounding Zabljak was pretty and had a tranquil feel. That night Christina and I climbed a small local hill to watch the sun set.



The next day I parted ways with Christina and headed back to Budva, where I spent last night. I have tonight here as well and plan to actually get out to a bar or club, which I haven't managed to do at all despite 5 nights here, generally because spending all day in the sun is exhausting. Strange as it might sound to you guys back home struggling through winter, I've had enough sun. Other things I have had about enough of include non-English speaking countries and crap, unhealthy food. I'm still having a great time at this hostel, but I'm also looking forward to getting in to Edinburgh tomorrow night.

Hrvartska

Which is the Croatian word for "Croatia". The country became independent following a war with the Serbian-led remains of Yugoslavia in 1991-1995, one of the seemingly infinite number of Yugoslav wars. Although not yet part of the EU, Croatia is reasonably pro-Western. My roommate on the sailing trip was from Pennsylvania and told me that a number of his countrymen were convinced that Croatia was a dangerous place for Americans to travel. This is odd because Croatia is one of the more reliably pro-American states in the region. Although NATO didn't intervene in the Serb-Croat war itself, they did launch Operation Deliberate Force against Serb forces in Bosnia in 1995. Croatia was of the view that they'd take any bombing of Serb forces that they could get. On one of the islands I visited, there was a shop selling those unfunny alcohol joke shirts (stuff like "One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor"). Nestled inamongst these shirts was one emblazoned with the legend "Don't worry NATO...", then a picture of a warplane, then "CROATIA is behind you!".

Anyway I've gone off on a bit of a tangent here. I flew out of Valencia to Split via Rome and arrived quite late Friday night. I was worried about whether I'd be able to find any food so late, a worry which turned out to be ridiculous when I got into Split, which was buzzing with tourists and had about 8 million restaurants still trying to ply their trade. It wasn't surprising that I knew almost nothing about Split. My travel preparation has got so lax at this point that I landed in Croatia without even any clue what the local currency was. I just went to an ATM and asked for 1600 something somethings, which turned out to be "kuna". Based on the publicity each city gets, I was expecting Split to be small and Dubrovnik to be large, but it turns out Split is 5 times the size of Dubrovnik. Oops.

Anyway, I made it into Split and hit the sack in preparation for my tour the next day. My hostel had a bunch of jerks in it, the type where everything they say or do is designed to make themselves look cool, and I was dreading spending 8 days with those type of people. However when I boarded my boat the next day, we turned out to have a really good group of people, all pretty easygoing. The places we visited were:

Hvar - The rich people's playground. I wandered up to a fortress on the hill behind the town and got a great view of the harbour, but I forgot my camera so that will have to wait until I get the pics off someone else. At night we visited another fortress which had been converted into a nightclub. I and several other sailing trippers stripped down and went swimming in their big indoor fountain. They were cross.

Mljet - Very small township with a national park at the back with a couple of lakes. Pretty without being all that stunning.

Dubrovnik - Old walled city, very pretty.



Korcula - Also known as "Mini Dubrovnik", another walled city. Nice but nothing special.

Makarska - Huge tourist town on the coast, lot of partying. There's a nightclub inside a cave on the edge of the ocean, so you can go swimming mid-party. Really cool place.

Omis - An old pirate island. Not a lot to do so we had a pirate party on the boat. I purchased a sword which at the press of a button lit up and made "CHING!" noises. This was a hit.

Pretty short summary, but then there's not much to say about endless swimming, sunbathing, and beer drinking on deckchairs. I had a great trip - this is the kind of thing tours are built for, visiting towns where you really only need one night to check the place out. The whole trip was drama-free except for the last night where our (female) guide drank way too much, for reasons I won't get into, and was sick. I was looking after her and came pretty close to getting into a fight with a drunk Italian guy who started trying to feel her up. Interesting times.

Today I'm heading to Dubrovnik where I'm spending a quiet night to break up the trip to Budva in Montenegro. I have 4 nights there before heading on my rafting trip down the Tara canyon.

Liverpool Game

After flying from Lisbon to Barcelona, we spent an uneventful night in a pretty ordinary hostel in Barcelona - great location but not much opportunity to meet people, so we had an early night. The next day we caught the train to our hostel in Valencia, where we discovered that our tickets (which we had paid EUR 170 each for) had never arrived. Bugger. We're not sure if the site was a scam or what, but Dane is giving them a chance to make reparations before reversing the credit card transaction. Having made it this far, we caught the train to Vila-Real anyway, intending to scalp tickets. On the way there we met a nice lady from Vila-Real by the name of Amelia, who spoke English and helped us out a lot with various things, driving us to the stadium and calling a taxi for us in Spanish afterwards. On getting to the stadium we discovered that there were still plenty of tickets on sale, even though pre-match publicity had said that it was sold out. We scalped a couple of tickets from a Liverpool supporter anyway, for half price of 40 EUR, but then discovered that they were in different sections, so we shelled out another 80 EUR for another ticket in the same section, so we ended up paying 80 each anyway. This was a lot better than the 170 each we paid to the scalping site, but we had no way of knowing we didn't have to do that.

Vila-Real is a town of less than 50,000 people which somehow manages to support a football team which probably ranks in the top 5 in La Liga in Spain. The stadium was smallish - a 25,000 capacity - which was good since we were up close and personal with the players. The game itself was a bit lacklustre, which was to be expected - it was a friendly, and though I think Vilareal mostly ran their top team, Liverpool took the opportunity to give their young kids a run. They did play the new striker Keane for the whole of the first half though. By the way, at Barcelona-Sants train station, we saw three Liverpool fans who were already wearing the official number 7 Keane shirt, even though he only signed to the club a day or two earlier. Crazy.

The player everyone wanted to see was Fernando Torres, Liverpool's premier striker. He started warming up on the sidelines in front of us midway through the second half, accompanied by cheers and whispers from the Spanish crowd of his Spanish nickname "El Nino". He was instrumental in Spain's win in the Euro Cup this year and is therefore loved throughout Spain even though he now plays for an English club. To give a sense of how valuable he was in his debut season for Liverpool, a passable strike rate for a striker is 1 goal per 3 appearances and a good striker scores 1 goal per 2 appearances. Torres, in his first season in the Premier League, scored 33 goals in 46 appearances, and has replaced the captain Stephen Gerrard as the most popular player among fans. He only played around the last 15 minutes and despite one good opportunity was unable to break the scoring drought. The game ended nil all.

Dane and I will probably spend tonight in the hostel bar, then tomorrow I fly to Split, Croatia via Rome, and he flies back to London. I'm joining my 8-day sailing tour of Croatia tomorrow, so there will be an internet drought. More after that.

Portugal

I was originally going to write separate posts for every region of Portugal but I can't really be bothered doing that so I'll give a quick rundown of my whole week and a half or so in the country. The short version is that it's a really cool place. Being a little more off the tourist trail than say Barcelona means that you get a better quality of traveler there. It's cheap, really cheap. And the cities are really pretty. I'm pretty lazy with photos though and have like one shot from my whole time there, which I may or may not upload later.

I started my trip with a couple of nights in Lagos, in the south. I didn't know much about the place and was expecting a lazy beach town, but what I got was the most insanely full-bore party town I think I've ever been to. Some of the stories of degeneracy I heard there were pretty jaw dropping and don't really bear repeating on a public blog. I will however repeat them privately on request. Bit too crazy a place for me, but a spot to bear in mind if I ever feel like drinking myself to death.

Porto was quite a bit quieter, a very pretty city with a lot of nice architecture. We stayed at a great hotel and became pretty good friends with a couple of Slovenian girls who we met again in Lisbon (and I will probably meet one of them again in Croatia). Didn't accomplish anything too jaw dropping there though. On the last day Dane and I hired a car and drove out along the Douro, but had the misfortune to be given horrible advice by a girl in a tourist office who could barely speak English, which led to our wasting most of the day. On the way back into Porto we took a wrong turn and ended up in downtown Porto, which is one of those driving-nightmare European old towns, with a twisted jumble of streets, most of which are one way, with drivers who will cut you off given the slightest chance. Driving on the right in an unfamiliar manual car, I didn't enjoy this much, but we managed to get back to the car hire place just in time to return it and board a train to Lisbon.

Lisbon is a great city which I would recommend to anyone doing the Europe trail. There's a bit of something for everyone. A lot of great sightseeing to do, or so I'm told. I spent most of the days sleeping, having got home from bars at such hours of the day as 7am. The nightlife is excellent - the locals are friendly and, as I mentioned, the tourists are a cut above the type you get in places like Barcelona or Rome. While there's certainly Lagos-style degeneracy if you go looking for it, there are also classier clubs with an upmarket feel. I also managed to hook up with the first girl I uttered a word to in the first club we went to, and you have to love a city where that happens. Highlights also included hanging out with a couple of Australian guys who were complete womanizing, drug-taking, alcohol-swilling maniacs, but who also managed to be friendly, funny, intelligent guys, rather than jerks like most of that type are. Lowlights included Dane and I losing an absurd amount of money at poker in a 24 hour period. We were already up for the trip so neither of us are down too much but it wasn't much fun!

So that was Portugal... and today we flew back to Barcelona, where I am currently watching my laundry dry and stealing free wireless. We're staying only one night before getting the train down to Valencia. We have two nights in Valencia, but the first one will be spent at the Estadio di Madrigal in Villareal, watching Liverpool vs Villareal. That's if our tickets arrive safely at our Valencia hostel. Liverpool have just signed a new striker so we're hopeful we may get to see his debut game (edit: we just found out that he will indeed be playing his first game for Liverpool, so that's pretty cool).

Blog finally up to date!

Barcelona

Barcelona seems like ages ago now, even though I only left there eight days ago. I do remember that I arrived there with the intention of largely ignoring the culture (Barcelona not being a particularly Spanish city anyway) and doing some partying. That my time there is a bit fuzzy now suggests that I achieved my aims. I do remember walking back to the hostel down La Rambla and getting propositioned by no less than four hookers, so they must have thought I looked in the mood to have fun (that, or very drunk). The only touristy things I achieved while there were taking a look at the Sagrada Familiar, the insane unfinished creation of Anton Gaudi, and going on a hike along the Carretera de les Aigües, a gravel path up above Barcelona that gives great views of the enormous city. I have photos of all of the above (ok, wait, not the hookers) but I can't really be bothered putting them up right now. I just wanted to get this post written before I completely forget that I even went to Barcelona. I'm in Lisbon now, so posts about Lagos and Porto are also in the works. Dane is napping so I might write them now. Or not.

Nice

It's good to have the net again. I've been in Porto for about the last 5 nights, in two different hostels, and in both of them my laptop wouldn't talk to their router. Hence the lack of blogging.

After arriving in Nice and checking into my hotel I met up with Julia and her boyfriend and after grabbing some lunch, we gathered supplies and retired to the beach with an esky to drink two bottles of champagne that I had brought with me. After polishing those off we relaxed at the apartment of a friend of theirs, and after eating some Indian food we had a pretty early one. The next day we met at the train station for a daytrip to Monaco, which is only about 20 minutes away by train. After wandering up by the palace for a while, we spent a while in a public swimming pool and then changed into more respectable clothes to go up to Monte Carlo Casino. It cost 10 euro to get into the casino and while the building was beautiful, it was a bit of a disappointment. It was early on a Saturday evening but not much was going on. I was hoping to play some poker but none was running. Oh well. I have a panorama shot of Monte Carlo harbour, it’s pretty big so I could keep the detail in it, so I've put it on a separate link: click here to check it out.

After bailing out back to Nice, we had a night on the town, although Julia and her boyfriend went home earlyish, while I kicked on solo until 5:30 in the morning or something. On returning to my hotel I was sober enough to realise that I'd feel like crap the next morning. My flight to Barcelona left late night the next night, so I decided I should book my room another night and spend most of the day napping. I tried to put this plan into action but the guy at the desk at 6am or whatever it was didn't speak a lot of English, especially not slurred English, and I was unsure if I had made myself understood. I therefore set my alarm for noon the next day, which was checkout time. When it went off, I was hungover as expected, but grabbed the phone and called reception. It turned out that I had succeeded in booking another night.... in the room next door, which involved packing up all my stuff, going down to reception and getting a new key, which defied the point of being able to stay in bed. I grumpily requested they cancel it, gathered my stuff together, and went and got my head straight in the lobby instead. Then I hung out at Julia's apartment until it was time to go and get my flight.

I didn't really achieve much in Nice, but I did have a really fun night out and it was good catching up with Julia. Doecke had told me that Nice sucked and Monaco was great, while I had the opposite experience. He didn't like Nice because it was unfriendly (not my experience) and full of drunk tourists (surely that's the whole point), while I didn't much like Monaco because there was nothing to do once you're over staring at people's Fararis. I wouldn't actually say I disliked the place, but a daytrip was definitely enough.

Onwards to Barcelona!

Champagne-Ardenne

The day after Rock Werchter ended, we hired a car in Brussels and Doecke drove us southwest into France. Our destination: Reims (say: Rhayms), the capital of the region of Champagne-Ardenne. After setting up camp in our hostel, and learning to our displeasure that gambling sites were blocked on the internet there, we walked into the center of Reims and managed to score a table at Le Foch, a Michelin one-star restaurant there. The prices were very reasonable - I had a 4-course menu plus cheese for 45 euro - and the food was excellent. An older couple from Alsace had the table adjacent to us and the man helped us translate the menu, talked to us a little about the regional peculiarities of Alsace, and at the end of the meal gave us his address and contact details with an invitation to visit him in Strasbourg. I have no idea who started the rumour about the French being arrogant and unfriendly, but it would be right up there with "The food in Italy is great" on a top-ten of completely untrue statements about Europe.

The next day we caught the train to Epernay (something like Ay-pear-nay), the wine capital of Champagne. First we went to a bar I had read about, called C-Comme Champagne, where five different small producer wines are served by the glass, changing weekly. We got a glass of each and they ranged from average through to very good. Then it was time to tour the cellars of Moet et Chandon. After learning about the methode champenoise, Doecke asked if there were any champagnes made without sugar added after fermentation as is normally done. After finding out that these "zero-dosage" wines do exist, he decided he wanted to try one, so we headed back to C-Comme Champagne and asked if they had any. They only had one, so we bought a bottle to drink, and coincidentally the producer (owner or winemaker or maybe both, I'm not sure) of the champagne was in the bar at the time. He was a friendly guy who chatted to us for a while about the wine we had bought, his business and the region in general. It was a really good experience. We had dinner at a place that allowed you to bring your own wine to drink (a very uncommon idea in France - and no corkage charge!), but unfortunately I selected a particularly poor Chateauneuf-du-Pape from the local wine store. Pretty good food though and well priced.

That night I decided that my plan of heading to Bordeaux after Champagne was no good. I had just had two full days of wine-related acitivities and didn't fancy spending the weekend doing more of the same in a city without a backpacker scene, when I could be doing something more social. Instead I decided to catch a sleeper train to Nice the next night and catch up with Julia, a girl I had met on my Europe trip last year. This plan would also allow me the opportunity to daytrip to Monaco.

The next day we visited a forest near Reims which is famous for having a number of beech trees which are mutated in some way - either a genetic variation or a viral infection - that leaves them gnarled and deformed. It's supposed to be spooky or something, but we found it pretty underwhelming. It did provide us with an opportunity to drive around the countryside of Champagne though.




Then I said my goodbyes to Dane and Mike (although I'll be seeing Dane again in Portugal in not too much longer) and hopped on my sleeper train to Nice. I was kind of dreading the 12-hour trip but actually it wasn't bad at all. Trains are much better than planes in so many ways. It isn't just that you have a little bed and can walk around whenever you want - it's things like not listening to the low-frequency drone from jet engines for 12 hours.... and rather than having to breathe stuffy dehumidified air, you have the opportunity at any time to go to the window and get a blast of country air in your face... then you can hang out at the window and look at the blanket of ground fog over rural France, watch little villages with illuminated churches on hills as they fly past and wonder what the lives of the people who live there are like....

And now we're on to Nice... but that's another blog post.