Montenegro, Hercig Novi and return to Croatia

After the inconvenience of not being able to check out and pay the bill without first going to a cash machine we were glad to finally leave Kamaria and head back towards the border and Croatia.

After a short while we arrived on the outskirts of the fortified town of Hercig Novi and although the main road was dusty and scruffy it seemed bad manners not to pull off into the side streets and visit the old town. This was easier said than done because this is another town with a parking problem and we crawled in a queue of traffic as everyone was searching for a space. Finally we found one as close to the old town as we were likely to get so we accepted that this was the best we would be able to do. It said that it was a pay car park but there was no ticket machine or attendant so we were thoroughly confused. I made enquiries in a couple of shops and finally established that tickets were on sale at the newsagents so I bought two hours and nervously left the car. There were some conscientious parking wardens scrutinising windscreens and tickets and a yellow mini being towed away on a car transporter and I began to worry that I hadn’t understood the procedure and might come back to find the car removed and a long walk back to Mlini.

It was quite a long walk along the busy road and getting hotter under the late morning sun so were glad to reach the entrance to the Stari Grad old town and find some respite from the impatient traffic and the increasing heat. Inside the old gate and within the confines of the walls there were a succession of basking squares with an unhurried pace of life and we walked from one to the other to take in the sights. We were immediately glad that we had stopped off because this was really very nice and most probably a place easily missed by tourists heading for Kotor and Budva going one way and Dubrovnik going the other.

After the squares we climbed a stairway of worn shiny steps to get to the entrance of the fortress which stands at the top of the town overlooking the harbour below. Inside there were walls to walk and views to admire, nothing like Dubrovnik of course, but pleasant all the same and worth the small admission fee. It didn’t take long to complete the visit to the fortress so we walked back down and had a welcome cold drink in a bar in the main square next to the town’s old drinking fountain and the Serbian Orthodox Church in the centre.

After a short rest we walked the other way through twisting lanes and down steep steps towards the harbour but it was a long way, very hot and time was running out on our two hour parking ticket so we abandoned the walk at the half way stage and climbed back to the squares with their balconied buildings and tall shady trees and then retraced our steps back to the car which was exactly where we left it and no parking ticket tucked under the windscreen wipers either.

Getting out of Hercig Novi was no easier than getting in and we sat in a snarling traffic jam and followed the line of cars through the narrow one-way system and finding the right road included quite a lot of guesswork because although there was a sign for every hotel and grill bar the road signs had a curious absence of helpful information if you are looking for directions to the next town but eventually we threaded our way to the main road and prepared to leave Montenegro.

There was a wait again at the border as the immigration police thoroughly checked the documents of a convoy of camper vans from the Netherlands and as we waited we reflected on the Montenegro experience. We had liked it but not as much as we expected to, there was a clear sense of being somewhere different, even more so than Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2008 and to be honest we were glad to be going back to Croatia and we took a leisurely drive back to Mlini and the Villa Carmen.

We had a different room this time, not as good as the first but with a nice secluded balcony, which was cool and surrounded by greenery but required the precaution of plenty of insect repellent. After we had settled in we walked to Mlini for lunch at our favourite restaurant and then just let the rest of the day slide away as we swam in the soft blue water of the Adriatic and then sat at the edge of the water getting a swim suit full of tiny pebbles that we later transferred to the hotel room when we got changed.

Sitting on the terrace in the early evening we watched the colours of the sea and the sky go through their daily transformation and I was struck with how different it is here to Greece. In the Cyclades the sky is a consistent blue that explodes into a vivid sunset but here I have always found it more subtle with a greater variation and range of colour as the sky goes through several stages as it progresses through to the end of the day.

And the end of the day meant a final stroll into Mlini and another meal at the favourite restaurant which may not have been very adventurous or imaginative but we liked it there and we enjoyed an excellent final meal.

Croatia to Montenegro

There was an unexpected early start today when Kim got up and threw back the shutters announcing that it was half past seven. Even though I was still asleep it was clear to me that it wasn’t anything like half past seven and sure enough it was only half past five and Kim has read her watch backwards!

Although we went back to sleep we needed an early start anyway because today we were driving to Montenegro. Over a second excellent breakfast we had to keep this to ourselves however because our Croatian hosts were not especially impressed that we were visiting the neighbours who caused so much damage in this part of Croatia only fifteen years or so before and certainly weren’t keen to encourage us to go there.

We wanted to go to Montenegro because we were aware of it up and coming status as a holiday destination and with the Montenegrin Tourist Board making big claims like,

‘Montenegro is the pearl of the Mediterranean situated in the south of the Adriatic, there is nowhere else that you can find, in such a small place, so much natural wealth, beauty, beaches, clear lakes, fast rivers, gorgeous mountains, history, culture, tradition, good weather, clean air, beautiful nature, blue Adriatic Sea, everyone should visit Montenegro sometime’

we felt obliged to go there before it gets too busy so when we left we drove out of Mlini and took the main coast road south, back past Cavtat and the airport and then towards the border.

Driving is not straight forward in Croatia for a number of reasons. First of all there are the unfamiliar rules like driving with headlamps on even during the day, which seems a bit pointless when the sun is permanently shining. And then there is the issue of speed limits: Because the main road runs through every town and village along the coast these change frequently and you have to keep your wits about you to make sure you are not speeding. These speed limits however to not apply to the Croatian drivers who quickly become impatient when held up by an inconvenient tourist and I frequently found myself at the front of an increasing queue of traffic who didn’t share my resolve for dutiful compliance with the limits. Whenever I could therefore I had to practice my impression of a Lincolnshire tractor driver and pull over at a convenient spot and let everyone pass.

South of the airport there were two more hazards, first of all the potholes that had to be carefully negotiated and secondly, caterpillars. Yes, caterpillars! I saw some things wriggling across the road but it took a while and a few casualties to realise what they were. There were hundreds of the little things making a dangerous crossing from one side to the other and the smears on the road was proof that a lot of them didn’t make it. I have no idea why they were doing but I have been doing some calculations to try and fully appreciate the risk. Each caterpillar was about five centimetres long and the road about eight metres wide so this would be the equivalent of an average man attempting to cross a busy motorway the length of three football pitches without getting run down and was therefore fairly hazardous.

As we approached the border the scenery stared to change, the mountains retreated further inland and we drove along the edge of a large lush green valley flanked by gentle hills with an abundance of trees and then the valley disappeared and the road was squeezed into a narrow pass that brought us to the border controls.

First of all we had to get out of Croatia and this involved a fifteen minute wait while the only man on duty was dealing with traffic coming in the opposite direction before a second man finally arrived to deal with traffic going into Montenegro. And then after a couple of kilometres we had to stop again and be processed by the Montenegrin border guards. These guys were really thorough and although there were only two vehicles in front of us this took another fifteen minutes of passport and hire car details scrutiny before we were allowed to proceed.

While we waited the environment police checked the sticker in the windscreen to make sure our environment tax was up to date, which luckily for us some previous hirer had paid for and which saved us the €10 tourist tax scam. The Robin Hood style tax is explained by the Montenegrin Government “as being in response to the increase in the number of vehicles which have additional negative influence on the air quality and the general degradation of the environment as such. The increased number of vehicles effects the emission of pollutants and dangerous substances and endangers the environment, especially during the summer season, due to the increased numbers of foreign tourists”. What a load of bullshit!

Now we were somewhere different but the first sign we saw was the familiar blue EU sign that announces the funding of an improvement project and this surprised us because they are not even in the EU: is it any wonder that we have an economic crisis I wondered? Montenegro is classified as a highly developed country by the Human Development Index but one of two former Yugoslav republics which are marked as ‘Moderate’ on the Failed States Index. As it turns out Montenegro has been receiving more European Union funding per capita than any other country for the last few years and €131.3 million has been earmarked by the European Commission for Montenegro to assist it achieve what is called European integration. Montenegro became a recipient of the EU funding through a new mechanism, the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance, or IPA, and most of the funds have gone towards ‘strengthening the infrastructure and management of the transportation sector’.

Well, we didn’t see much evidence of that and just as in Croatia I was being careful with speed limit compliance and once again I was irritating the local drivers. I wasn’t deliberately trying to make a nuisance of myself it was just that I was being mindful of the Foreign Office advice to take care when driving in Montenegro because the traffic cops can be rigorous in enforcing the law especially with foreign motorists and I was very conscious of having a Croatian number plate. It was a good job that I was being careful because in the thirty kilometre drive to our accommodation we passed four speed trap patrols that were waiting to pounce.

Croatia, Dubrovnik

The water taxi took about thirty minutes to make the short journey from Mlini to Dubrovnik and even though large cruisers anchored up outside the harbour spoiled the approach the old town fortifications looked spectacular as we sailed into the harbour and once off the boat we transported into an alternative world of narrow medieval streets, magnificent buildings constructed of white Dalmatian stone and a riot of red tiled roofs. We knew that we had all day to explore the city but we were impatient so purchased our tickets and climbed to the top of the walls for the two-kilometre walk around the magnificent tenth century guard’s walkway.

It was extremely hot and It took a couple of hours to complete the walk around the city stopping frequently to admire the breathtaking views of the cathedrals and churches, the battlement and towers and the busy streets bustling with activity at the base of the walls and through the city to the other side. The route took us first alongside the Adriatic and then at the Fort of St John into the old city port past fishing boats, yachts, pleasure craft and water taxis all floating gently on the placid sea within the protective walls of the harbour’s medieval defences. Then we were on the land side where there were there were the best views of the tiled roofs and on to the highest point at the Minceta Tower where there was a steep climb rewarded with an expansive panorama of the city and the vivid blue sea behind it.

The medieval city of Dubrovnik was founded in late antiquity and grew first under Byzantine and then later under Venetian rule before becoming an independent republic in 1358. It developed into a maritime and trading power that rivaled the Venetian Republic and reached its zenith in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It even managed to keep its political independence under Ottoman rule, which began in 1526 but it was sacked in 1806 during the Napoleonic wars, and lost its status as a city-state two years later. It came under French rule and was ceded to Austria in 1815. A century later, it became part of Yugoslavia.

When we had completed the circumnavigation of the walls we returned to street level and walked first along the polished white paving stones of the main street occasionally taking detours into intriguing little side streets and alleys. We admired the reconstructed Rector’s House and the Cathedral, wandered through a street market and then to some of the quieter little streets underneath the walls for a different perspective. The old city dates from the thirteenth century, when the imposing fortifications began to be built and the elegance and charm of the historic centre is a perfect blend of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture. Not surprisingly the place had an Italianate feel with pizzerias and waiters pestering for business in that unique Italian sort of way but we didn’t mind this and just politely said no thank you in an English sort of way and walked on.

By the time we had walked underneath the walls of St John’s Tower and into the old harbour I was beginning to understand why in 1929 George Bernard Shaw described Dubrovnik as ‘Paradise on Earth’ and thankfully the post war reconstruction has restored the old town to its former splendour.

At the beginning of the bombardment, the city was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger and quickly after it was over UNESCO launched an action plan to save Dubrovnik and the reconstruction work began. To rebuild the roofs the original sixteenth century rafters had to be strengthened and almost half a million tiles had to be replaced. The original tiles had been made in the village of Kupari, about fifteen kilometres from the city, and dated from the time of the Dubrovnik republic but the workshops had closed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and specialists faced the task of finding a kind of tile which could as far as possible be made using the original materials and methods of construction. Eventually French and Croatian specialists managed to recreate the original technique and the famous roofline was perfectly restored.

The cost of the restoration was estimated at $20 for the old city within the walls and $30 million for the urban area as a whole. Much of the funding came from the new Croatian government and the Dubrovnik Reconstruction Office but also with aid from private Croatian sources and from UNESCO itself. Croatian and international teams of architects, sculptors, restorers and other experts managed to complete the bulk of the work within seven years and in December 1998 Dubrovnik was taken off of the danger list.

It was midday and hot so we returned to a waterside bar that we had used the previous year and thought about lunch. Last year we seriously over ordered here and ended up sending food back so this year we were mindful of that and ordered accordingly – just one plate of small fish and a salad. We were in a perfect spot next to the girls trying to sell thirty minute tours on glass bottomed boats and watching the guided tour parties trying to make decisions about who was going on and who wasn’t. Eventually we tired of watching the people parading back and forth, left the harbour and went back into the city.

It was now almost unbearably hot and Kim had acquired a headache but we had seen mostly everything we wanted to see in Dubrovnik so we walked to the bus stop, I bought the wrong tickets in a shop, and then waited in the shade for the Mlini bus for the fifteen minute ride back along an elevated road with great views over the city, the harbour and the sea.

Croatia, The Siege of Dubrovnik

We had an excellent breakfast on the sunny terrace with local specialties, fresh bread and home made marmalade and jam and Doris sold us tickets for the water taxi to Dubrovnik, which I think was probably another part of the family business.

We had about an hour to wait between breakfast and the boat and we spent this in Mlini wandering about the back streets, through overgrown gardens, down mysterious passageways and along the seashore, it was a lovely place and we had made an excellent choice of holiday location.

The taxi left from the little harbour in the village and we waited in the already hot sunshine until it arrived at ten o’clock and then selected seats on the upper deck and sat and sweltered while we waited for it to leave. Eventually it left and followed the coast towards the city and then we saw something unexpected and nothing like we had seen before on previous visits to Croatia, a string of war damaged shelled out hotels at regular intervals all the way to Dubrovnik. This we learned later was the legacy of an invasion by Montenegro during the secessionist wars of the 1990s.

Montenegro played a disastrous part in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia because in 1991 its army, urged on by Slobodan Milosevic, advanced across the border into neighbouring Croatia, destroying villages, looting and stealing on the way and then shelling the ancient city of Dubrovnik. The city was attacked by the Serbian-Montenegrin army and besieged for six months during which time about two thousand shells rained down on the walled city, damaging seventy percent of its buildings and two-thirds of its famous red roofs. Dubrovnik’s ancient heritage was threatened with destruction and a plaque within the city now shows all of the major strikes on public buildings and churches, cobbled streets made of Dalmatian stone and irreplaceable statues and monuments.

Early in 1991 the political leaders of Montenegro and the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army, the, JNA, justified the attack and siege of Dubrovnik as a necessary move towards protecting the territorial integrity of Montenegro and Yugoslavia and preventing a potential conflict along ethnic lines, as well as stopping the so-called unconstitutional secession of Croatia. The Montenegrin Prime Minister rallied the country with the rabble rousing statement that the ‘Croatian authorities wanted to have a war and they will have it.’ He continued by saying that ‘if Croatia wants to secede then the internal borders must be revised,’ while interpreting the war in Croatia as an inevitable outcome of the totalitarian policies of Zagreb: ‘One million Serbs in Croatia are deprived of their rights and are forced to respond with arms.’ He assured the people of Montenegro that the time had come to ‘draw the demarcation lines vis-à-vis the Croats once and for all,’ and that ‘the new borders with Croatia would be more logical and just than those drawn by the old and poorly educated Bolshevik cartographers’

In the early hours of 1st October JNA soldiers and reservists began military operations in the southern Croatian region of Konavle. Just after five o’clock the people living in the village of Vitaljina and throughout the region of Konavle were woken up by heavy artillery fire coming from the JNA positions at Prevlaka Peninsula, Prijevor, Mojdez, and also from the JNA’s naval vessels anchored off the Croatian coast. The artillery fire was then followed by an infantry thrust into Croatian territory.

The invaders evicted people from their houses and engaged in massive looting, pillaging, and the destruction of private and historical property, actions which had no justification or any strategic military objective. The airport was attacked and equipment stolen and heavy looting occurred in Kupari, where the hotel complex Vrtovi Sunca was virtually cleaned out of all its furniture and equipment, pieces of which were later either sold on the black market in Montenegro or given as ‘gifts’ to various state-run institutions and organizations in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. After the looting of the hotels they were then destroyed by heavy shelling, an action designed to destroy the economy of the region and to prevent them being used for refugees and people bombed out of their homes.

Europe and the World watched most of the dreadful events of the Yugoslavian wars on television screens but took no action but for the west at least, the destruction of Dubrovnik overstepped the mark and brought pressure on the warring factions to stop. It was almost as though the World was prepared to watch ethnic cleansing, death and destruction in cities with unfamiliar names that meant little to them but when a UNESCO World Heritage Site was attacked and a city that was seen to belong to the World and not a single place, collectively they said ‘enough is enough’.

The ‘War for Peace’ turned out to be one of the most disagreeable episodes in recent Montenegrin history because Montenegro disgraced itself by putting itself in the service of the Yugoslav army and Slobodan Milosevic. After the war Montenegro became a virtual pariah state, and the later bombing of nearby Kosovo reinforced this isolation.

After the end of the war in 1995 Montenegro remained closely allied to Serbia but declared independence on 3rd June 2006. In March 2007 the Montenegrin President apologized for involvement in attacks on Dubrovnik, which caused several hundred civilian deaths and destroyed countless homes, and agreed to pay damages. Some estimates place the value of the damage at around €35 million. So far, Montenegro has paid up only €375,000 as compensation for looting the area’s cattle. Reparation is going to take a long time and in the mean time the bombed out hotels which disfigure the coastline remain as a dreadful reminder of the war.

Really, I should have found out about this before the holiday and I suddenly began to feel a bit uneasy about visiting Montenegro the next day for fear of offending our Croatian hosts.

Croatia, Mlini

It wasn’t especially well sign-posted and predictably I missed the turn for Mlini and we ended up in the next village of Srebreno where there was a string of beach bars but no signs but after we asked for directions and established that we were in the wrong place we went back the way we had just come and this time found the turning on a treacherous unmarked bend and quickly found our accommodation, the Villa Carmen.

There were a lot of steps to negotiate but at the top we were greeted by Doris (good Croatian name!) who showed us to a nice clean room with a big private terrace in the sun. Kim was tired so rested for a while but I couldn’t settle until I had got some beers in the fridge so although it was mad hot I went down the steps and climbed the hill back to the main road to find a mini-market.

It was a small and simple little shop and I quickly selected a screw cap bottle of wine but at the beer fridge I couldn’t remember from last year which one I preferred, was it Karlovačko, Ožujsko or Laško? So I did the sensible thing and bought one of each so that I could try them all just to be sure. Back at the room I tried the red Karlovačko first of all and it might have been that one but I knew that I couldn’t really be certain until I had sampled them all.



After Kim had rested and I had finished the first beer it was time to investigate so we left Villa Carmen and walked down more steps to the beach where the sea looked so inviting that I had to go back up all of the steps another time to get the swimming costumes from the room. The beach was small and quite busy, no sand but white stones instead and tiny pebbles at the water’s edge that scrunched under our feet as we walked into the sea. It was surprisingly warm so there was no reluctance to dive in and enjoy a fifteen minutes swim in the turquoise water and then after thirty minutes to dry off in the sun we left the beach (because thirty minutes is quite long enough) and walked along a leafy coastal footpath back to Srebreno where we selected a bar with seats in the sunshine, ordered some drinks and sat back and just relaxed.

We didn’t stop that long but walked back and spent some time on the terrace in a lovely garden with ripening vines, pots of boiling geraniums, succulents and palms, and cypress trees all crammed randomly in and competing for space. As the afternoon slipped into early evening we listened to the cicada soundtrack as the temperature became more comfortable and with a high thin cloud the sky became a curious chalk white reflected in a calm milky sea that was disturbed only by the occasional boat splitting the water in two as it passed by.

We had decided to eat at the hotel family restaurant close by but before we did so we took the advice of the guests in the next room and walked first down the hill and to the village of Mlini just out of sight around a bend in the road. On the way Kim took some shots of the sunset with her magic camera (it takes a sunset picture even when there isn’t one) and then we passed old stone houses clustered around the tiny little harbour with little fishing boats, no more than rowing boats really, and then to the village centre.

The centre of the village was really pretty with little shops and restaurants, an old mill and a millstone, flower beds and a fast flowing stream coming down from the mountain behind and discharging into the sea. In the very middle was a two hundred and fifty year old plane tree that was home to hundreds of chirruping sparrows and as we walked underneath the outstretched boughs one got Kim with a direct hit on her shoulder and we interpreted that as a clear sign that we had last night’s winning lottery ticket waiting for us back at home.

There were some promising looking restaurants in the village but as agreed we returned to the hotel family restaurant and had a leisurely meal in a pleasant garden. We both had an excellent meal and during the time that we spent there I picked up a leg full of mosquito bites which started to itch furiously some time during the night.