The travels of Tim and Megan: Budva, Montenegro

Wednesday

The plan had been to depart Sarajevo airport at 6.30am and land at Tivat airport, Montenegro at 9.45am after a brief stop at Belgrade. We left Sarajevo at 6.30am as planned, but things fell apart from there. When we arrived in Belgrade, we realised that our connecting flight to Tivat had been cancelled and that we had been put on a 12.40pm flight to Tivat instead. We were not impressed at all, as it meant waiting around the Transit area of Belgrade for about 5 hours!! And if that wasn't bad enough, our 12.40pm flight was then delayed by about almost an hour. Of course there were no apologies for any of this - that's how the good people at JAT Airways roll. So we eventually landed in Tivat at around 2.15pm - not cool. But it got worse. Our large suitcase was missing! We were ushered towards the Lost Property Office, the busiest part of the airport. We gave them all the relevant information and they told us that bags go missing all the time and usually turn up within a day or two. Nice. So now we had a four day beach holiday with basically the clothes we were wearing (which were not beach clothes), no toiletries, no togs or towels, no sunscreen...basically nothing useful for the beach. Thanks JAT.

We caught a taxi to Budva, the lovely little beach town that would be home for the next four days. Budva is about 20km from Tivat. Needless to say, we were extremely annoyed and not in a fine mood to explore the beach town. Nevertheless, we set off for a wander through the town (picking up a few essentials along the way) and then we walked along the beach.

Montenegro is a small country (area of less than 14,000km squared) with a coast on the Adriatic Sea and which borders Croatia to the west, Bosnia & Herzegovina to the north-west, Serbia to the north-east, Kosovo (if recognised as a separate country) to the east and Albania to the south-east. It's capital and largest city is Podgorica. Much of the country is mountainous. A sovereign principality since the Late Middle Ages, Montenegro saw its independence from the Ottoman Empire formally recognised in 1878. From 1918, it was a part of various incarnations of Yugoslavia and then for a short period it fell under the banner of Serbia & Montenegro. On the basis of a referendum held on 21 May 2006, Montenegro declared independence on 3 June of that year. The official language is Montenegrin, although this is a variation of Serbian.

Budva is a coastal town in Montenegro with around 15,000 inhabitants, although this number is massively higher in the summer months, when the town is over-run with thousands of tourists. Budva is 2,500 years old, making it one of the oldest settlements on the Adriatic Coast. It is the centre of Montenegro's tourism, and is well known for its sandy beaches, diverse nightlife, and beautiful examples of Mediterranean architecture.

Our walk took us for a short poke around the walled Old Town and then to a bar wedged in between the Old Town and the marina, packed with beautiful super yachts! The bar, naturally, given its location, was rather swanky and there were a lot of very image-conscious people there. We thought they looked rather ridiculous, wearing high heels, skimpy dresses and make-up at a beach bar. Maybe its a Montenegrin thing, but we saw a lot of girls all dolled up during our stay in Budva, regardless of the time of the day or where they were...yes, even at 10am walking along the beach...ridiculous!

We left the swanky marina bar and and found a far more relaxed bar on the main beach and had a drink there. It had been a very frustrating day and we were pretty tired, so we had an early night and a massive sleep, which made us feel a lot better.

Thursday

On Thursday we had breakfast in our hotel, which was pretty good, and then we went out shopping. We each bought some togs, a towel and a sunhat and we also bought some sunscreen and a tunic for Megs and a T-shirt for Tim. Then we were all set to head down to the beach. It was a stunning day - well in to the 30s and barely a cloud in the sky.

We decided to spend the day on Slovenska Beach, the main beach in Budva. We grabbed some sunloungers and an umbrella right by the water and set in for a lazy day of sunning ourselves. The water (much the same as we had experienced in Croatia, which is further up the same coast from Montenegro) was extremely clean and clear and it was quite warm too. There are dozens and dozens of beach bars spread along the massive beach and the one right behind where we were sold us a half-litre of beer for just €2! Bargain!

In the mid-afternoon, we went for a walk along the beach down to the Old Town for a better look around there. Budva's Old Town is enclosed in a walled fortress and surrounded by sea on most sides. There are a few churches, several restaurants and bars and loads of shops crammed into the beautiful town. We actually nearly got lost in the maze of narrow alleys in there! There is also a huge citadella at the far end of the Old Town. Tim had a little look around inside the citadella, which is now home to a fantastic library. You can climb up onto the fortress walls and get great views down over the Old Town and most of Budva, as well as out to sea and the large island just off the coast of the main beach (see photos below).

One of the tiny squares in the centre of the Old Town is apparently called Poets' Square. It has a little pathway that leads out of the Old Town and on to a small, kind of hidden beach. It was much more peaceful on this beach, so we sat there and had a coke in the shade - we had taken enough sun for one day!

In the evening we had a couple of drinks on the balcony of our hotel room. A few dark clouds rolled in over the mountains and we had a brief thunderstorm, but that had cleared by the time we went out for dinner. We chose a seafood restaurant called "Porto" (Montenegro does amazing seafood). It was on the path that runs along in front of Slovenska Beach, so we had views out to the sea! Unfortunately there is a pond at the front of the restaurant that is home to some fish, a stingray and a giant turtle swimming around in it. This drew constant crowds of people who, it seemed, had never seen a fish before, who gazed in to the pond and took photos and pointed out the turtle to their thick kids who couldn't see it for themselves. They did not seem to think it was rude for this gazing to take place pretty much on top of our table where we were trying to eat dinner!

Anyway, the food was delicious. Our waiter tried to charge us more than double the menu price for our bowl of mussels that we shared for starters. We didn't have a bar of it and put him in his place. On the way back to our hotel after dinner, we walked down the street two back from the main beach, where it seems the "diverse nightlife" is centred. By diverse, they mean about six or eight outdoor nightclubs in a row with very scantily-clad girls swinging around poles. Strangely there was almost nobody actually in the bars, but there were hundreds of people standing in the streets watching the action from a safe distance.

Friday

Friday was another insanely hot day - almost too hot in the afternoon. We mixed it up a little and visited a different beach called Mogren Beach. This is located further around past the Old Town to the right. It involves a short walk along a narrow path with the sea on one side and a cliff-face on the other side. On this short walk, we found Budva's little treasure - every town has one - which is a bronze statue of a ballerina posing on a rock on the edge of the sea. it provided some beautiful photo opportunities with the Old Town in the background.

Mogren Beach was absolutely packed, but we managed to find a couple of free loungers - these were a lot more spendy than the Slovenska Beach ones! Drinks were more expensive too. Those damn Mogren Beach daylight robbers! We were amused by a rather odd couple who had the loungers just in front of ours. The woman made about 30 trips back and forth from the showers at the back of the beach down to her lounger, with a tiny child's beach bucket filled with water. She would tip the contents (maybe a litre, if that) of the bucket into an inflatable dinghy that she had positioned beside her lounger. Each time she made the trip, she trudged along like a robot, with no emotion in her face, which reminded us a little of Chief on the film "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest". After about 45 minutes of this, her husband emerged with a baby, which then sat in the inflatable dinghy partially filled with water, so that it acted as a paddling pool. Not worth the effort.

The water was beautiful and we had a little dip to cool off. We were treated to some more posing Montenegrin girls, who, make-up and all, wandered into the water and then posed Baywatch style for a while before retiring to their loungers. Hilarious.

It was lucky for us that just as we needed to find some shade and grab some late lunch, the Brazil v Holland quarter-final was kicking off. We found a bar back near the main beach that was showing the game and ate some lunch and had a couple of beers while we watched Holland come from a goal down to beat the star-studded Brazilians. The food was great but the service was poor. It seemed that service was usually pretty poor in Montenegro, aside from the odd one or two shining lights, like our hotel staff.

After the football, we returned to our hotel and had drinks on the balcony. There was a fair bit of lightning away in the distance, but no storm in Budva this time. We watched the Ghana v Uruguay quarter-final in our hotel room and we were devastated that the dirty, cheating Uruguayans managed to scam their way into the semi-finals. Poor Ghana! We had takeaways from a little place near our hotel for dinner. We had really yum pizza and crepes. The girl in the store had been studying English and was delighted to practice her English speaking with us. Surprisingly, very few locals speak English in Budva (which is a tourist town after all), whereas almost everyone in Bosnia had great English. Anyway, the pizza girl was very nice and she even gave us each a cigarette lighter as a gift since she liked chatting to us so much! Nice.

Saturday

We returned to Slovenska Beach on Saturday, to almost the same spot as we had been in on Thursday. It was even hotter than the previous two days. We wrote some postcards, read, listened to some tunes and had a couple of dips in the water. All very lazy and chilled out.

In the afternoon we repeated the quarter-final football viewing / getting some shade to avoid burning to a crisp. We found a nice bar to watch Germany pull out a blinder to thrash Argentina 4-0. Very nice. After the game we wandered into the Old Town and had a drink at a little bar called Cafe Grecko. The waiter was an interesting character. he was from Serbia but had been brought in for a four-month stint in Budva - fun!

In the evening we had an amazing dinner at a great restaurant called Konova Stair Grad. It is located in the Old Town, but it backs on to the little secluded beach we had found earlier. So we sat outside and had views of the sea. Tim had sole fillet and fries and Megan had risotto. Aside from seafood, there is an Italian influence in the food in Montenegro. It was a beautiful calm and warm evening and we had a leisurely walk back through town to our hotel, where we realised that we had both got sun burnt that day.

The lost suitcase had still not turned up and three days had passed now. We had phoned the Lost Property Office at Tivat Airport several times to check if it had turned up anywhere, but there was no sign of it and it was obvious that they were not interested in finding it. Still we had managed to get by with the little that we had from our carry-on bags and the small suitcase (mainly Megan's things), and we had really enjoyed our time in Montenegro.

Sunday

On Sunday morning we packed our things (that didn't take long!) and left Budva. At the Tivat airport, we had another go at the Lost Property Office staff, who had still not found our suitcase and had not done anything logical to try to find it. We also had a bitch at the JAT Airways staff, who actually said to us, "we don't care, it's not our problem". Seriously, never EVER fly JAT Airways. Even if you're tripping through the Balkans, choose a different airline. They are rude, incompetent and they have appalling customer service. On top of that, they cancelled a flight and bumped us to a later one without even telling us in advance and every flight we took was delayed. JAT Airways is the worst airline in the world!

There was good news on the suitcase in the end. When we arrived back at Heathrow, Tim chatted to a Lost Luggage representative, just in case they could offer any useful information really. As it turned out, through a complete fluke, he managed to pick a suitcase from his enormous list of "found" suitcases and its description matched that of our missing suitcase. A lovely bright yellow ribbon that Tim had tied to the handle of the suitcase a year or so ago was the clincher! Several phone calls to JAT Airways over the next couple of days eventually resulted in the suitcase making its way back to us in London! It had had its barcode ripped off somehow and was stuck in Belgrade the whole time - go figure.

Country Tally:

Megan 40

Tim 37

Bear 37