Montenegro

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We booked a full-day guided excursion to neighbouring Montenegro for Friday (12 May). We had wanted to go To Mostar (Bosnia & Hecegovina) but had missed the excursion 3 times in Split, Korcula island and now Dubrovnik (talk about being suay, we are really very unlucky to have missed Mostar 3 times in a row). So the next best option for us to experience some other place than Croatia is, Montenegro. The excursion cost a whopping 53 Euro each, not including lunch, but as we wont visit Montenegro on its own, this is the best opportunity to go and visit it.

Well, the coach was full of silver-haired european pensioners/retirees and we are the only Asians. The excursion set off from Dubrovnik and drove up the mountain, we drove through 25 hairpins (1 hairpin is 1 curve of the mountain), up a height of 1000m above sea level. The view was spectacular, on one side of the mountain was mediteranean view and on the other side was continental view, it was really amazing to see the contrast in landscape. All you see is vast green meadow, and valleys dotted with small little stone houses.

We visited 3 towns in Montenegro, namely Kostar, Cetini and Budva. A bit of quick Croatian history and geography here (i dont claim to be an expert but this is what i heard from Danica and our tour guide). The ex-Yugoslavia is made up of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia & Montenegro, Bosnia & Hercegovina. The Serbian and the Montegro had attacked the Croats to seize control of the rich coastal area. Whereas the Bosnians had fallen victim to the Serbs due to racial cleansing, as the Serbs in Bosnia had wanted the Bosnians out of their homeland. So there is bad blood between the Croats, Bosnians (the victims) and the Serbian, Montenegrians (the attackers).

Montenegro is not a war-torn country, but there is a stark contrast between the two countries. Croatia has a long coastal area and is beautiful, clean and prosperous whereas Montenegro is a mostly land-locked country and is poor and dirty. Montenegro is still part of Serbia (which is why it is called Serbia & Montenegro), they want to be independent of Serbia, as the money they earn now goes to Belgrade, the Serbian capital.

Montenegro is such a strange land, i just feel kinda funny after visiting it. Here and there you see stone houses in a rubble, half-completed, or abandoned. Although there are vast stretches of green lush meadow, there is just no signs of human activity, there is nobody out there working on the fields, no cattle grazing, no shepherds herding the cattle. You would expect to see someone walking outside on the road, but we only see people in the old town square. It is all so strange, we saw some girls dancing in a trance to the tune of some loud soviet/communist style music blaring from a loud speaker on top of a building in the old town square. The girls are swaying their bodies, some of them even lie down on the ground and wave their hands about, they look like they were doped and in a trance, really. It is not just us, even the european old folks in our tour group stared in disbelief at the sight.

Our tour guide told us a joke about the Montenegro people, which speaks volumes of their nature. There are two people on the beach, one is standing and the other is lying down on the beach. Which do you think is a Montenegrian? The answer is, the one standing, cos he is too lazy to lie down !

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