A good deal later

[RH] Not only can I not be accused of being terribly regular about my postings, I've also left a number of them hanging with a "to be continued" tag. And I think I've gone back and continued, like, none of them.

Anyway, since that great little trip up Rugova Gorge in the last post, we've taken a couple of longer jaunts over to the coast of Montenegro. The first time was in early June, when my mom was visiting. And just a couple of days ago, Chelle and I (and Hazel, of course) got back from another trip over there. This was our swan-song Kosovo trip, as she and Hazel went back to Seattle yesterday. The story of our drive to the airport in Prishtina at just after 4 AM is worth visiting itself, but I want to stay focused here.

For our trip back in June, we had rented a VW Passat wagon from the "Global Development" car rental (etc.) place. By U.S. standards, rental cars are ridiculously expensive over here. And the gas ain't too cheap either, naturally. But with my mom and Hazel, a car rental was the only way to go. And we liked it enough that we went back over to Prishtina* to rent another Passat from the same place for our most recent trip. The first time around, someone had recommended Budva -- on the north-central stretch of Montenegro's Adriatic coast. From there, you're basically looking out toward the east central coast of Italy ... and in fact if you climb some of the highest mountains in the coastal range, you can actually see Italy on a clear day, or so our guidebook claims.

The coast around Budva is phenomenal: Various shades of turquoise water that feels silky on your skin, lots of tidal caves to swim into, a rugged cliff coastline with little coves of sandy beaches. And Budva itself is very appealing, with a quaint old walled town right on the water, mostly rebuilt after being destroyed in the 1979 earthquake; but a few old original structures remain, and the ancient stones and materials from the ruins were salvaged for the rebuild, of course. Just feels so European after Kosovo ... but not at all obnoxiously trendy. Speaking of trendy, we'd actually wanted to go to Dubrovnik, about 80 or 90 kilometers north of Budva, on the Croatian coast. Now there's a great old walled city, one that survived not only the earthquake but pretty intense shelling during the roving wartime of the '90s. But with our limited time frame (about five days for each trip, including a beautiful but grueling drive through the mountains to get there and back), we just didn't want to go the extra miles.

On our way back to Prishtina with my mom on the first trip, we went south from Budva through the resort village of Petrovac. It was the one day of our visit that turned out to be chilly and drizzling, so it was nicely timed that we were leaving. But even so, we were charmed by the empty waterfront on a Sunday morning. We walked a little along the in-town beach, bought a few knick-knacks from a cute little tourist dive, stopped into a real workingclass cafe up the slope from the beach area to use the bathroom (and ended up drinking tea while the other patrons drank the regional rakia and grappa). And when we drove the high road out of the area, we could see that the next cove below Petrovac was bordered immediately inland by this lush, subtropical bamboo and grass savannah region. And except for what looked like some minuscule development on the very north end of that cove, the beach appeared deserted and inaccessible except by foot. I wanted to go down there and check it out -- I thought it looked like the outback fringe of a pineapple plantation abutting a deserted beach on a volcanic island -- but by that time we were a couple thousand feet above it, on the small road that went over the summit and down to Podgorica to the east.

I'm glad to say this glorified driveby of Petrovac wasn't a waste of time. Not that it would've been even if we'd never come back for a longer stay, but in this case, we did. When we arrived back in the area last week, we could immediately see that August was different from June. This was high season in a big way ... the hordes (including us) had descended. We drove north along the coast from where we'd exited the big new EU-funded tunnel through the next-to-last blip of the coastal range. And after several kilometers, we looked down toward the water and saw that we were right above the "pineapple plantation" savannah. We took the next exit and found ourselves on the main street of a little tourist village -- the place I'd perceived as a bit of minuscule development on the cove below Petrovac. The first thing we did was find a place to park, whereupon we got out and joined the pedestrian masses wandering about after a day at the beach.


* Since my last post, we moved for the summer to the city of Prizrin, about 60 miles south of Prishtina.