by My accommodation in the coastal town of Bar was nothing special, and that’s being kind. We had shared toilets. No problem, but where’s the loo paper? Then I realised about a dozen sheets of bog roll had been draped over the side of my bed. He’s staying three nights, so four threes are twelve, yeah, that should do it. The guest house seemed to be in a wind tunnel. It really whistled through.
Thursday morning. I was ravenous. I wolfed down a breakfast, briefly looked round the town that was named after one of the top five things a visitor would want, just to confuse everybody, then I hopped on the bus to Stari Bar, the old town. On the train I’d been warned by the Serbian bloke not to visit the old town because it was “just like the WC”, but off I went to check out the lav. “Lav”, by the way, means “lion” in Serbo-Croat, and is also the name of a common Serbian beer. The English guy who bought a can of Lav on the train thought it was an apt name for the contents. I instead got a can of Jelen, which means “deer”. Anyway, Stari Bar wasn’t anything like this guy suggested, and was very picturesque, even if the steep main street was a little touristy. For two euros I visited the ruins dating back many centuries, where you could wander and climb to your heart’s content, and they weren’t touristy at all. On the main street I wanted to buy some rakija as a present. The lady couldn’t speak English as far as I could tell, so I practised my extremely sketchy Serbian. I wanted to confirm that the price was €6, and the next thing I knew she’d fetched six bottles from around the back, when I only wanted one. I’ve clearly got some work to do. That day was the first day I tasted the quite wonderful figs which were in abundance.
The following day was quite stressful. I was up early and got on the first bus to Ulcinj, a town just along the coast, supposedly with a very good beach. I fancied the idea of spending the day lying on the beach, reading a book, not having to do anything. The bus took 40 minutes, and when I arrived, suddenly half the signs were in Albanian, full of weird and wonderful combinations of Qs and Xs and Ës. Right, now where’s the beach? I asked a lady. The big beach or the small one? I didn’t realise there were two. The big one, I guess. Straight on. It had to be at least three kilometres to the beach, perhaps more. The beach went on for miles and miles, and it was lined with hotels that each had their own blocks of sun loungers. I just wanted to lie on a towel somewhere. Now, where can I leave my stuff? After perhaps an hour of searching for somewhere safe-ish, I left my belongings behind a bar and had a swim, but I could never relax. I spent two hours on the beach, got my stuff, tipped the barman, and trekked back to the bus station. I was glad to get away from there. Back in Bar I ate goulash and drank beer at a basic and wild-looking fig-tree-surrounded eatery called Berlin, which you could also stay at. Heaven knows what that would be like.
On Saturday I checked out of the guest house and got the taxi to the train station. The driver couldn’t speak English; I enjoyed my chance to practise some basic sentences. Or basic words, rather. I’m not at the sentence stage just yet. The train from Bar to the Montegrin capital Podgorica (now there’s a good quiz question) took just over an hour. I was going back along the way I’d come previously, only this time it was daylight. We went past Lake Skadar, which straddles Montenegro and Albania. I had to hang around in Podgorica, and made sure I had a good slap-up lunch, while I waited for my bus to Mostar. My ticket spelled out clearly that my departure was from platform 11, but everybody else seemed to be going from either 10 or 12. I was fine; my bus was just late. We set off half an hour late and after eight hours along slow, winding roads, and another border patrol, I arrived in Mostar. There was some drama along the way as an Italian passenger, also going to Mostar, ranted and raved at the driver in stereotypical Italian fashion, after refusing to let him out at the border for a smoke. “You’re a Russian fascist,” he said.
It was 10pm on a Saturday, and Mostar was buzzing. I didn’t have the faintest clue where I was, however, and my two maps weren’t much help. Which bus station had I just got off at? There were clearly two. Streets weren’t signposted. (This was about as bad as in Bar, where the streets were occasionally signposted, but very confusingly and in about size-8 font.) My guest house, which I found eventually, was down a narrow street called Stupčeva, which means “beehive something” in Romanian. My key was under the left flowerpot, as promised. There’s something quite nerve-wracking about these unmanned, unmarked apartments, but phew, I’d made it.
