Travel with Indigo

With a population of less than 700,000 and a land area slightly smaller than Connecticut, this is the least consequential of the Balkans countries, yet it is also undoubtedly the most scenic, a miniature impecunious version of Austria. “Wild Beauty” is the national tourism slogan, and that it surely has. Its coastline, just 180 miles long, is renowned for steep cliffs, fine beaches and translucent waters, its interior for craggy mountains, Alpine lakes and primeval forests.

As the primary port of entry, and primary port, the city of Bar, though invitingly named, is a jarring contradiction to the country’s beauty. One of my guidebooks, whose intended readers are youthful backpackers and so less fussy than I, says, with a gift for understatement, “Bar is unlikely to be anyone’s holiday highlight.” It will appeal to those whose tastes run in the direction of Soviet era architecture.

At the heart of the busy town center are three adjacent, identical concrete structures that closely resemble gigantic upside down toilet bowl plunger cups and exude all the playful charm of an abattoir. The part of their concrete that has not fallen away revealing rusty rebar, is badly worn, moldy and needs paint. The retail shops the plunger cups are there to house need tenants and their glass storefronts and paved walkways need cleaning. Much of the rest of the city reflects a similar state of dereliction, and as a result, our stay there was brief.

For our next stop, we chose the beach resort town of Budva and there secured dockage along the quay in the old town. Just a few steps away were a sliver of beach frequented by locals and a smart bar/restaurant there to accommodate them. Across the way was the old town itself, a former medieval trading center now converted, like all such old towns in the Med, to a shopping and entertainment center.

Not more than fifty yards away begins a great arc of beachfront on which are some twenty or more bars, restaurants, coffee shops and the like, all poised for the summer season to begin. As in the Greek islands, the beach consists entirely of pebbles of various sizes giving its shore the appearance of a paid out gravel pit.

While sitting on the aft deck, a parade of people passing by on their way to and from the beach distracted me from a book I was trying to read. Of those in the parade, I noticed two uncommon and glaringly obvious features. The first was that the women were young, minimally clad and stunningly attractive, leading me at first to believe that the quay to which we had tied must be the site of the Miss Montenegro Pageant now evidently well underway. Thus did I come to learn a fact the entire male population of the planet, with the lone exception of yours truly, already knew: Serbian (including Montenegren) women are among the most beautiful in the world.

The other feature of this parade was that everybody in it, including males, were much taller than any group I had ever seen before. It was as if the national basketball teams had chosen this place and time to go for a swim. Curious, I consulted Wikipedia on my handy iPhone and found the answer. The people who populate the areas around the Dinaric Alps of the western Balkans are the tallest in the world. The average height of a man there is six feet one and a half inches, and the women are not far behind. My supposed basketball teams were just average folks.

Just south of Budva is wooded parkland connected by a short causeway to a tiny island densely packed with terracotta-roofed, two-story vintage dwellings, which when work is complete will become one of the finest five star resort hotels in Europe. Once the favored hotel of Sophia Loren, Doris Day and Queen Elizabeth II, it fell into disrepair during the Yugoslav Republic (along with much else) but soon will be restored to its former excellence. Called Sveti Stefan (Saint Stephen), it is a slice of Mediterranean heaven surrounded by the sun-spangled Adriatic, with oleanders, pines and olive trees scenting the air. Cool place.

One of the country’s deficiencies is finer hotels. Once the current Troubles are behind us all, this will remedy in due course as Western hotels begin to sprout up. In the meantime, the Sveti Stefan is the best option when it opens. Others include a few resort hotels in and near Budva and Herceg Novi and the large collection of hotels in nearby Dubrovnik. Away from the coast, there are none above three stars (two stars by US standards), especially in the mountains of the far north where the adventuresome traveler will want to go.

On our last night in Budva, some of the crew and I attended the season opening of a popular tiki bar featuring an authentic Brazilian samba band. There I met Serbs, Greeks, Brits, Russians, Croats, Swedes, and Germans and a black girl from North Carolina and her Swedish husband. Apart from her, I was the only American, the only man with gray hair and as usual the earliest to leave. From my brief encounter with its nightlife, I sensed the town is one that mature adults should avoid in the season. Raffish and very much a beach resort town, it still was a fun place and worth a visit.

Among the people of Montenegro, and those of Bosnia and Croatia too, there is an evident disinclination to work. Proud people, they take particular pride in this relaxed approach to daily life and joke about it, a humor captured nicely in the following witticisms I encountered there.

• Man is born tired and lives to get a rest.
• Love thy bed as you love yourself.
• Rest during the day so you can sleep at night.
• When you see people eat and drink, approach them. When you see them work, withdraw yourself not to trouble them.
• If you see someone resting, help him out.

The Yugoslav Wars
As it turned out, I remained in the western Balkans for nearly four months, time enough to form some lasting impressions, to learn a bit about the confusing amalgam of ethnicity and religion and to grasp what happened in the Yugoslav War of 1991 to 1995. For succinct articles on the subjects, consult Wikipedia on The Yugoslav Wars, The Siege of Sarajevo, The Siege of Dubrovnik and The Siege of Vukovar. These, all with links to still more articles, will give you a firm grasp of the warring parties and their motives.

The mix of people in this region is at first bewildering, but after awhile I began to make some sense of it, and here is my take, though keep in mind that I have omitted lots of exceptions and variations in the interest of simplicity.

To begin with, most all citizens of the upper Balkans—those with whom we are concerned here—are of Slavic descent and speak essentially the same language with minor variations, called Serbo-Croatian. Slovenes, the lone exception, are Slavs but have their own language. As often true throughout world history, religion cleaves the people into warring factions, a divide widened still further by the inexplicable affinity of Serbs for a totalitarian state and the unsurprising affinity of the Croats, Bosnians and Slovenes for democracy and freedom.

When I use the term Serb it means those who either come from or identify with the ethnicity and worldview of the Serbian people of the country of Serbia. Though these live predominately in that country, they also live in all of the nearby countries of the Balkans, sometimes, as in Croatia, in heavy concentrations.

Montenegrins are close siblings of Serbians and indeed only recently separated from a political union of the two. Like Serbians, Montenegrins are Eastern Orthodox, have a long tradition of close alignment with Russia and until recently had affection for Communism. They were historically Eastern in their outlook, xenophobic, and regretted the passing of the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslav Republic.

In recent years, however, under new leadership the country has seen the light, disavowed Communism and its relationship with Serbia, aligned itself with the West and enacted Western free market, low tax, and small government ideals. It is today a country poised for dramatic economic achievement, most notably in tourism.

Montenegrins and Serbians are at the personal level distant and unreceptive to strangers. I sought many times to make eye contact with them but never succeeded. Even among the well-lubricated customers of a bar, I sensed tolerance but not welcome.

An incident in Budva makes the point. A bar I attended in the old town was crowded, so much so that I could not get the bartender’s attention nor even squeeze myself up to it. Standing next to me was a young Serbian man occupying more of the bar than he needed. Between him and his neighbor was room for me but he had placed his drink in front of that space as if to capture it for himself. I tried to gain his eye contact and tried by word and gesture to suggest that he move his drink to a position more directly in front of him. He declined to respond or even to acknowledge my presence, so, affecting an inoffensive manner, I took hold of his drink and moved it a foot. (It is no simple matter to move a man’s drink in an inoffensive manner, and in this attempt, I may have failed.) Not bothering to look at me or say a word, he moved it back. He was half my age, a full head taller and had the physique and bearing of a soldier. He also seemed to have a disposition easily inclined to homicide.

As I thought about it, he might have indeed been a soldier in the recent wars, and if so, it was likely that an F-16 with “U.S. Air Force” painted on its side had bombed or strafed him, an experience that would understandably dampen his affection for Americans.

Nothing similar to this has happened to me before in any country I have visited, with the exception of countries in the UAE. My guidebooks and talks with other travelers confirm that this was not an aberrant experience.

Croatians and Slovenians, by contrast, are far more affable. They are predominately Roman Catholic, subscribe to Western liberal traditions and are friendly toward the West. I frequently heard Croats say they were not like those “Easterners”, meaning Serbs. During the Yugoslav Wars, Croatia came to the aide of Bosnians fighting the Serbs (although they are said to have done so mainly for profit, a fact that still irritates the Bosnians as well as the Serbs), yet soon enough turned on each other.

Just to make things complicated, there are the Muslims. These predominate in Albania, Kosovo and a major part of Bosnia but also live in scattered towns all over the Balkans. They align with neither West nor East but with the world of Islam, though they are far more tolerant than are the Muslims of the Arabian Peninsula (excluding the kind-hearted people of Oman). Walking around in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, you would hardly know you were in a Muslim country, save for a few older women in headscarves. Even the mosques are modest buildings that blend into the neighborhoods, quite unlike the grand structures of the Arab world.

Long a snake pit of irreconcilable religious and ethnic hatred and wracked by wars (see, e.g. The First and Second Balkans Wars of 1912 and 1913), the Balkans of today is little different. After the collapse of Tito’s Yugoslav Republic, Serbia appointed itself its successor and went about trying forcibly to incorporate its neighbors into a Communist Greater Serbian Nation over which it would have hegemony. In democratic votes, each of the countries roundly spurned Serbia’s attempts and instead embraced Western liberal values and freedom. The Serbian army and its paramilitary forces, aided by Montenegro, attacked these upstart breakaways in a failed attempt to subdue them. After a great deal of bloodshed and numerous ethnic atrocities over a period spanning four years, the Serbian army and its allies were routed with US and NATO assistance. A precarious peace brokered by the US in 1995 still holds.

Most of the Serb leaders responsible for launching the war and perpetrating its atrocities are today serving long prison terms, only because the death penalty is unfortunately out of favor in Europe. Better yet, there is widespread recognition by all the parties that they must repair and rebuild their economies by attracting Western investment and that to do this they must put an end to their incessant quarrels. How long that holds is anybody’s guess. The region’s pit remains filled with angry snakes.

As I say, this rough thumbnail sketch of events leaves out many important details but captures the essence sufficiently to inform the discussions that follow. For more, see the Wikipedia articles cited above.

The Bay of Kotor
Few places in the world are as sublime as the Bay of Kotor, often described as Europe’s most spectacular fjord. Its rugged mountainous shore, opalescent waters, colorful subtropical gardens and ancient terracotta roofed villages give it the air of a fantasyland and rank it, along with the Gulf of Corinth, among the most captivating bodies of water I have ever seen.

To get there, we traveled north from Budva along Montenegro’s scenic mountainous coast lined with high cliffs and rocky headlands and, at the Bay’s opening into the Adriatic, turned in to its narrow entry constricted by converging peninsulas. The bay, shaped roughly as an hourglass, consists of an outer and an inner bay separated by a narrow stricture. Once inside the outer bay, the entry peninsulas hide the Adriatic from view giving the beguiling effect of being in a large inland lake surrounded by steep hills, rocky shores and, in the distance, high mountains.

Our first stop was the delightful town of Herceg Novi. Plastered onto the face of an exceedingly steep hill, bougainvillea, oleander, and flowering cacti garland its buildings and lanes and enormous date palms line its waterfront. This verdant subtropical landscape suggests South Florida, yet the mountains just behind the city are dappled in snow well into late spring. I know of no other place where subtropical plants flourish so near snow-covered mountains.

The town square sits at the top of a very long, steep series of stairs or, if you prefer, at the end of a short taxi ride, and at night it is buzzing with activity around the numerous outdoor cafes, coffee bars and swank shops. Walk up another flight of stairs, through an ancient stone archway and you come upon a tiny plaza on which is a pleasing old Orthodox chapel still used today and thoughtfully surrounded by al fresco bars and restaurants. From the plaza looking out over the Bay, the views are spectacular and grow more so with each sip of rakija, a fortified brandy of undisclosed ingredients, which is drunk neat or applied to the skin as an effective antifungal agent.

Along the shore is a pedestrian walk connecting many of the surrounding lakefront villages on which the locals promenade each evening beginning around 6pm, taking in the night air and practicing their impressive skills at avoiding eye contact with outsiders. Despite the aloofness of its natives, Herceg Novi remains one of my favorite places in all of the western Balkans.

Kotor Old Town
From Herceg Novi on the outer bay, we passed through narrow straits into the more compact inner bay. Here, mountains, gray and treeless in the distance, steep hills swathed in subtropical greenery and timeless villages stand mute as they have for centuries.

Just as I was certain it could not get better, that surely I had seen all the best the bay could offer, we rounded a turn into an arm at the end of which stands the remarkable old town of Kotor. Up close, it is like so many old towns, built of time worn stone blocks, walled in against predatory raiders and now humming with shoppers and tourists. From our vantage, though, it took on a different character. Although the town is directly on the bay’s shore, a nearly vertical wall of bare scabrous mountain rises immediately behind it giving the scene a theatrical quality unlike any place I have seen before. I suggest you consult the town’s website and view the photos. You will see what I mean. Better yet, go there.

Old Towns in General
Since arriving in the Med, I have encountered countless towns and cities whose primary appeal to tourists is found in what I have been referring to as an old town. Built most commonly from about 1000 to 1500 AD, roughly in the middle and late years of the Medieval Period, some expanded well into the eighteenth century. They invariably feature a high surrounding wall with crenellations, moats, heavy gates and other devices to discourage invaders and are built of limestone quarried nearby.

The earliest structures used unfinished stones mortared into place, while later versions used milled stones. Laneways are paved in cobbles of the same stone, most worn smooth over time, and vary in width from about twelve feet to as little as six feet. Buildings are usually three to five floors high, built close together (thus the narrow laneways) except where more widely separated to make room for plazas, have pitched roofs of terra cotta tiles, and few, small window openings always with simple slatted shutters. Later structures exhibit some refinements, like articulation and relief at window and door openings and at eaves, done in the vernacular of the dominant occupants at the time. All of them have churches or cathedrals and small chapels.

The best old towns I encountered were in Vienna, Florence, Rhodes, Palma (Mallorca), Zagreb and Dubrovnik. Others of note are Hvar, Rovinj and Split in Croatia, Herceg Novi and Kotor in Montenegro, Hania on the island of Crete, St. Tropez on the Cote D’Azur and Barcelona. The best exclude all traffic other than pedestrian, are immaculate, and have tasteful signage for shops, streets and plazas. They have also resisted slathering over the original stone facades with stucco in a misguided effort to modernize their appearance.

Much of the appeal of these old towns comes in the absence of vehicle traffic and in the narrow, winding labyrinth of lanes offering surprises around nearly every corner. Wandering around aimlessly in old towns, taking in the sights and smells, stopping for a coffee or meal in some open-air plaza is a true delight. They are even more appealing at night when illumination gives them still more character and the plazas are crowded with people in a festive mood.