Our visit to Europe’s newest little state went well, and was as relaxing as traveling with a 10-month old to visit a family with a two-year old can possibly be. Montenegro is an interesting place, and I think we made it there at a very interesting transitional moment.
The land itself is what I would imagine the northern Arizona shoreline might look like when California finally breaks off into the ocean. Dry and jagged, with sharp bare mountains that fall straight into the sea. The sun is high and intense, the plants are tough and low. The mountains seem to tower over you everywhere – an effect damn near vertiginous after spending several months in the middle of the Eurasian steppe -- and commanding the entire horizon lies the Adriatic, which in color and temperament seemed much like what I always imagined the Mediterranean would look like.
We never really had a chance to get to know the country very well – our Serbo-Croatian is terrible. We stayed near the coast, which as I gather is quite different than the mountain interior. While the inside sounds like a sort of Balkan Scotland, with mountains and valleys and poor soil and fierce clan loyalties, the coast was a cosmopolitan place. It was variously ruled by the Romans, Byzantines, Turks, Venetians, and Austrians. The old towns up and down the coast are really quite stunning. And since about 20 percent of the newborn nation’s GDP apparently is generated by tourism, it is their economic engine now.
Once you are out of the earshot of Russian tourists, Montenegro is one of those places that makes you think, “hey, how come there aren’t more people here?” One day we drove out to a very long stretch of sandy beach just south of Ulcinje, near the Albanian border. The specific spot we went to was charmingly called “Safari Beach,” and featured a rather sleepy little restaurant with a severe wasp problem and almost nothing on its menu actually available for order as it was the offseason already. I took a walk south on the beach and came to its cousin, “Tropicana Beach,” which was completely closed. All the metal furniture, cheap rattan umbrellas, and lifeguard stations had been stacked up good and tight for the winter. It reminded me in an eerie way of Asbury Park, except in this case, it is not a place whose glory days are behind it, but one that is destined to be profoundly changed in the next few years. Reports are that several major overseas developers were interested in the spot, and soon it will soon rival Turkey and Egypt as Russia’s favorite seashore. Montenegro is just discovering it is a tourist destination, and I get the impression that these mountain people were only passingly aware they had a seacoast until just a few years ago. Whether the willy-nilly property sales and hell-for-leather construction schedules will be to the ultimate good seems to me very unlikely.
And it is a bit of a jarring contrast to the region’s recent sad history. This was the first time I’d ever visited a country that my country had bombed in recent memory, and it was something strangely on my mind through most of my time there. Granted, Montenegro was not targeted during the NATO campaign against Serbia in spring 1999. Still, I could imagine American planes flew through those skies, from ships in that sea, over those hills and mountains. The fuel in their tanks, the bombs under their wings, the salary of their pilots, were all paid for by my tax dollar, and were sent on their way by leaders I had a say in choosing.
It made me a little uncomfortable to arrive at passport control with a whole planeload of Russians, as I handed the officer perhaps the only American passport he’d see in a while amid the veritable stacks of Russian ones. What quarrel does my country have with these people? Was it worth it to pick that fight? With all the mistakes that could have, and did, happen? It seems so when you think about why we did it. For years the former Yugoslavia had been a bloodbath of pent up racial and sectarian tension. The bombing was the west’s final effort to show once and for all that this uncivilized barbarism would have to stop.
We stayed in a house on a hillside just up the valley from the village of Dobra Voda, on the outskirts of a Muslim village. From the balcony we could see in the bottom of the valley a mosque, with its minaret topped by a green spire. Ramadan started while we were there, and we could hear the adhan called each night. The Muslims had been there for centuries, the furthest frontier of a civilization that for centuries was the perfect other in Europe’s vision of itself. And what must the people have thought throughout the 1990s when their government sponsored genocidal death squads murdering Muslim men and boys not an afternoon’s drive away from them? What worries did they face when other Muslim countrymen even closer in Kosovo were in danger of a similar threat?
But I digress, here are a few more pics of the view from where we stayed…
The land itself is what I would imagine the northern Arizona shoreline might look like when California finally breaks off into the ocean. Dry and jagged, with sharp bare mountains that fall straight into the sea. The sun is high and intense, the plants are tough and low. The mountains seem to tower over you everywhere – an effect damn near vertiginous after spending several months in the middle of the Eurasian steppe -- and commanding the entire horizon lies the Adriatic, which in color and temperament seemed much like what I always imagined the Mediterranean would look like.
We never really had a chance to get to know the country very well – our Serbo-Croatian is terrible. We stayed near the coast, which as I gather is quite different than the mountain interior. While the inside sounds like a sort of Balkan Scotland, with mountains and valleys and poor soil and fierce clan loyalties, the coast was a cosmopolitan place. It was variously ruled by the Romans, Byzantines, Turks, Venetians, and Austrians. The old towns up and down the coast are really quite stunning. And since about 20 percent of the newborn nation’s GDP apparently is generated by tourism, it is their economic engine now.
Once you are out of the earshot of Russian tourists, Montenegro is one of those places that makes you think, “hey, how come there aren’t more people here?” One day we drove out to a very long stretch of sandy beach just south of Ulcinje, near the Albanian border. The specific spot we went to was charmingly called “Safari Beach,” and featured a rather sleepy little restaurant with a severe wasp problem and almost nothing on its menu actually available for order as it was the offseason already. I took a walk south on the beach and came to its cousin, “Tropicana Beach,” which was completely closed. All the metal furniture, cheap rattan umbrellas, and lifeguard stations had been stacked up good and tight for the winter. It reminded me in an eerie way of Asbury Park, except in this case, it is not a place whose glory days are behind it, but one that is destined to be profoundly changed in the next few years. Reports are that several major overseas developers were interested in the spot, and soon it will soon rival Turkey and Egypt as Russia’s favorite seashore. Montenegro is just discovering it is a tourist destination, and I get the impression that these mountain people were only passingly aware they had a seacoast until just a few years ago. Whether the willy-nilly property sales and hell-for-leather construction schedules will be to the ultimate good seems to me very unlikely.
And it is a bit of a jarring contrast to the region’s recent sad history. This was the first time I’d ever visited a country that my country had bombed in recent memory, and it was something strangely on my mind through most of my time there. Granted, Montenegro was not targeted during the NATO campaign against Serbia in spring 1999. Still, I could imagine American planes flew through those skies, from ships in that sea, over those hills and mountains. The fuel in their tanks, the bombs under their wings, the salary of their pilots, were all paid for by my tax dollar, and were sent on their way by leaders I had a say in choosing.
It made me a little uncomfortable to arrive at passport control with a whole planeload of Russians, as I handed the officer perhaps the only American passport he’d see in a while amid the veritable stacks of Russian ones. What quarrel does my country have with these people? Was it worth it to pick that fight? With all the mistakes that could have, and did, happen? It seems so when you think about why we did it. For years the former Yugoslavia had been a bloodbath of pent up racial and sectarian tension. The bombing was the west’s final effort to show once and for all that this uncivilized barbarism would have to stop.
We stayed in a house on a hillside just up the valley from the village of Dobra Voda, on the outskirts of a Muslim village. From the balcony we could see in the bottom of the valley a mosque, with its minaret topped by a green spire. Ramadan started while we were there, and we could hear the adhan called each night. The Muslims had been there for centuries, the furthest frontier of a civilization that for centuries was the perfect other in Europe’s vision of itself. And what must the people have thought throughout the 1990s when their government sponsored genocidal death squads murdering Muslim men and boys not an afternoon’s drive away from them? What worries did they face when other Muslim countrymen even closer in Kosovo were in danger of a similar threat?But I digress, here are a few more pics of the view from where we stayed…
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