The Blue Monkey Review

That meant renting a car and driving, something that will almost always appeal to a Californian. The road in that direction is a minor road in a country of minor roads, but it had hardly any traffic. I had some difficulty dodging farm equipment and rocks on the road. It goes over a mountain ridge, up where snow still covered the ground, but the sun shone and the air was warm. And the scenery continues to surprise me in a good way. Just above Nikšić sits a huge lake. And just beyond the Bosnian border lies a valley so shocking in its size and beauty that I could hardly believe what I saw.

During what people here still simply call “the war,” Bosnia was invaded by forces both from Serbia and Croatia for the not very good reason that both Serbians and Croatians live in Bosnia. (Slobodan Milosevic, then president of Serbia, now stands trial at the Hague for atrocities committed in Bosnia. Dr. Franz Tudjman, Milosevic’s counterpart in Croatia, would be sharing lock-up humor with Slobo if he hadn’t conveniently died. So instead he is memorialized with a modern bridge just outside of Dubrovnik. And, since I’ve already made this detour, the Milosevic trial is broadcast on TV here, every morning.)

Bosnian Serbs managed to force de facto partition of the country. So, when I entered Bosnia I really went into a political Twilight Zone known as Republika Srpska. Crossing Bosnia meant crossing the border out of Montenegro and about 100 meters later crossing a border into Republika Serpska. About an hour later, of course, I drove up to the border of Republika Srpska to exit and then managed to find the border of Croatia another sprint down the road. And, strangely, there was a border to cross somewhere in between all of that, for what I cannot say.

The crossings were everything you could want from border crossings in the Balkans. Suspicious men in uniform took my passport, and my car’s passport, and went into dilapidated guard houses where they did God-knows-what and returned to hand the documents back to me—sometimes stamped, sometimes, mysteriously, left unaltered. Then they raised, by hand, the flimsy gates that protected their nations from illegal immigrants and smuggled cars. How flimsy? These are the gates you see in movies that get rammed through by cars (not trucks) driven by Steve McQueen. At Croatia the border guard (the only woman guard of the day) had trouble keeping the gate from bouncing back up when she lowered it.

Once in Croatia I felt odd, as though I’d driven into a strange new world. A world very much like Europe. Better roads, no litter, signs that made it easy to find my way around. In fact, it was a pleasure to drive in Croatia, even though the roads crossed unforgiving mountains and then hugged the sides of the mountains along the Adriatic. Sorry to get repetitive on you but (ho hum!) the scenery was spectacular.

Still, I had a bit more scenery than I bargained for when I discovered that my hotel was half an hour beyond Dubrovnik. Once I finally reached the place where I needed to go, there was a startling lack of a hotel—just a bus station on the side of the road. I parked, got out and started to look around. Since my cell phone wouldn’t place a call I was pretty much on my own. I walked down the first driveway I would find to a gate, then looked over a fence down into someone’s backyard. People live close to the vertical here, with front stoops perched over the Adriatic. An older woman tending her garden became the first, final, and only nominee as someone to get me out of my mess. I called down to her and after she recovered her balance she only slightly grudgingly took on the task of helping me locate my hotel. And, if you had to ask, she spoke no word of English.

Villa Ratac, where Ruth spent her first night in the Balkans, looks like a dream of a seaside villa. Buildings, furnishings, appliances are all new, all designed for guests. The buildings are faced with white stone, and every room has a huge balcony looking out onto the Adriatic.

When I finally showed up the only other person there was Lukša, the son of the owners, and he quickly showed his excellent training from the American School in Dubrovnik by taking me down to the seaside stone bench and treating me to a beer or two (“It would be impolite for me to drink if you don’t join me,” he told me more than once.) We sat for an hour or more talking as the sun sank into the Adriatic. Although Lukša betrays none of the pessimism that I often find in Montenegrin young people, he shared some views with my students in Nikšić. “Our professors at the American university found it very unusual that we cheated. But here it is natural that if you have the answer you will help your colleague.”

Dubrovnik

I spent the next two days becoming acquainted with Stari Grad (the old city) in Dubrovnik. This is the magnet for tourists, with its wide squares and its placa that runs from the Onofrio Fountain at one end of the city to the clock tower and Orlando column at the other. It’s a city of marble squares and walks, and the best preserved and most impressive city walls in Europe. Ruth and I spent an hour walking around the walls on our day together in the city, helping a woman with vertigo along one scary stretch (but, unfortunately for her, not the only one). The views available both of the city and of the Adriatic are, well, you know, spectacular.

But from the city walls you can see just how extensive the reconstruction in the city has been. Although some rusty looking old tiles still cover some roofs, most of the buildings in the city have new orange red terracotta tiling. During the war Dubrovnik was shelled intensively by forces from Serbia, including forces not only from Montenegro but specifically from Nikšić. When I planned to come here I had more than one warning not to take a car with NK plates. Lukša advised me to park my car and its SCG (Serbia Crna Gora) plates in the family parking area, off of the main highway. “Because you never know—some drunk might come by and who knows?” I was happy to comply. I probably attracted a few hostile looks. The only time I was aware of this was when Ruth and I stopped on the winding cliffside road to look down on Dubrovnik. A health nut walking the narrow verge of the road happened to walk onto the turnoff about this time and ran a very hairy eyeball over the car and us as well. As the three of us ascended the steps at the rear of the turnout he turned on me and started asking about the car. I quickly replied that it was a rental and that no, I wasn’t from Montenegro, that we were “ iz Americke.” He didn’t seem completely satisfied, but whatever language I was speaking it clearly wasn’t Montenegrin.

Dubrovnik was a republic, that is to say an independent city governed by a narrow elite of nobles (only 22 families qualified). It maintained its independence from Hungary, the Turks, and even Venice, and grew rich by trading grain from its hinterland and goods from all over the Levant. As befits a wealthy and Catholic city, it has many churches. I don’t make a practice of visiting every church I see, having filled up my lifetime’s quota for Catholic churches during my study trip to the Holy Land fifteen years ago. I was not particularly impressed with by St. Blaise Church or by the Cathedral, though I’m happy to report that the Cathedral is not packed with Baroque wares and that it even contains some contemporary art. But neither had anything to compate to the retablo at the Mission Inn, in Riverside.

[There is a Serbian Orthodox church in Dubrovnik. Since Rebecca West wrote in the 1930s at some length that the city authorities had managed to exclude Orthodox churches in spite of pressure from their Russian allies, I have to assume the Serbian church was built during the Communist era. If so, that would have to count as high irony.]

There is an ethnographic museum in what had been the city granary. I can’t urge you to part with the entrance fee to see the collection of early 20th century traditional garb. What I found more interesting was the building itself. Grain was dried on the top floor and then poured through holes in the lower floors into huge storage bins below.

Ruth and I also explored the Rector palace. The nobles had such a fear of losing their status to a single ruler that the leadership of the community went to a nobleman elected by the city senate, but the Rector served for only one month. And during that time, he had to remain in the palace (which also housed the city prison), leaving only for ceremonial functions and with the permission of the senate.

The Montenegrin Riviera

We returned to Nikšić (“home”) by driving south along the coast. It isn’t far until you are leave Croatia and return to Montenegro. The roads deteriorate immediately, and what had been a difficult road in Croatia becomes a tortuous one in Montenegro, winding along the coast with nary a culvert or tunnel to straighten the stretch. When we finally did come to a tunnel, just outside Kotor, it turned into an ordeal all its own. I know that my associates living in the Northeast U.S. will think “Squirrel Hill” or “Lincoln” when I say tunnel. Better to envision something from Journey to the Center of the Earth. This one looks to have been carved from the rock and then left unfinished, though the tunnel had so little lighting I couldn’t be sure. And it didn’t just leak in places from the melting snow and porous rock—water poured into the darkness and made it all the harder to tell if we were about to drive over rough spots in the road or into the mother of potholes. Since drivers in front of me swerved into the opposing lane to avoid some of these spots, I swerved behind them.

We also made a little detour finding our hotel, the Bokeljski Dvori in Prcanj (recommended by a friend who teaches German here in Nikšić, and quite a good value with fantastic views of Kotor Bay). We passed our turn, and in what by now should make my hair stand on end and my throat contrict to choke the sounds, I uttered the words, “It looks about as far on the map to go the other way as it would be to turn back.” I’m sure the distances were comparable, but the new route put us onto a road that snaked around blind hairpins and squeezed between the bay on one side and front doors of houses on the other. In Greensburg, PA, it would have made a narrow alley or a decent sized bike path. Need I add that traffic ran both ways?

We spent the next morning in Kotor, once a Venetian city and at times an independent city. It sits on the bay that bears its name, also the only fjord in southern Europe. Here the geography is more unforgiving than even at Dubrovnik. To remain independent the city built fortifications up the hill behind the walled city, probably as much to protect it from the Montenegrin tribespeople as from attacks by sea. You reach the fortress of St. John by walking to the rear of Stari Grad and find the stairs. And then you just keep going up. We climbed for about an hour to reach the top of the fortifications, the place where you can look out the back window of the fort and see that what runs behind the city is a ridge and not the side of a mountain. The ravine would also be a fjord if it had filled with water.

It surprised me how unreconstructed the fortress was. Many parts of the wall that runs alongside the path have crumbled away, and there are lots of areas that would make a mother with a small child more than a little anxious. In one or two places you see relatively new concrete, and there is a decades old steel bridge that crosses into the main part of the fortress. For the fortress, this bridge counts as more or less up to date. Parts of the bridge plates have fallen off and we both assumed that we would not see if it could hold both of us at once. Nothing about the fortress had been redone to make it tourist friendly or attractive. In other words, it was a great place to poke around in. Ruth and I had the place to ourselves.

The fortress makes Kotor special. Thecity also has some beach areas, though nothing to compare with cities further south. In other respects, it is a nice tourist getaway, and we saw lots of tour groups and independent tourists. Only in Kotor (so far) have I seen the kind of overpriced objects that you might want to take away with you as a memory of your time here. Souvenirs have a kind of charisma, and as it happens some of the most attractive objects were small icons available in the Serbian Orthodox church in Stari Grad.

From Kotor we took the road back to Nikšić, following the coast to Budva then east over the mountains through Cetinje and finally turning north at Podgorica. Early in the afternoon we stopped at Restoran Ognjište, one that I’ve seen from the road many times. A friend had recommended it. I need to reconsider that friendship. The restaurant was a kind of Montenegrin theme park in miniature, what the owners of Texas Roadhouse might do with a Confederate-themed restaurant if they had complete freedom of design and lacked all sense of taste. The restaurant evoked (I guess) the rugged Montenegrin spirit in a cave-like setting. Construction materials included brick, stone, timber, woven wood, rope, iron, and I’m sure other things I couldn’t catalogue. It is the kind of place where menus are handwritten on leather pages. It sits next to a small river with a boat-like building at “anchor,” and just generally looked like a complete mess. Prices were high (for here anyway—about what you might expect at Olive Garden), service extremely attentive though stuffy.

So, the adventure continues. For Ruth, it is just beginning. She keeps a journal of her own online, so you can check there for another source of the truth.