A couple of weeks ago I went to Bulgaria, to see Lilly again. Together we made a roadtrip to Montenegro. Here's a short summary of my trip.
I arrived in Sofia on a Friday afternoon. Lilly picked me up from the airport and we went to her place. In the evening we would have dinner at her parents' house and the next day we would go to her family's village house in the mountains. The dinner, my first meeting with her parents, went quite well. Her Albanian father welcomed me with a glass of rakija. I drank it at a reasonable speed and answered all of his questions (what do you do for a living? what do your parents do for a living?) to his satisfaction, so it seemed like I was approved before we even started eating. They had prepared several dishes because they didn't know if I would like everything, but in the end I ate a lot from all of the food they made.
The trip to the village the next day was a real challenge: suddenly it had started to snow and since it was the first snowy day of the year nobody was prepared for it. But after some delay in the early afternoon, we could travel to the village safely on mostly cleaned roads. Even the most crappy village roads had been cleaned:
Oh, and in the village Lilly made a pretty bad-ass picture of me. Those boots were not mine by the way, because obviously I didn't expect to have such weather conditions in October when I packed my bag. But I am considering to buy boots like that now. They look quite manly:
On Monday the weather was better and we started our trip to Montenegro. We took the shortest route that didn't pass through Kosovo and Albania (crazy traffic there) and ended up on a very high mountain pass near Novi Pazar in Serbia. Since we were above the clouds there, I could take some nice pictures:
After 12 hours on the road we reached Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, at around 6pm. While searching for a parking place we got pulled over by a fat man in a t-shirt who said he was from the civil police. He said we were driving in an area where it was not allowed and said we needed to pay him 10 euros or we would get a fine of 100 euros. We made clear that we wouldn't pay anything until he showed us his badge (it's in my car! it's in my car!) and in the end he drove away without getting any money from us. It was unfortunately not the only time somebody in Montenegro tried to rip us off. At a gas station one day later the woman behind the counter tried to charge 66 euros on my creditcard, even though I had clearly seen that the meter indicated 56 euros. The fact that the lady admitted her "mistake" without even looking at the meter revealed that this was not an honest mistake...
We visited Podgorica the next morning (there's not that much to see) and we drove to Kotor via the Shkoder-lake and Budva. Kotor is a lovely coastal village, with an even more lovely old town. It has a mountain right next to it, from which you can have wonderful views, like for example this one:
Kotor is really worth a visit if you ask me. It's nicer than most Croatian coastal cities, less touristic and a lot cheaper too!
Since the road between Bulgaria and Montenegro via Serbia was long and not nice enough to drive for a second time in one week, we decided to drive back through Albania (where Lilly was a bad girl again, overtaking a truck where it wasn't allowed and getting caught by the police doing so; luckily the policeman was very friendly and liked that Lilly had an Albanian father so he let us go with just a warning) and Macedonia and spend a night in Ohrid. We both had visited Ohrid before, but I only was there once in bad weather conditions. So it was nice to visit this place again. And it was certainly a nicer ending to our trip than another 12 hours on a road we had seen before!
I arrived in Sofia on a Friday afternoon. Lilly picked me up from the airport and we went to her place. In the evening we would have dinner at her parents' house and the next day we would go to her family's village house in the mountains. The dinner, my first meeting with her parents, went quite well. Her Albanian father welcomed me with a glass of rakija. I drank it at a reasonable speed and answered all of his questions (what do you do for a living? what do your parents do for a living?) to his satisfaction, so it seemed like I was approved before we even started eating. They had prepared several dishes because they didn't know if I would like everything, but in the end I ate a lot from all of the food they made.
The trip to the village the next day was a real challenge: suddenly it had started to snow and since it was the first snowy day of the year nobody was prepared for it. But after some delay in the early afternoon, we could travel to the village safely on mostly cleaned roads. Even the most crappy village roads had been cleaned:
Oh, and in the village Lilly made a pretty bad-ass picture of me. Those boots were not mine by the way, because obviously I didn't expect to have such weather conditions in October when I packed my bag. But I am considering to buy boots like that now. They look quite manly:
On Monday the weather was better and we started our trip to Montenegro. We took the shortest route that didn't pass through Kosovo and Albania (crazy traffic there) and ended up on a very high mountain pass near Novi Pazar in Serbia. Since we were above the clouds there, I could take some nice pictures:
After 12 hours on the road we reached Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, at around 6pm. While searching for a parking place we got pulled over by a fat man in a t-shirt who said he was from the civil police. He said we were driving in an area where it was not allowed and said we needed to pay him 10 euros or we would get a fine of 100 euros. We made clear that we wouldn't pay anything until he showed us his badge (it's in my car! it's in my car!) and in the end he drove away without getting any money from us. It was unfortunately not the only time somebody in Montenegro tried to rip us off. At a gas station one day later the woman behind the counter tried to charge 66 euros on my creditcard, even though I had clearly seen that the meter indicated 56 euros. The fact that the lady admitted her "mistake" without even looking at the meter revealed that this was not an honest mistake...
We visited Podgorica the next morning (there's not that much to see) and we drove to Kotor via the Shkoder-lake and Budva. Kotor is a lovely coastal village, with an even more lovely old town. It has a mountain right next to it, from which you can have wonderful views, like for example this one:
Kotor is really worth a visit if you ask me. It's nicer than most Croatian coastal cities, less touristic and a lot cheaper too!
Since the road between Bulgaria and Montenegro via Serbia was long and not nice enough to drive for a second time in one week, we decided to drive back through Albania (where Lilly was a bad girl again, overtaking a truck where it wasn't allowed and getting caught by the police doing so; luckily the policeman was very friendly and liked that Lilly had an Albanian father so he let us go with just a warning) and Macedonia and spend a night in Ohrid. We both had visited Ohrid before, but I only was there once in bad weather conditions. So it was nice to visit this place again. And it was certainly a nicer ending to our trip than another 12 hours on a road we had seen before!
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