Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
h at night in Mostar, as the teenagers ripped it up at their dance halls, I
lay in bed sorting out my impressions. Until the wee hours, a birthday party
raged in the restaurant outside my window. For hours they sang songs. At
i rst I was annoyed. h en I realized that a Bosniak “Beach Boys” party beats
a night of shelling. In two hours of sing-alongs, everyone seemed to know all
the words...and I didn't recognize a single tune. In spite of all its challenges
and setbacks, I have no doubt that this Bosnian culture will rage on.
Cetinje: Monks, Track Suits, and Europe's Worst Piano
Leaving Mostar, I drove over patched mortar craters in the pavement. In
Sarajevo, they've i lled these scars with red concrete to make them memorials.
h ey call them “Sarajevo roses.” Here the roses were black like the rest of the
street—but after my Mostar experience, they showed up red in my mind.
Circling back to Dubrovnik, I drove south to yet another new nation
that emerged from the ashes of Yugoslavia: Montenegro. During my trav-
els through this region, my punch-drunk passport would be stamped and
stamped and stamped. While the unii cation of Europe has made most
border crossings feel archaic, the breakup of Yugoslavia has kept them in
vogue here. Every time the country splintered, another border was set up.
h e poorer the country, it seems, the more ornate the border formalities.
And by European standards, Montenegro is about as poor as it gets. h ey
don't even have their own currency. With just 600,000 people, they decided,
heck, let's just use euros.
For me, Montenegro, whose name means “Black Mountain,” has always
evoked the fratricidal chaos of a bygone age. I think of a time when fathers in
the Balkans taught their sons that “your neighbor's neighbor is your friend” in
anticipation of future sectarian struggles. When, for generation after generation,
so-and-so-ovich was pounding on so-and-so-ovich (in Slavic names, “-ovich”
means “son,” like Johnson), a mountain stronghold was worth the misery.
My recent visit showed me that this image is now dated, the country is
on an upward trajectory, and many expect to see Montenegro emerging as a
sunny new hotspot on the Adriatic coastline.
Most tourists stick to Montenegro's scenic and increasingly glitzy Bay
of Kotor, where the Adriatic cuts into the steep mountains like a Norwegian
j ord. But—inspired by my back-roads Bosnian experience—I was eager
to get of the beaten path and headed deep into the rugged interior of the
“Black Mountain.”
