Sailing at 7 Knots: Montenegro- A New Country

Montenegro only became a country in 2007. Prior to this date it had been part of Serbia. The twentieth century witnessed scrambling for territory leading to wars and attempted genocide in the 1990s in the Balkans, in Bosnia. Entering a new country is always exciting: what new things would we see.

My own experience of Yugoslavs was being married into a Slovene family. For over 20 years I had intimate knowledge of some of the attitudes of post WW2 migrant Yugoslavs. But they never saw themselves as Yugoslav. They were and are Slovenian first. Yugoslavia was only a new country too, in a historical sense being born after WW1. In Australia there are people from most of the former Yugoslav states: in the main Slovenia, Serbia , Croatia and Macedonia. Tito held these states together and when he died and eastern Europe was collapsing Yugoslavia also broke up. Serbia then invaded Slovenia, Croatia and most infamously Bosnia. The government of Serbia was determined to prevent the dissolution of what it believed to be it's territory. I remember my mother in law saying in the 80s, when I visited Slovenia, that there was a move to make Serbian the official language. This was not well received by the small Slovene community. The nationalistic fervor felt by the residents of all states to their own state was to prove to be a force as Serbian imperialism was thwarted by them. Former Yugoslav states were not about to give up their independence: just as they had received it.

So what was this disparate group of countries to be like now in 2015.

Montenegro is the first of the former Yugoslavia we will visit. Magnificent scenary is the impression one gets as you sail along their coastline. Albania had been severe and lacking in ports for us. Our first entry port was Bar. From here we sailed to Budva.

We anchored near St Stephens Church, built on an island, now connected by an isthmus, human made, to the mainland. Tito organized the construction of resort style life here, I imagine for his apparatchics. It is beautiful. Montenegro has a population of only 600,000. The yachting fraternity have discovered it and so have other tourists. Unfortunately this, in my view, has led to unfettered development along their coastline near sites like Bar.

St Stephan's Island Montenegro

Budva is an UNESCO World Heritage site. I was so looking forward to seeing the fortress. But economics has won and the site is festooned by bright lights and all the buildings inside are shops. It reminded me of Santorini and Rhodes: where tourists travel the glitz does as well. We destroy what we seek to find. All these comments certainly don’t mean we don’t enjoy being here, but it further supports our observation that tourism is a gift to the economies and a curse. We try to see beyond the glitter and see the geography, the history , the people beneath the layer. But as travellers our “tourist glitz” censors are heightened. Seeking difference is probably why we did enjoy Albania: it hasn’t really been discovered yet.