July 23, 2012
A day at the seaside: Dubrovnik - Lovcen (Montenegro)
WE ARE HITCHHIKING to Albania, the two smiling Belgians told us. They'd watched us wheel our loaded bikes on the ferry that bridges the few hundred metres of an inlet and they turned as we disembarked to wave upright thumbs not to seek lifts but to give us encouragement.
One was tall and would have denied he had ginger hair. His skin was pale and his nose slightly hooked, as though it could serve as a rudder in the wind. His friend was shorter with darker hair. Both wore shorts with sandals over bare feet. They had taken off sturdy shoes during the crossing.
'We've hitched from Belgium,' one said. 'It's gone pretty well.' He named their target for tonight but it meant nothing and I resisted the temptation to unfold the map to find it. We were in the loading lanes for cars and coaches and our conversation came to a halt when a burly Slovenian drove his white bus slowly towards us in the not unreasonable hope that we would get out of his way.
I reflected at our camp-site down the road that hitchers revel in traffic. They depend on it. Cyclists avoid it. And avoid it we did today, as best we could. We had to ride the coast road for a while but the traffic was good natured and the trucks we had seen from our room seemed to have stopped in Dubrovnik.
We rode as far as the small airport 10km to the city's edge and then turned off. Not too soon, either, not because of the traffic but because the road had been reduced to rubble. And a sign warned it was likely to stay that way for 20km.
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'This is Croatia's plot to sabotage Montenegro's tourist industry,' Steph joked. 'Anybody arriving at the airport will be forced to turn right into Croatia rather than left and across the border. And at the height of the tourist season, too.'
The rubble reduced everybody to jogging speed. The secondary road we had always planned to take to the right would have been only a little longer and have been smooth and just about deserted. But drivers are prisoners of habit or their GPS and they stuck to the broken road regardless. Which was fine because we saw a car every 15 minutes and rode a quiet if hilly road through villages little larger than their names and, for the first time, through untouristed Croatia.
Not that the country let us go without a chuckle. For two kilometres before the border our own road was reduced to rubble in turn. It seemed so improbable that we stopped to check the map and a Swiss driver in a white car halted to ask 'Vous cherchez...'
There was a row going on as we left Croatia. A fat woman in uniform, sitting at a table, was shouting at a man in the doorway. We stopped as the sign demanded and she looked up as surprised as she was embarrassed and waved us on so she could continue bickering when we were out of hearing.
The welcome to Montenegro was less eventful, a young man in brown uniform taking our passports into his hut to stamp. That left the descent to Herceg Novi, or New Castle, a place supposed to have a lovely old town but which has a far larger and hideous new town.
We headed down to the beach, noticing that Montenegro's men are far from the world's most svelte, and followed the beach-side road pretty much all the way to the little ferry that will lead tomorrow to the bay of Kotor, a UNESCO world heritage site.
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