Back in the Balkans, July 2008

As I write this, I’m sitting in a tree-covered garden overlooking the small town of Virpazar at Lake Skadar in Montenegro. I know. Lucky aren’t we? And well you might envy us, for this really and truly is one of the most beautiful spots in Europe, one of the few places I’ve been on the continent where I grew up that can rival Africa for the sheer drama of the landscape.

We’ve been taking things easy (ish) for the first few weeks of our scouting mission. Our drive across Europe took in Lille (horrible), Switzerland (lovely, especially the Davos-Stelvio Pass road as seen on Top Gear. It was a blast even in a fully loaded Honda CRV, and we only opted out of the Stelvio passage because our brakes had begun to steam, not something you really want to push with 42 alpine hairpins to negotiate), Italy, Slovenia, and then, in the dead of night, Croatia. We intentionally chose to roll up at a remote border crossing late at night hoping that the notoriously zealous customs officials wouldn’t ping us for 30% duty on everything the back of the car. Fearing the worst, it was a real relief when they ushered us into Istria without even properly looking at our passports. After a brief two-night stay having a look at the area, we then hit the spanking new A1 highway and arrived in Split a mere 4 days after leaving Dover. From then, it was onto the ferry and onto Vis Island, which is as much as we can call home these days.

We hadn’t planned to spend nearly two weeks on Vis, but the island has that sort of effect on you – your in-built relaxometer kicks and most people wind up staying rather longer than they had first imagined. We managed to spend about half this time in our house while we cleaned up after a couple of groups of guests, sheltering in the meantime in a small flat around the corner. We lazed, we drank strong local wine, we sun-bathed and swam in some of the cleanest waters in the Mediterranean, and we looked up our cadre of old friends to gossip about cricket matches, who was shacked up with/divorcing who and of course sounding out anyone who might have a sniff of a half-way decent property deal.

Without giving too much away, we saw one or two interesting options; the difficulty with our investing in Vis again is a simple one. Since we bought our house four years ago, prices have gone up by so much that were we looking to buy the same house again today, we would have found it well beyond our budget. Whilst it’s nice to know that our first investment has already doubled in value, it means that today, armed with twice the war-chest we can afford only half as much as before! Additionally, the Vis islanders have taken a novel approach to the matter of the asking price for their stone houses. Essentially, they keep note of what their neighbours manage to get and then add 50%. When (not if) it fails to sell at this highly optimistic level, rather than dropping the price as might well be the case back in the UK, they actually bump the price up, assuming that if inflation is working that way it should also apply to their houses! As most of the vendors are in no hurry to sell – after all, they inherited these places for nothing and don’t even live in them – most properties simply sit on the market with laughable price tags, going nowhere. There might be a sucker born every minute, as Phineas Barnum once noted, but those suckers ain’t us. We’re also well aware of the “English people are interested, they’ll pay even more!” mentality – a myth we’ve been at pains to explode as the pound plummets still further against not only the Euro, but also the Kuna. Wrong time to be buying a house out there then?

Actually, not at all. Instead, it has now become more like a game of patience, with the vendors waiting for rich buyers to materialise and Emma and I waiting for them to realise they just won’t, and that an offer at 60% of the asking price might be all they’re going to get. So, keeping an educated eye on two renovation projects in particular, we eventually prised ourselves away from this Dalmatian island paradise and motored on down the Adriatic towards the new kid on the Independence Block, Montenegro.

Montenegrans are molto-friendly. It seemed for a while as though every guest-house or restaurant owner made it their personal mission to sit down and chat to us, welcome us to their town and make us feel right at home. The fact that our Serbo-Croat is now reasonably conversational might have had something to do with it (it’s pretty rare for anyone to bother and most people are delighted to find that we’re giving it a go), but I suspect this is just the way that Montenegrans are – helpful, hospitable and apparently supremely well-connected. Well, you would be, wouldn’t you, if your entire country was the size of East Anglia and contained only 500,000 people in total. Within a few hours of arriving at Lake Skadar last May we had rather lucked out by finding lodging with the extremely popular local doctor, who promptly introduced us to two drunk Russian generals and a retired American spy

The generals turned out to have served in tank regiments in Afghanistan, and in between endless vodka toasts to celebrate VE Day (or something similar, maybe that was just an excuse) they crushed us in bearhugs, invited us to Moscow to stay with them and admitted that they did a lot of bad things in Afghanistan without knowing exactly why.
“It was right for us to go in,” one of them admitted as the American spy performed translation duties, “but it was wrong of us to stay.”

Mr X (I would use his real name but he might get his ex-colleagues to bump me off) was the former spy in question. After Googling his full name, as we later did at the giggling Doctor Dean’s suggestion (pronounced Day-an), we found that he’d been up to his neck in trouble for several decades, including, but not exclusively limited to being stationed in Siberia for 15 years and getting banged up in Arizona for selling arms to Iran. Needless to say he had some pretty interesting stories to tell, mostly involving his latest book (written in Russian), in which he claims that it was the Russians who really won the Cold War. Strangely enough, this 3600 page tome has yet to find a publisher in the west, but given the way the economic situation is now, his argument’s starting to hold rather more weight. Montenegro is living proof of the East’s rising economic superiority, and no-one was better placed to illustrate this than his wife Yelena a Russian blonde in her early forties who was trying to sell the generals some local real estate.

Russians and real estate – it’s not just London that’s affected by their wide-boy loadsamoney approach to buying a place abroad. Over the last few years the new-money Russkies have driven up the prices of coastal property to the point where they don’t even bother quibbling about the asking price (“Is cheap, I buy. (snaps fingers) Vladimir!”). Some, of course, equate expense with cachet regardless of taste, location or any other kind of contrary evidence. The end result is the same – a stunning, Amalfi-style coastline has been ruined in places by the sort of considered, sensitive developments that have so added to the beauty of the Costa del Sol. The Montenegran coast is now a building site, every new high-rise adding to an already stuffed-to-capacity and making millionaires overnight of anyone dealing in faux Spanish-style balustrades or concrete. And millionaires are the only people who can now afford to buy on the coast – two bedroom apartments have been known to be snapped up for over a million Euros, and trust me when I tell you that even with a view of the Med, they’re not worth that much. Budva, Bar and to a lesser extent Petrovac – they’re all heading the same way. That is to say that the daylight hours are filled with the sounds of jack-hammers and the nights are dominated by mega-rich Russians in Hummers, karaoke beach parties and women in mini-skirts with ridiculously long legs, apparently independently moving buttocks and a complete absence of taste. At one point, sitting at a café near the old town, it felt like we were judges on a new Borat/Gok Wan-type show: How to Look Good as Russian Prostitute. Come my friends! Let us discuss in great detail about super-stilleto-fuck-me-pumps and white boob tube, is latest fashion, you get many punters!

Wrong time to be buying a house out here as well, then?

Well, actually, it’s another no, and the answer lies in two words: Lake Skadar.

First of all, it’s staggeringly, draw-droppingly, epically beautiful. It’s the Balkans’ largest lake and Europe’s largest crypto-depression. A crypto-depression, for those of you who like me fell asleep in Geography class (although you probably didn’t have as dull a teacher as Mr Phillips, whose Welsh accent would have sent even the most desperately afflicted insomniac to sleep, dreaming of his remarkable collection of tweed jackets with brown elbow patches) is where the base of the lake is actually below sea-level, a remarkable natural phenomenon that means the lake’s water levels vary by as much as three metres throughout the year where the Med of course famously has no tide of any description. Surrounded by mountains on all sides, this vast expanse of freshwater stretches 40km across to the Albanian border and hosts over 150 species of birds (including eastern Europe’s only pelicans) and several indigenous species of delicious fish. If you use that estimable Google image search engine you’ll have a vague idea of what I’m going on about (justice is not done unless you’ve got a panoramic camera). The best thing of all, however, is that the Russians don’t want it. They have Lake Baikul, they have the Urals, they have this sort of thing back home, albeit with a somewhat chillier climate. What they don’t have is Mediterranean coastline. Which is why Budva is now Moscow-by-Sea. And it’s also why Lake Skadar has so far remained undeveloped and unspoilt. And this means, importantly, that property prices here, whilst rising steadily, have not yet seen the sort of staggering Zimbabwean-style inflation suffered by the beach resorts.

After a week out here, we’ve seen plenty of potential matches, most of them through friends of the good Doctor Dean, with one in particular giving us sleepless nights already…and which would likely as not take almost every penny we’ve saved to renovate. Still, that’s sort of what we’re out here for, right? Sometimes we feel a little like those eejits you see on A Place in the Sun after all, but instead of going for the nice safe flat in that ex-pat development, we really are leaning towards the crumbling ruin perched on the hillside…

And we’ve still got Durmitor, Rumania, Northern Croatia and Hungary to go…