We have Lift Off!

First, an apology to Bolimir. After my last post it only took another couple of days to finalise the contract with our chosen majstor and work began almost immediately thereafter. As I write this we are currently up to Day 8 of the build, which is something of a relief as we weren’t sure we’d ever get going. Since then we’ve had a week and a bit of constant activity – just as well considering Bolimir had contracted to complete all of the work in a frankly ambitious 60 days.

Headed by a genial chap called Musa, Bolimir’s team were, we noted immediately, all Albanian or Kosovan and thus Muslim. This cheered us further as unlike most locals they would be neither hitting the loza first thing in the morning nor the beers in the evening (although the cigarette-smoking ratio shot up accordingly). Within days they had cleared the konoba, built up an extra wall and had completed all the excavations necessary for the foundations and those for what they call the armatur – a metre wide concrete support stretching around the house that would partly help stop it sliding off the side of the hill.

Emma and I contented ourselves with more mundane tasks. Following the visits of Jess and then Jim, we then had Emma’s parents over for a week, so we’d spent rather more time entertaining than getting to grips with the outstanding issues surrounding the restoration of Vila ZaBes and the formation of our tourist business. The latter had been particularly neglected in favour of our more practical concerns; we had still to source doors, windows, a spiral staircase, a plumber, lots of tiles and several items of furniture. With our final guests of the year departed, we could attack these things in earnest. We finally spoke to a plumber – a nice chap called Dragan – and he gave us a reasonable enough quote for us to hire him over the coming weeks. We had already dragged Jess and Jim all over southern Montenegro looking at tiles and the few items of non-hideous furniture to fall within our budget, but the doors and windows were still causing us some consternation. We might have this one licked though; on a lake safari trip around Skadar with her folks, Emma had stopped off at the idyllic fishing village of Karuč where we had previously seen a beautiful stone house being completed near the waterfront. One quick flirt later and Em had a telephone number in her pocket – not that of the owner of the house, but the contact details of the chap in Cetinje who had made all of his beautiful woodwork.

The village of Karuc, on the shores of Lake Skadar

In amongst all this relative excitement we had also managed – at the sixth time of asking – to register with the Inspector of Foreigners in Bar (yes, such a thing really does exist!). Despite being still within our tourist visa limit, we needed to apply for temporary residency in order to start up our little company, so we were relieved – not for the first time – that the relevant officers were actually in this time, very sweetly promising to process our papers within two weeks. We raised an eyebrow to each other.

“Can you imagine the Croatian authorities being that chilled and friendly if we were applying for visas over there?” Emma wondered aloud. I had to agree. There was no way it would have been so straightforward – although it had to be said we were not yet actually in possession of said visas. We trundled away from Bar feeling reasonably pleased with ourselves.

Of course, there’s always a little grey weather cloud with your name on it ready to piddle on your parade at an inopportune moment. For us, the moment was when we arrived at the house one day and realised that our terraced gardens now had three massive mounds of earth sitting on them from the digging. And they were nowhere near where we actually needed extra earth to level out certain – well – levels. As the workmen were now busy with the foundations, we were going to have to pick up shovels and move it ourselves. And somehow this transmogrified into cutting a trench for a new 20-metre wall we decided we were going to build. After a couple of abortive afternoons arguing about the best way to proceed, however, we realised (owing to other stuff far too boring to go into here) that the wall might not be necessary after all. This was just as well. My first attempt at dry-stone steps nearly wound up with me tottering over a three-metre drop. We decided from then on to attempt only what we knew we could do rather than naively wading in and having a bash at something we’d never attempted before.

Landscaping, then, was not among our more natural gifts (insert your own gag here). One of mine, however, looked like it might just provide us with the odd free meal here or there if the new gardening careers fell flat (which is, at the time of writing, an absolute bloody certainty; the gardens are still covered in earth). No – I haven’t written anything else, much less sold it. It turned out that I’m pretty good at finding wild mushrooms! We’d been out two Sundays in a row with Gojko in one of the local forests and had managed a reasonable crop of what he assured us were non-poisonous fungi. He was particularly proud of one giant reddish brown specimen.

“These ones are delicious!”

We weren’t entirely convinced, mostly because after dicing it the flesh turned from dark yellow to bright blue. Smarties apart, I couldn’t think of any food that colour that was safe to eat, and expressed my fears to Gojko, who not for the first time swatted concern aside and insisted they take pride of place in the lunch I was preparing. We should never have doubted him. The fungus reverted to its more natural colour as soon as it hit the frying pan. The resulting risotto was nutty, rich, and completely stomach-friendly. If it was a bit "Good Life", so what? There's something quite cool about picking your own dinner.


If we had endured a busy week, it was mundane compared to that of Novak, owner of Crmnica Valley’s only nascent castle. Not only had he been forced to the brink of sacking one of his workers but two of his houses in Belgrade had just fallen down thanks to some inexpert excavation work nearby.

“Insurance?” he sighed when I asked him if the culprits would compensate him for such a disaster. “This is all dirty money. Three houses fall down, two of them are mine, and I can do nothing. Thank God nobody was home when it happened. So anyway, I get this news in the early morning and then I arrive to my castle at 2pm and find this guy I hired is still asleep! What am I supposed to say? Like you, I am a foreigner here, and I do not wish to cause problems by sacking the only local labourer I employ…” he mused at length. Fortunately, the wine was slipping down very nicely. We were convened at the house of local vintner Ivo Ukšanović, whose award winning red wines we had already sampled the previous week with Jim. Smooth and richly flavoured, they were so good that we left that night with an entire case. The difficult bit was going to be saving them for special occasions!

It wasn’t just Novak who had had a rough week. It hadn’t gone quite so well for Tuzi the kitten either, with the rather distressing news – for him at least – that he might not be a him at all. Gojko, who owned – or rather was owned by – four cats, informed us that Tuzi was in fact a Suzi, despite what looked to me suspiciously like a proto-nutsack dangling below his tail. Some internet research of our own only clouded matters. Depending on what rubbish diagram you consulted, Tuzi’s rear end looked by turns like a girl’s and then a boy’s and then like neither, which made us fearful for a while that he might be something in the middle (seriously, one cat site told us some kittens were born without an anus, which would surely be a bit of a – ahem – bummer). It’s also not just the size of him that’s changed recently either (900g and counting). People here had been joking that Tuzi had my hair and Emma’s eyes but now that his peepers appear to have changed from bright blue to bright green, I may have some explaining to do…

"I have nothing up my left sleeve! I have nothing up my right...ah, nuts."