See ya 2008 - welcome 2009...

Whoever it was that said time flies when you’re having fun was being a little disingenuous. I think the maxim really ought to read that time flies when you’re shortest of it and drags most when you’d prefer that particular period to be over and done with. When Em and I first embarked upon this project, we set ourselves a very simple goal – we had to be ready for business by May 2009. The advent of the New Year now means that we’re approaching the three-month mark of the build, leaving us four more to go. The mathematically aware of you will have deduced that we should therefore be almost halfway done by now. The big question is: are we?

Well, sort of. December proved to be a beautiful but unforgiving month. The gorgeous colours of autumn were gone but one happy by-product of the November rain was a three metre rise in water levels, and with the surrounding mountain peaks now dusted with snow, on a clear day the lake was looking even more stunning than ever.

In winter, most locals just battened down the hatches, sleep, eat and drink. Some, like us, though, were going to have to keep on working. The owner of Badanj in Virpazar had already had to halt work on his new cellar conversion as the floor was now 50cm underwater.

“It’s not so bad – now he can go fishing without going outside!” was one typically cheery reaction from the local bar crowd. As for us, by the time we hit the 10th December we had already lost two weeks of our schedule to the relentless rain, so it was with some frustration that our workers disappeared at the very point that we were blessed with a week of beautiful sunshine.

Of course, I don’t mean that they disappeared like that girl in The Vanishing. We had simply fallen victim to the muslim festival of Eid, a week long religious holiday that sort of replaces Christmas on the Islamic calendar, and which this year was blessed with bright sunshine and unseasonably warm temperatures of 17 centigrade. And that made it three weeks without progress on site. We weren’t too worried at that point, mostly because we knew that at least we would not be also losing a week over Xmas itself – neither our version centred around the 25th of December nor the Orthodox Christian version celebrated on 7th January (which does make you wonder just how reliable any of these scriptures are – talk about conflicting versions of the same events; it’d never stand up in court…).

Two birthdays? Who do you think you are? The Queen?

Thankfully we had filled all this “down” time reasonably well, launching into all manner of Photoshop and HTML related study to get our website up and running (go check out http://www.undiscoveredmontenegro.com/!). The first week was spent on design. The second week was spent arguing about the design and changing it entirely. The third week was spent ironing out about a hundred programming errors and the fourth (which we’re in now) has been dedicated to the rather clever (but very tedious to explain) process of “tagging”. In a nutshell, we’ve been optimising our site so that it comes up high on certain google-searches, which is why we’re quite pleased that now, when you type “lake skadar holidays” into the search engines, our spiffy new site comes up on the very first page. We were feeling quite pleased with ourselves. And then, of course, we found out that our workers would not be coming back.

Yep. You read that right.

Two days before we were due to head back to the UK for three weeks – three weeks during which we would have no idea of progress or lack thereof – our project was to be handed over to a completely different bunch of builders. This made us a teensy bit nervous. True, our previous gang had put our main door in the wrong place, but that was their only mis-step in over 10 weeks (and the majstor had generously offered to repair this damage by building us a new balcony to line up with this new doorway). It took their replacements just 24 hours to induce palpitations, when mere hours after we’d had a run-through of the build they managed to get the dimensions of a bathroom doorway wrong.

“Don’t worry, Ben, we can change that,” site-foreman Zdanko assured me the morning of our departure.
“Maybe,” I replied, trying not to sound too angry, “but we’re going to be away for three weeks. We don’t want to return to find every doorway 15 centimetres shorter than they’re supposed to be.”

We left that afternoon only after giving the new workers a twenty-point check list of exact measurements, dimensions and instructions in Serbo-Croat that I felt could not be misunderstood even by the bastard child of Baldrick and Jade Goody. The good news was that at least when the weather was kind and the builders weren’t repairing mistakes, the walls were going up at the rate of one metre a day – a gratifying sight as the house was finally looking like somewhere people might actually live one day. Zdanko reckoned that twelve rain free days would see the roof on for both the old house and the extension. Needless to say we’ve been keeping a close eye on the weather reports from Virpazar while we’ve been away…

Tuzi, meanwhile, was being punished for his fighty-bitey behaviour by being sent to prison. Sort of. We’d managed to find what was in all likelihood Montenegro’s first cattery in Ulcinj, so for the bargain cost of €5 a night we’d booked our little bundle of fur in for the duration of our time away. We had assumed, somewhat naively, that it would be a set-up similar to that we’d been used to in the UK, with an inside pen and outside “yard” for him to run about in. In fact, the quaintly named hotel za mačke housed its feline guests in the sort of cage more commonly used to put up cats or dogs recovering from surgery.

“Don’t worry, we exercise them outside every day, and we will give him toys to play with,” the vet promised as a rather baffled, and baleful Tuzi was dumped into his “cell”. Emma looked aghast. I tried not to think about it too much, hoping that Tuzi would both survive the ordeal and perhaps learn to appreciate us a little more upon our return.

In the event, the journey back to the UK was – by our standards – uneventful, moving from car to boat to plane via Bar, then Bari, then Stansted. We had quite a lot to squeeze into our time away. In no particular order, we had to buy a car, buy a kayak, sell a scooter and as much of our left-over UK furniture as we were able, register our UK business, open a business bank account and somehow fit in some Xmas shopping. We haven’t quite ticked off every item on that list yet, but there are still a few days to go – and we did manage to get hold of a very good value Renault Espace 7-seater (which we’ll be driving back to Monte with as much gear as we can fit into it). We’ve also enjoyed – for a limited time only! – some of the little luxuries that we are otherwise starved of in Montenegro (mince pies, peanut butter, Thai food, etc). At least the Ster Cinemas multiplex has finally opened in Podgorica’s Delta City shopping mall. Prior to its arrival there was no local cinema so we watched the latest James Bond film in a state of near bliss despite it not being one of the series’ best.

And thus we’ve come to the end of a busy, hectic and occasionally stressful month. I’m not entirely sure if it’s gone quickly or slowly – probably a bit of both. This also explains why I’ve left it late to post this blog entry. One thing that is worth mentioning is that we owe all our friends and family huge debts of gratitude – not only have many of them put us up over the last few days, but they’ve also, despite the financial doom and gloom engulfing much of the planet and the continued plunge of the pound to previously unplumbed depths, been unswervingly enthusiastic about what we’ve got planned just at a point where we were, admittedly, feeling a little bit frazzled. It’s been like having our own private cheerleading squad – so thank you, people. You know who you are!