How Montenegrin are you?

Confused about your national identity? Take my easy quiz for some enlightenment!

 

You wish to buy a second hand car for a few thousand euros. What do you buy?

a)      Something reliable with good fuel consumption, in decent condition that Which? don’t slate and that hasn’t been savaged by Jeremy Clarkson.

b)      A 1991 VW Golf MK2.

It’s time for a fun night out! What are you wearing?

a)      Girls: jeans and a sparkly top. Guys: jeans and a shirt, possibly ironed.

b)      Girls: crazily short miniskirt, heels that would make Jimmy Stewart come over all dizzy, half an inch of slap and a wonderbra. Men: a tracksuit.

You have had a great night out but you can barely stand up you’ve drunk so much rakija. How are you getting home?

a)      Bus, taxi or beer scooter.

b)      Your 1991 VW Golf MK2.

You are in the supermarket and are looking for peanut butter. Where might this be?

a)      With the jam and honey?

b)      In the fridge with all the cheese.

You are at the supermarket check-out having bought a cucumber, three tomatoes, some canned tuna, milk, some Staklo Arf glass cleaner and some cevapcici. How many plastic bags will you require?

a)      None, thanks  – I brought my re-usable recyclable hessian bag.

b)      Six.

How many mobile phones do you possess?

a)      Er…one?

b)      Three – one for friends who have Telenor, one for those who have T-Mobile and one for those who have M-Tel so we can all talk to each other for less!

It’s breakfast time! What are you having?

a)      Cereal, toast with homemade marmelade, nice cup of tea. And then another cup of tea.

b)      Rakija, Turkish coffee, cigarette. In that order.

You have just finished the first fix stage on your new house. What do you do next?

a)      First of all, get the roof on. Buy a kitchen and bathroom installations, a few lights, doors and windows, then maybe some furniture once the plastering, painting and tiling has been done. Then clean it up, sort out the garden, maybe do some landscaping.

b)      Move in.

You are in a café and notice that there is a no-smoking sign on the door. What do you do?

a)      Order a coffee.

b)      Immediately light up, especially if you are near babies or anyone else you suspect might be a non-smoker.

You have an important meeting with someone at 10am on Tuesday. When do you show up for the meeting?

a)      10am Tuesday.

b)      When you have time. If you can’t make Tuesday they can wait until Wednesday. Or Thursday. Or next week.

Whilst on your way driving to Kolasin you get stuck behind a truck hauling stone up the tight mountain road. You’re going to be late. What now?

a)      You just end up being a little late. If you’re on your way to meet a local it’s not like they’re going to be on time.

b)      Wait until a blind hairpin bend, and then overtake with a flash of your headlights, a beep of your horn and your indicators off.

Congratulations! You’ve just got married. How do you see the husband/wife duties panning out during your time together? 

a)      No idea, but we’ll figure it out. We’re flexible.

b)      She will cook, clean and have babies. I will drink beer.

Your journey home usually takes 10 minutes, but this time it takes twice as long. Why?

a)      Ten minutes?? My commute is over an hour, where the hell did you get enough money to live in zone 1?

b)      Well, first I saw Ivica in his car so I had to beep, stop and say hi and ask after his mother, his wife, his children, his kum and his dog. Then I saw Tomislav’s car, so I had to beep, stop and say hi to him to and then ask after his wife, his children and his kum and then I saw Janko and had to beep, stop and ask after his wife and his children and argue with him about the presidential election. Then I saw Vesko…

What do you regard as proof of a foreigner’s identity?

a)      A passport or an identity card?

b)      An officially stamped, signed and translated copy of your original birth certificate, even if it says NOT PROOF OF IDENTITY at the bottom in capital letters.

You have a garden of mature fruit trees. What do you do with your harvest?

a)      Eat it.

b)      Distill a bewildering assortment of rustic brandies.

It’s time to put out the rubbish – what do you do with your household waste?

a)      We have a compost heap and recycle old carrot shavings into shoes for African children.

b)      We throw it into a bush/forest/river/laybye (delete as appropriate).

Congratulations guys, your partner has just given birth! How will you choose to celebrate the arrival of your new child?

a)      I’ll buy the wife/girlfriend something nice, have a few drinks and then spend time with our new family member.

b)      If it’s a boy, you’ll fire all your automatic weapons into the air and then get drunk. If it’s a girl, you’ll proceed directly to getting drunk and hoping you get a boy next time.

You see a new road sign on the side of the road. What is the most appropriate action to take?

a)      Nod appreciatively that the local government at least had the money to replace the old one, which was full of bullet holes.

b)      Get out your rifle and plug it one. If you hurry you may even get to be first!

You’ve got a new car that isn’t a VW Golf MK2, and it has an annoying bong that goes off every time you pull away. How do you make this stop?

a)      Try and diagnose the fault yourself, it’s probably because the handbrake is on or something. If you can’t find the problem, take it a dealer so they can investigate.

b)      It’s the seatbelt reminder. To avoid this irritation, hook your seatbelt around the back of the seat and plug it in so you don’t have to wear it. Problem solved!

Your friends are coming over and they have a small toddler. What should you offer the little’un to eat?

a)      Fruit or veg - but best to ask the parents in advance, just in case.

b)      Chocolate. Smokis. And Coca-Cola.

You are 30. How many teeth do you have?

a)      All of them – I think.

b)      If I’ve got my falsies in, all of them. If I haven’t, seven. Can I have another piece of chocolate cake?

You need to buy a first aid kit. Where can you buy one?

a)      A chemist?

b)      A car parts shop.

How did you do?

If you scored mostly As, you are probably British, possibly American, Australian or Western European.

If you answered mostly Bs, you are Montenegrin or have gone native. Cestitamo!

So what do we do now?

That’s a really boring title. Sorry. Inspiration has been a little thin on the ground the last couple of weeks, mostly because late February/early March is what we in the activity holiday field call “shit-are-we-going-to-get-some-more-bookings-bugger-it-let’s-spruce-the-place-up-and-see-if-that-helps” time. I told you I was all out of snappy titles.

It’s at this stage of the year that people are thinking about their Easter holidays rather than their summer ones, and consequently our enquiries graph has flat-lined. It’s nothing to worry about really – it did the same last year and things soon picked up again in early April – and we have almost exactly the same amount of bookings now that we had last March – but nevertheless it means that we are often left with very little to do at a time when our natural anxieties tend to bob to the surface. This is the flipside of living the dream, the bit you don’t get to see on TV. We have a fantastic life in a Mediterranean idyll. We spend our summers kayaking across glassy waters, leaping into amazing freshwater pools and eating and drinking some of the best natural produce Europe has to offer. We spend our summers doing THIS.



I know, we’re utter bastards aren’t we? And you can shut up about our taste in music.

Winters, however, are different. In the absence of a regular 9-5, we fret about bookings and either do boring things or become a little bored ourselves (car accidents in Norfolk notwithstanding), which is…well…not at the “very” end of the interesting scale. The weather’s a bit rubbish, you’re at a loose end and you need to take your mind off business matters – so you end up doing chores, just to break the days up a bit. We’ve painted walls, ceilings, cupboards, bedside tables and floors in an effort to give our house on Vis a bit of a lift. We’ve been creating driftwood wall art, making coffee tables out of discarded pallets and shoe-racks out of ancient fruit crates dragged out of bushes in an attempt to maximise practicality on a shoe-string budget. We’ve replaced lightshades, light switches, and even lights. We’ve even done a little work on our actual marketing, with two new listings in OwnersDirect and Airbnb that have already brought us in no fewer than four extra bookings.

 

 

Looking much smarter - and this was before we REALLY got going...

 

(mention this blog when enquiring about Kuca Visoka on www.thisisvis.com and we’ll bung in a 10% discount!)

Of course, we were on Vis a bit late thanks to the Croatian customs bods insisting that we take our hot tub direct to Montenegro (see two posts ago). It was great to see old friends again, albeit briefly, but in the back of our minds we always knew that we would have to get back to Villa Miela to make the same efforts there. Since my last post, our Skoda had been freed from the muddy field we’d dumped it in and our hot-tub had made it over our wall courtesy of our mate Dragan.

 

 

 

This is not the same Dragan who failed car electrics module 1 last time out. Nor is he any of the following Dragans: Dragan Majstor, Dragan Doors, Dragan Plumber, Electric Dragan, American Dragan, Dragan Big Boss or Dragan Lawyer, all of whom have crossed our path in the not so recent past. Dragan Dajkovic (for this is his name) avoids our usual address-book-defining moniker simply because he is not such an easy bloke to sum up. He is, variously – and depending on the time of year – Dragan Lorry, Dragan Hunter, Dragan Stolar, Dragan Vino, Dragan Dupilo, Dragan Digger or Dragan Drina (for the cancer sticks he has perennially on the go). He’s a brilliant bloke who seems to know, or know how to do almost anything, and if there is something that falls outside of his sphere of knowledge, it’s likely he knows a bloke who lives in an appropriate postcode. He’s a good bloke to be mates with.



There are two skills I’m desperate to learn from Dragan (other than how to operate heavy plant machinery) – how to make traditional Montenegrin chairs and how to cooper a wine barrel. Maybe next winter, if the DIY ever gets finished. Before the start of the season there’s a lot to do. We have to set up the tub and attach the wood burner (not to mention test it). We have to prune an entire natural orchard. We have to clear and gravel at least two levels of our terracing, clear and tidy another three levels of bits and pieces of building rubble, wood flotsam and discarded bottles of Niksicko that had been left there by various slovenly workmen since 2008. We have to repair a couple of dry-stone walls, set up a “natural” shower by the tub, reconnect our pump system from the spring at the bottom of the garden, do touch up painting in the house, replace loads of light bulbs and fittings, fix one boiler and check over all our bikes and kayaks. We have to meet with our lawyer and our accountant to, erm, balance the books. Oh, and we still have to move house. Again (more of which next time).

Given that we’ve only had two days without rain recently, we’ve not been doing too badly.



Better, at any rate, than the England rugby team. Watching your side getting spanked by Wales is never a choice experience, but watching them getting spanked by Wales in the presence of a Welsh rugby fan was the nadir of my sporting year thus far (and I’m a Norwich supporter). Of course, there is a chance things could get even worse by this time next week. Our cricketers may have failed to beat a bunch of part-time New Zealanders and the expensively-remunerated prats who mostly comprise our national football team might well have come to Podgorica’s FC Buducnosti stadium and left without the multiple points that shall be required if we’re to have any hope of being at the World Cup in Brazil in 2 years’ time.

 Wayne Rooney mistaking Montenegrin arse for the ball



Last time England pitched up here for the Euro qualis, they were 2-1 up and cruising when Manchester’s favourite granny-banger decided to boot a Montenegrin defender up the bum for the hell of it, got himself sent off and then had to watch from the sidelines as his put-upon team-mates, a man down, conceded an equaliser to a pumped up Montenegrin side (as well as getting himself banned for the first two matches of Euro 2012 – thanks Wayne). At Wembley, England (population 60m) managed a god-awful scoreless draw with the same opponents (population 650,000). The scene is set for a really crap game and a 1-1 draw.

And I really, really want to go. There are only two issues – I don’t have a ticket and I’m not entirely sure I’d spend all my time cheering for Woy’s Wonders…

Car rescue...again!



Us with the 296th best car in the UK

We’ve not had much luck with our Montenegrin cars.

Our first Montenegro vehicle was a Honda CRV whose 4x4 system we broke in Romania and which we scrapped back in the UK. Our second was a cursed Renault Espace whose electrics made no sense and rarely worked and which we sold at a large loss (again back in the UK) on the very day Which? magazine declared the ’98 model (ours) 296th out of 296 in a customer satisfaction survey. Our third was Boris the Landy, and you know what happened to him if you read the last blog entry. Our fourth was not in fact Ken, Boris’ replacement. Our fourth was actually a dark green Skoda Fabia TDi that we bought in the UK for peanuts, spent rather more than that getting it through its MOT and brought to Montenegro to act as our cheapo runabout while guests were ferried about in the Landy.

With the Landy being taken back to the UK each year to keep it legal for all European driving, the Skoda, we figured, would come to Montenegro and stay in Montenegro on local insurance. This left us with the dilemma of what to actually do with it while we were away over Christmas.

“We could just leave it at the villa,” I suggested. “If our house gets broken into again, what’s to stop the Skoda being nicked?” said Emma.

Now the Skoda was no joy-rider’s favourite, but underneath it was a VW, and a sought after diesel VW at that, so despite Montenegro’s low petty crime rate it might still prove too tempting a target for passing ne’er-do-wells given that 70% of all vehicles in the country are Volkswagens (and how do you suppose all of them got here?). So we did the next best thing. We dumped it in a field belonging to a local friend for three months. Hey, our friends Tim and Katie dumped a car in Greece for years before returning to collect it – and it started up first time.

All I can say is that Nissan batteries must be superior to VW ones, because when we returned to collect the car, it was growing several kinds of fungus inside and turning the key in the ignition did absolutely zilch. Using my NVQ in mechanics* I deduced that the battery was dead and needed replacing. Only the battery couldn’t be removed without a 11mm socket and a ratchet wrench, and mine were in Croatia.

We tried jump starting the Skoda from the Landy. Nothing. Then our field-owning friends Ana and Mio got involved and suggested giving it a bump start. I was pretty certain that with no charge in the battery a bump start was a waste of time, but we gave it a go anyway. Nothing. Mio then began to tell me that the “akumalator” was dead and pointed under the bonnet. The what? Did he mean the alternator? That would be mean we’d have to tow the damn Skoda to Podgorica to get it fixed (urgh). I was wary of taking anything Mio said about cars at face value on account of him being a) no more knowledgeable than I and b) blind, so re-iterated that I thought it was the battery, which made him screw up his face. He called his mate Dragan instead.

Dragan and I go back a few years. He was the plumber who installed all our pipes etc at Villa Miela, and he did a first rate job. I had, however, made a point of not calling him up and asking for his help for a year or so simply because I had spent the preceding three years doing exactly that, and had noted this patient man’s growing exasperation with me.

“I only need to borrow an 11mm socket,” I told Mio, who was already on the phone telling Dragan to bring jump leads. “I don’t need jump leads!”

Dragan rolled up 10 minutes later, and gruffly nodded hello. It was the sort of nod that’s a bit like a Montenegrin shrug in that this small movement can speak volumes. This nod said “So I’ve got to dig you out of another hole, have I, you daft English bastard?” I explained that I just needed to get the battery out and that I could then try and charge it or buy a new one. Dragan looked at me, confused, and muttered something about the akumalator. I didn’t have the language to tell him that there was no proof the alternator was broken, and re-iterated my need for an 11mm spanner. At this, Dragan gave me some high speed verbals and headshaking, and told me my jump leads were “shit” and that English people were not used to doing things for themselves.

“In England you are too soft. Look at you, Ben, you don’t know how to fix anything, you haven’t got a clue.”

Huh.

I leaned against the car door and told them to do whatever they thought best. This turned out to be 45 minutes of fannying about with jump leads trying to start a dead battery, and two gos at bump starting a car with a dead battery, after which they tried jump-starting the car again with FOUR leads and revving Dragan’s Dacia to the end of its rev scale in an attempt to get the Skoda’s battery (did I mention it was dead?) to accept a charge as the car lay off the path and half into the field. The engine coughed. And then died again, which seemed to be sufficient evidence for Dragan and Mio to give me that sort of “ah-hah” that means “see, told you so!” – despite the evidence pointing overwhelmingly towards progress of the f***-all kind.

I lost patience.

“FFS! Listen, you two, the battery’s clearly dead. Why can’t you just lend me a spanner so that I can heave the bloody thing out?”

As I said this in English there was no real response. Mio pointed at the bonnet and said again that in his (blind) opinion, the akumalator was at fault.

“Mio, it’s the bloody battery!” “Akumalator!” I heaved a big sigh of frustration. “Mio, what the hell IS an akumalator exactly??” Mio pointed directly at the battery.

The French for battery is batterie. The German for battery is Batterie. The Italian for battery is batteria. And yet in Serbian it’s called an akumalator. This made Mio right, me a plonker and Dragan a condescending clot. I thanked them both for their efforts, borrowed Dragan’s spanner, removed the battery and bought a new one after my charger told me that the original had expired and had joined the choir invisible. I returned to the Skoda with the new battery, and of course, it started up first time – sadly, not in the presence of Dragan, which sadly rendered irrelevant the smug little speech I had prepared for him.

“Hah!” said I. English bloke does know how to fix something after all. I gunned the engine to make my getaway and mud sprayed twenty feet into the air. Five minutes later, I had moved all of three inches and had churned a lovely scooped channel of oomskah into Mio’s field. I was stuck.

Bah. I hate cars.

 "Mummy's car all dirty!"

 

*I don’t have an NVQ in mechanics. I barely know one end of a spanner from the other.

We're back! Again!

Keep it short, do it often – that’s the way to write a blog, apparently. Oops. Brevity has never quite been my forte and that this is my first post in about three years shows that when it comes to accepted wisdom, I can as usual be found furthest from it. It will therefore be no surprise to anyone reading this that I have decided to pick up my ongoing Montenegrin am-dram more or less in the same vein that I started out...

February is a pretty predictable month. In the UK, it rains. On the continent, it snows. In Montenegro, it rains a lot. It is, in short, a less than ideal time of year to drive across Europe in a Landrover pulling a 2.2m high wooden hot-tub in a trailer bought for £150 off off ebay. A month after being in a road accident that you were very lucky to survive…

First, a brief summary of the last three years, where blogging for once took a back seat to the real life pursuit of our life change. We finished the house. We quit our jobs (again). We had a baby (it’s in the contract, all renovations/grand designs must be punctuated at the least opportune moment by the patter of tiny feet), and then had our first half season running activity tours at Lake Skadar in Montenegro, using our renovated house, Villa Miela, as our guest accommodation, which went quite well. We spent one winter in the UK, Emma working, me looking after little Freddy. Emma quit her job for a third time. In 2012 we came back out to Monty for our first full season, which went brilliantly, ensuring that we would not need to work over the next winter at all. We enjoyed relaxing at the lake and at our place on Vis.

IT'S TIME FOR A MONTAGE...

Amazing house, amazing guests, amazing that we got this far, really...



In January 2013 we came back to the UK to visit family and friends for a few weeks, and to get our old blue Landy, Boris, MOT’d so that we could continue to drive him all over Europe (at the time of writing, importing an older car to Montenegro is hellishly difficult and expensive). In the January slush, two Mercedes drivers decided to lose control on Norfolk’s A11 and effectively write off Boris, who was smashed front and back. Emma was hit by the second vehicle as she was heroically racing to get Freddy out of the car, and wound up with 7 inches of sliced thigh (Fred and I were amazingly uninjured). We then had to spend 4 further weeks sorting out all the insurance and finding another Landy (red this time), who in a flash of political inspiration we decided to call “Ken”.

RIP Boris. Thanks a bunch, Mercedes drivers.

Not a great start to 2013, then.

So now the hot-tub. Our 2012 guests were awesome, but following the season we realised that what the villa really lacked was a pool, or rather, a way for guests to cool down on site as opposed to in the numerous waterfalls, natural pools and of course the lake that featured heavily in our activities. After quite a lot of on-line research, I discovered that the cheapest solution was to buy a wooden hot-tub that could be installed above ground and also used as a plunge pool in summer (if proper filtration was used). The snag was, you couldn’t buy such a thing in Montenegro. Germany, however, was a different matter. You name it, the Germans make it, and make it properly. A swift “suche” auf den Internet later and I found a company that made lovely tubs from Siberian larch for a very reasonable price. The issue was transportation. Getting the tub from Germany to Montenegro was likely to cost half as much again if using a third party, and that was before you got to the thorny issue of exactly how much you’d be charged to import the tub itself into the country. As the German factory was just south of Stuttgart – and therefore on my way back across Europe – I decided to save us a large sum of money and collect the thing myself instead.

Yeah, I know.

The trailer was a rusting hulk I bought off ebay for this one-time only journey and then stored at my uncle’s until we’d found our new Landrover following Boris’ unfortunate demise. I’d carefully calculated that it was big enough to carry the hot tub, purchased a number-plate and had repaired its lightboard so that I was fully legal, and set off from Sussex in the rain for Dover. Ken was full of other stuff too: 2 more inflatable kayaks (we already had 6 out in Monty), one magimix, loads of kitchen odds and sods, new bedding, childrens toys and soft furnishings like lampshades that were simply not buyable in Croatia/Montenegro. I had bought and fitted Ken with a nice new roofrack (although not as good as Boris’), and had planned my cross-continental journey to the hour. I had, this time, thought of everything.

I should have checked the trailer’s tyres.

Waiting at Dover for the delayed ferry, I made the first of several planned checks to discover that one tyre was going flat. When I tried pumping it up again, the tyre’s entire valve pinged off and the tyre collapsed completely. When I tried inflating the spare (yes, I had made sure I had one), the pump broke, and I was due to board the ferry in 2 minutes. It was not the most auspicious of starts.

I called Emma, who was still at my mother’s house, and was due to fly with Freddy to Ljubljana three days hence to meet me. The vague plan was for us to travel together down through Croatia, hoping that we could procure some transit documents that would enable us to stop off on Vis for a week or two before continuing down to Montenegro with the rest of our belongings, which were still on the island. I know, I know. Ever the logical one, Emma found out there was a Norauto in Calais that might be able to help (Norauto being the French Halfords), and thus it was that I spent my first hour on the continent limping off the ferry at 20kph with my hazards on, letting the satnav guide me into town in the hope that the French could prove quicker than a Kwik-Fit fitter.

Norauto was shut.

There was some swearing at this point. I had to get to Saarbrucken that evening and it was already 1pm. What was this, some sort of typically gallic lunch-break where they shut the whole store and sat out the back smoking Gitanes and moaning about the 35 hour week? Angry, I barged into the nearby Carrefour and bought a new foot pump, resolving to fit the spare myself. I was on the point of screaming with frustration, the spare turning out to have more holes in it than QPR’s defence, when Norauto’s workers unexpectedly wound up their steel shutters and flicked their sign over to “ouvert”. I practically raced into their garage. Did they have a 145/50 R10 tyre they could fit on this stupid Englishman’s trailer? They did not. They had only a pair of 155s that would not fit inside the trailer’s wheelarches. I grabbed a spanner and bent back the mudguards, freeing up another 5cm of space. Would they fit now? The Norauto blokes laughed at me, and said they’d give it a go. They were better than their word – the new wheels went on and I was at least saved from total disaster – but it was already 3pm by the time we were done, and I had 400 miles still to cover.

Now, I’ve driven across Europe in February before, and if there’s one thing you can count on it’s that you will get caught in a blizzard at some point. Unfortunately for me, that point was just a few hours later. I trundled down the motorway, whimpering in fear as the trailer slewed about behind me, all road markings hidden by snow and with visibility in the dark down to about ten metres. By the time I reached Saarbrucken it was gone 11pm, and I was a gibbering wreck. What the hell was I doing? What if it was like this the whole bloody way? I’d die. Death would have a little word with himself and think, well, I let this bloke off last month, but he seems to really, really want to snuff it in a Landrover, so maybe I should oblige him?

Fortunately for my life and my sanity, the next day was clear and bright and the Germans proved a good deal more adept at clearing overnight snow than their British counterparts. All I had to do now was head to Kettenacker and pick up the hot-tub and its woodburner from the lovely people at www.sauna-badetonne.de. They were expecting me, but even so, my appearance did prompt some head-scratching. Had anyone ever come to collect their own tub, I asked as Uwe and Silvia helped forklift the tub and burner into the trailer and onto the roofrack respectively. No, they said – and certainly not in a trailer as “kaput” as the one I had brought along. Uwe merely chuckled and shrugged when I asked him if he thought I would make it to Montenegro. Silvia whipped her camera out and took pictures (“in case you make it, so we can tell other people it can be done!”).

Uwe and I lashed the tub down with several ratchet straps. Silvia handed me the export documents, telling me that these would be good to get me as far as the Slovenian border. Once I was over the border, she said, well, I was on my own.

“You might get twenty days for transit,” she guessed, as of course they had never known anyone try to cross Croatia with one of their products before. “That’s what seems standard when our trucks have to transit through Switzerland.”

The truth was, I had no clue what to expect at the Slovenian/Croatian border. HMRC, Croatian customs online and various googling had inexplicably failed to produce one previous instance of any private person trying to do what I was about to attempt, and next to no advice on what the proper procedure was. In the meantime I had to use all my concentration to keep the Landy at a steady 45/50mph so that the trailer had the smoothest ride possible. Rather disconcertingly I had to stop twice before I’d even reached Slovenia to replace snapped ratchet straps after being alerted to hot-tub wobblage by other motorists, but once I realised this was because the straps were getting frayed on the trailer’s rusty bodywork, some judiciously placed cardboard seemed to do the trick. Munich, and then Ljubljana were reached with a minimum of fuss, and Emma and Freddy were likewise gratefully retrieved for the big day: crossing into Croatia and seeing if we could a) get through and b) stop off on Vis en-route.

At the Slovenian border, my export documents were scanned – this meant I’d get back the MwSt (German VAT) that I’d paid back in January but from here on, I’d be making things up as I went.

My first foray into the Croatian customs building was not terribly productive. Various uniformed men and women sat behind glass partitions and either shrugged at me or ignored me completely when I asked – in Croatian – how I could get transit documents. When I did manage to get one lady to reply, she told me brusquely that she did not know how to help me and suggested that I drive to the border with Hungary instead (!). Undeterred, I went back outside and got Emma and Freddy to come into the building. If ever you have a paperwork issue with stubborn and unhelpful bureaucrats, I can highly recommend using your adorable toddler as emotional blackmail material. Eventually I was directed to a different counter, where – wouldn’t you know it – it turned out there was a chap working in the customs office who could procure my transit documents after all. Funny that.

€150 later, we were finally into Croatia. The downside was that we had been granted only three days to get across into Montenegro, so there would be no stopping off at Vis - I’d have to drive for a 6th straight day all the way down to Montenegro after we’d overnighted in Split. With Freddy watching endless episodes of In the Night Garden on our headrest DVD player (best invention ever, if you have young kids) and Emma’s legroom somewhat restricted by the bolt on air-conditioning unit Ken had had fitted at knee level across the front dash, we just about survived the infamous swirling winds of Sveti Rok and arrived at our final hurdle, Montenegrin customs, sometime around 4pm the next day.

This is what happened at Montenegrin customs.

And so it was that we finally rolled down into Herceg Novi, stayed overnight with the ever wonderful Jack and Hayley and the next morning pottered another 100km to finally arrive at Villa Miela, which was miraculously intact and undamaged (we had had break-ins the previous two winters, where a few things got pinched and the doors got a little bashed up). This was in part thanks to the new alarm we had installed, but also I suspect due to our leaving the keys in the hands of one of the local boss men, an influential villager with whom we are now on good terms. Twas not always thus (he was one of the guys who tried to get our wall knocked down a few years ago), but allegiances tend to shift along with necessity out here.

We’d done it.

Now, how exactly were we going to get the hot-tub over the wall…?

A bit of a Krapfest

To many, mid-September is just that odd month between summer and autumn, a weird inbetweener when football and cricket are played concurrently, a month where that faint glow of summer is still tangible as the days get shorter. It’s when the kids go back to school. It’s when many businesses plan their annual budgets. It can set the tone for a six month period that most people in the Northern hemisphere spend drinking hot chocolate and remembering to put the central heating on. September is important - not least because it was in mid-September 2001 that Emma and I first met.

It was also in mid-September – this time in 2008 - that we completed the purchase of a dilapidated centuries-old ruin sliding off the side of a hill on the shores of a lake no-one had ever heard of, in a country most people couldn’t find on a map, just before the middle of the wettest European winter in years and right in the middle of the biggest global financial crisis for a generation. And the time scale we gave ourselves to renovate this heap and make a new life for ourselves running an eco-tourism business? Seven months.

You can hear Kevin McCloud tutting already, can’t you? Needless to say, we did not make it. After our first builder put doors where they were not supposed to be, hiked his costs by 200% without informing us first and took four months to get our roof on, we were forced to fire him and return to the UK, our dreams dashed. But we bounced back by getting new jobs and more importantly, managing to hire possibly the best builder in the whole of the Balkans. Things worked out ok after all.

Until we got to mid-September 2009, that is, when in a freakish turn of events I got sacked by text message. This was clearly not a positive development, but then things bizarrely righted themselves again. I got another job almost immediately, Emma scored an even better one and once again we were back in business. Sure, we had spiteful neighbours bent on destroying Zlatko’s beautiful border wall, but we fought them off and are now just a slip of legal penmanship away from being able to finish it. Sure, it was tough project-managing the ongoing build from a different country, but Zlatko’s work was outstanding (if a little delayed) and his workers dedicated and skilled. And sure, it was a blow that we didn’t meet our revised end-date of May 2010 as planned, but by summer we’d begun a rather more important project, with our first little Heywood due to arrive on Valentine’s Day 2011!

Something tells me it's going to take a lot longer to finish this project...

In our mind’s eye, then, we had always had mid-September 2010 down as our final finish date. It had a certain symmetry about it – two years more or less to the day that we bought the house – and it would also be the last time Emma would be able to fly anywhere until the spring of 2011. Communication between us, Zlatko and American Dragan indicated that we might be right on schedule. And then my employer went bust owing me two months’ wages just before we were due to head out for nearly two weeks.

All together now – arrrgggh.

Left with little alternative, we did what we’ve always done in such circumstances; we dug deep, borrowed some money and I got myself my third job in 12 months, starting the very day we got back from our “holiday” to see if American Dragan and Zlatko between them had finished our house. In Heywood-land, see, this is what constitutes an average year...

Of course, it won’t surprise you to hear that they weren’t quite done yet. We had forgotten to “Dave-minute”* American Dragan.

*a “Dave-minute” is the sneaky practice of handing someone a false deadline in the knowledge that they will miss it but still be on time for your “real” deadline.

It wasn’t a problem of quality. As with Zlatko, what Dragan had accomplished had been finished to a very high standard. Floors and beams had been sanded and beautifully varnished, tiles had been expertly laid, lights had been safely installed, walls had been carefully painted and a myriad other little left-overs had been ticked off, too, but as usual it appeared that there would be no breaking of the tape without us being there to send the whole phase scurrying through to completion. It was initially disappointing, but after a few firm discussions, work motored on apace. Skirting boards were affixed. Door surrounds were fashioned. Extra lights were wired in. All plumbing units were tried and tested. We cleaned. We repaired. We went to KIPS and OKOV more times than we should ever have to and once again fell prey to the logistical quagmire of the Montenegrin shopping experience.

Want a 120mm soil pipe? That’ll be KIPS in Golubovci. Want a flexible hose to connect it to your toilet? That’ll be the other KIPS out by the stari aerodrom. Want to return that soil pipe because you realise you actually need a different solution you didn’t spot first time and now wish to purchase on your way back from the other KIPS? Well, first you have to find a store worker to take the pipe back and give you a form. Then you have to go to the manager’s office to get the form stamped before revolving to the exact person you returned the pipe to. He will then fill it out and direct you to head back to the manager’s office - again - where you have to queue to get the form stamped - again. Then you have to go back that self-same store worker to buy your replacement goods before heading to the check-out till. Here, you perform the easiest part of the whole operation (naturally) and are told to head around the side of the building to collect your purchase. Except the girl around the side of the building tells you that you in fact have to cross the parking lot to go to their second building to get another stamp. At this second building, a second girl steals your receipt and replaces it with a completely new piece of paper that gets the aforementioned stamp. You then have to head back around the side of building #1 where the first girl will rather unhelpfully tell you to head out in the yard to collect your hose, where you will have to wait for ten minutes for a yard worker to arrive and take your replacement bit of paper, leaving you with the disconcerting feeling of having no proof that you’ve actually bought anything. You will then have to drive around to the other side of the yard to where your materials are stored and wait, a process that will take somewhere between five and fifty minutes depending on how much of a queue there is and whether your appointed KIPS employee knows where to find what you have bought. Finally, the goods will be loaded into your car and somehow, after all this, you are handed back your original receipt mere seconds before spontaneously combusting in impotent, impatient rage because you’ve forgotten those nails and in order to get nails you’ll have to go back into town to OKOV, past the Mercator Mexx on the road to Tuzi because God forbid that KIPS, a DIY store, should stock such an item!

And this is sort of how, almost exactly two years after we signed the papers and became the owners of that crumbling ruin, our house got finished. Almost.

We hope you agree that the results are pretty tasty.

We’re not quite done, of course. That border wall still has to be finished, and with it the rainwater recycling system. We’re still a few lights and fans shy, as well as one interior door, and have yet to find the right internal door handles. As you can see, Zlatko has installed some gorgeous ironwork for our spiral stairs, but won’t be able to attach the wooden treads until November (he has other jobs on that might actually earn him a profit and he rather understandably wants to finish those first), and of course the untamed monster that the garden has become is a battle for another time. We also have an extra problem to fix in the shape of a leak in our water tank (don’t worry - it sounds a good deal more serious than it actually is.

We are, however, finished enough for people to live in the house should they wish to. They’ll not have much furniture to use yet, but every electrical and plumbing installation is 100% operational. Good work, Dragans Dragišić and Deverdzić!

Those delays might only have been measurable in days rather than weeks, but combined with our already too-tight holiday schedule they sadly meant that as a result we missed the wedding of a couple of friends and barely had any time to relax ourselves. Only on the afternoon of the final Sunday could we spend any time with our good friend Dean Jovičević (he who spotted the house for us in the first place) and make some new friends as we joined the Montenegro Phototrekking Walking group on a hike from just outside our house in Zabes over to Godinje and then on to Virpazar itself.

The hike was part of a series of events that weekend hosted by the rather unfortunately named 2010 Lake Skadar Krapfest, the third year that the event had been running. Krap, of course, means carp in Serbo-Croat – the ubiquitous fish turning up on every local restaurant’s menu in either dimljeni (smoked) or na žaru (grilled) form – and is thus the perfect local festival mascot - provided you lack a fluent understanding of English slang. Created to promote the lake and all forms of eco-tourism, this was an event we had actually been looking forward to attending because it would afford us a rare opportunity to chat with likeminded people who a) would speak good English and b) might well be someone we could partner with when we start up in 2011. On this score it did not disappoint, at least. It was members of this group that had so delighted us earlier in the year when we heard of their “clean up the lake” campaign - and heartening to see that young Montenegrins were fully committed to protecting the National Park.

Ecology students apart, it would of course normally take a lot more than an organised hike to lure youngsters away from Podgorica. Virpazar was frankly throbbing like we’d never seen it before as locals poured into the tiny village in anticipation of an evening concert headlined by a chap called Darko Rundek.

Busy now - rammed later

Aleksander and Lilja, two of the phototrekkers, explained to us what all the fuss was about.
“He is a major star over here!” they said. “Think of him a little as the Croatian version of Sting. That’s how big a deal this is.”
“So he was part of a very popular group earlier in his career but now does his own stuff with an ever-changing troupe of global musicians,” I guessed, “but regarded as not all that cool by the younger kids?”

“Exactly!” they laughed. Emma and I have previous form when it comes to enduring obviously crap (sorry) concerts [see the previous blog entry, for example], but compared to what we had been forced to listen to in our house, Gospodin Rundek acquitted himself very well. Dragan and his team, you see, were fans of that peculiar Balkan folk music that sounds like a German oompah-polka crossed with Arabian wailing.

“My wife, Christine, she hates it too!” he grinned when I’d asked him what on earth the attraction was listening to a sound only marginally easier on the ear than bagpipes. “It’s about love of your family, your country. It’s happy music!”

Zlatko was less enamoured. On one of his brief visits to Villa Miela, the first thing he had done was switch off the offending radio, muttering “Turkish music!” under his breath.

To be honest, by that point I had sort of tuned it all out as I got on with the job of putting together no fewer than fifteen pieces of IKEA furniture that we had managed to get over the border into Montenegro. Nearly two weeks later, I still have “IKEA thumb”. I also survived a brief run in with the geometer (surveyor) Doctor Dean had set us up with back in August 08, a chap who had attempted to charge us €500 for his non-services. By then used to dodgy demands coming in this conveniently round number, we had insisted on receiving the detailed plans we had been promised in exchange for payment. Eventually, after meeting him for the fourth time in three weeks and still being given nothing more than a map of our land photocopied from the local land registry, we had cut off contact.

“You owe me €500!” he protested now, door-stepping me on our final evening more than two years after our last meeting.
“For one piece of paper? Not a chance,” I replied, crossing my arms and shaking my head with finality. “Do you have the survey with you right now? You know, the exact measurements of our land?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, then you’re not getting any money. Goodbye,” I asserted as bravely as I could. He called me several names, most of which I didn’t recognise, and drove off. American Dragan chuckled beside me, having helped to translate for part of the more lengthy exchange.
“What did he call me?” I asked, bemused.
“He called you mangup,” replied Dragan. “This is like, hard man. Smart, but ruthless, you know?”
I had to laugh. After deflating, ego-bruising arguments with shouty bullies like Bolimir, Electric Dragan and the wall-hate posse over the course of the last two years, it seemed I had finally found my Montenegrin backbone.

When I looked it up in the dictionary later, the entry read “mangup – rascal.”

If you can’t beat ‘em…

So, we're almost done. The sofa and woodburner are on their way, American Dragan is taking care of the water-tank repairs and our website (www.undiscoveredmontenegro.com) has been newly updated. Now all we need to do is see the build through to the finish, ensure Junior arrives safely and then get busy with a lot of paperwork...

All good things come to those who wait...

No moonwalking this time. This visit we marched to the beat of a different drummer, the kind that unlike Michael Jackson has no reverse gear, the kind that knows no fear and moves only forwards, marching into battle ahead of the troops, leading the charge with a swift one-two beat (to no doubt get mown down by machine gun fire in the first moments, but you know what I mean).

In my family, there is a law called the "Dave-minute". This refers to my step-father's required five minutes’ notice for dinner actually translating to him needing nearer forty-five, so dinner minus 45 minutes is when he is told it is ready. We had noticed a similar phenomenon in Montenegro that we shall call Montenegrin Time - to which builders were particularly susceptible. With Zlatko, if we gave him a month as a deadline, it would really take two. If he told us something would require a week to complete, it generally meant a month.

This is not a criticism, by the way. A Bolimir week would last an entire season and anyway, there's an unwritten law of property that states that you can only ever have two of the following three ideals: speed, quality and value for money. We had long since decided to give up on speed in favour of the other two, but even after a couple of years on this project, Montenegrin Time still caught us out on a regular basis. On our last visit, we had been a bit disappointed by the lack of progress and noted that Zlatko's men only really got cracking on our house in the week before our arrival, often leaving them no time to complete certain items before our departure, which would render our entire visit less worthwhile. We couldn't blame them for this - they had many more lucrative parallel jobs - but on this occasion we were desperate to get what we had asked for, when we had asked for it. We had told Zlatko we’d be heading out for July 7th - but then we got delayed by Emma’s work and had to fly out a week later instead.

“This could be a blessing in disguise,” Emma said. “After all, if they only started work a week ago, they’ve got a bonus week to get it finished. If they’re actually done this time, that’ll leave us free to sort out the next stage rather than standing around uselessly waiting for them to finish.”

We had unwittingly “Dave-minuted” Zlatko. Did it work? Did it ever. We should do it more often.

From the outside, the house looked SPECTACULAR. There was a deliciously crafted new gate. The doors and windows had been re-coloured a gorgeous darker hue, and the door and window surrounds had been re-coloured a subtler, lighter shade of ochre. The stonework was complete. The gutters had been transformed with a paint job of their own. The chimney was finished and poked beautifully up above the roof line. It almost made us cry.

Inside, there was extra progress. Every bathroom had been tiled by Goran and his team, exactly to the patterns specified, and every bath was ready and in position. The unappealing stone steps in the konoba had been removed, and although the new spiral stairs were still not in, we knew already that these were going to take a little more time given that Zlatko had rejected the modular unit we had selected from KIPS and had decided to get them made for us himself (a rather slower process).

As our five-day long stay unfolded, the news kept getting better. First of all, our kitchen arrived and was installed the same day thanks to the extremely efficient team from Eurosalon.

Of course, the sink had to be purchased and fitted separately...

Two days later came the moment neither of us thought we'd ever see. Dragan the Plumber (Zlatko apart, our favourite contractor) got our hidrofor working again and plumbed in two of the four bathrooms. We finally had working showers! Working toilets! Working sinks! And at about the same time, thanks to our ever-helpful translator, Sara, we received the best news of all from Dragan the Lawyer - he informed us that we had won our battle with four of the locals over the position of our wall. We had apparently beaten a second knock-down order and he was now in the process of getting the official kataster borders (infamous for being notoriously inaccurate) redrawn in our favour. Come September, we might finally be able to finish our wall...

This all meant that our elected finisher, American Dragan (no, I’m not joking, you can’t have any other name if you wish to work with us) could get cracking inside, something he’d been unable to do until we turned up and removed all the rubbish and left-over materials that Zlatko’s crew had left behind inside the house. He will now work together with Dragan the Plumber (who still has two more bathrooms and the white goods in the kitchen to go) over the next month to properly ensure that the house is ready for habitation by the end of August.

Good God. Surely not? Surely we can’t be nearing the end of a two year mission to restore one of the most beautiful stone houses in Crmnica? What on earth will we do then??

I for one suspect that our travails will not be so easily over. Come August/September, we’ll have an awful lot of furniture to buy, as well as a hell of a lot of landscaping to try and tame the beast that has become our ever more savage garden. This will mean more trips to KIPS and the like, which is actually what we spend most of our brief visits doing anyway. As mentioned back in the days when we were still living here (Montenegro, a Survival Guide, October 08), shopping can test your patience in Monty. First of all, there are no websites to save you time in selecting where to have a look for stuff. You have to get in the car and traipse round every store until you find what you need. The problem is that Montenegrin stores are the most frustratingly sloppy edifices to enterprise that Europe has yet foisted upon the unwary consumer. There’s the SuperMaxi supermarket that sells tortillas but no salsa. There’s the Technomarkt that sells printers, but no printer cartridges. There’s the otherwise impressive KIPS that for some hugely annoying reason sells all its plumbing odds and sods in one store and all its bathroom supplies in another. There’s the Gorenje showroom on the road to Cetinje that not only won’t sell you the extractor fan on display, but makes you collect it from their warehouse (which of course is on the other side of town), a warehouse that of course does not stock the filter that any normal person would assume comes with the extractor itself. Oh no, for that you have to go to Frigo Electro. But not the main Frigo Electro near the Voli supermarket in Podgorica. No, you have to go to the tiny one near the massive orthodox church…

Ivanka was very displeased at having to buy the left shoe at Delta City and the right shoe at Mercator Mex.

Getting that extractor took us two and a half hours. We still require a nice sofa, four wardrobes, a woodburner, four mirrors, several mattresses, a full set of curtain poles and curtains to go with them, a decent set of patio furniture for 8 and one final ceiling fan (we managed to find three already, itself something of a miracle as almost no-one near us appears to sell them).

Oh, and we have 9 days of holiday left this year. As the Americans are fond of saying: do the math.

Amid all this helter-skelter racing about, I would like to report that we had time to kick back and enjoy some of the beauty of the area, but we didn’t. As usual, it was left to the wonderful Tim and Katie to hand us our one afternoon of relaxation joining them on a sunset cruise on the Monty B down in Kotor, which did just the trick. On board we also met another couple on the renovation trail, David and Michelle, with whom we seemed to have plenty in common - although it’d be fair to say that they were rather nearer the finishing line than us, having just completed their own impressive house in Kotor after a four-year odyssey that might even have ours beat for drama.

That same evening Tim and Katie took us along to what sounded like a very intriguing performance down on the Tivat marina by an arts company based on a touring “theatre boat” from Canada. Emma and I are always game for an evening of weird culture, so we happily tagged along. It did not disappoint. The appropriately titled performance of “Purgatorija” was not, unfortunately, anything to do with Dante but rather a completely original musical set entirely on an impressively decked-out long boat while the audience followed the action sat on the quayside. I say followed the action, but it was hard enough trying to keep up during a 90 minute long extravaganza that made little sense to begin with and still less the longer it went on. Bellowing their way through a collection of atonal musical numbers supported by lyrics that were gibberish whether in their native English or the bafflingly inaccurate Serbo-Croat subtitles that were beamed onto one of the ship’s sails on an average delay of about 20 seconds, it was a little like watching a college am-dram society with an enviably decent budget and a 2:2 in Sociology. In the background under the admittedly impressive set design, meanwhile, a troupe of Cirque du Soleil cast-offs swayed about on sashes, ropes and modest trapezes wearing the sort of lycra costumes seemingly designed principally to expose their genitals while underneath them the lead actress battled her baffling Siamese-twin costume, a failing mike and the incomprehensible narrative by striding around the stage like Bonny Langford in Mungojerry and Rumpleteaser.

After half an hour, my ears had started to hurt. After an hour, numb-bum syndrome had set in with anaesthetic inevitability and just before the final curtain (ok, sail) a dogfight broke out in row K, scattering those stoic souls who had toughed it out to the finish. What the local people made of it all, we could but wonder. Half of them had slunk away around the halfway mark, thus avoiding the second act’s giant talking heads and having to fork out during the whip-round. I fear this sort of thing may not quite catch on in Monty.

So, until the next time. It’s been two years since we first saw this house. If we get it properly finished in another two, we’ll have matched David and Michelle. And given that we’re already thinking log cabins and plunge pools, the story probably has a fair bit left to run…