The Last Straw

One morning, at 2 a.m., I awoke to the familiar sounds of my neighborhood pack of dogs chasing someone, but something about this chase sounded different. I took up my front row seat, that is, stood on my fifth floor balcony, to observe the proceedings below. In the courtyard were two packs - one of dogs, the other of people. Several of the people were holding chairs out in front of them, like lion tamers, balancing the chairs in one arm. I thought the cafe owner would be upset to know his chairs were being removed from the premises until I spotted the owner amongst them. And in lieu of the long whip you would expect to see in the lions ring at the circus, these folks had rocks in their other hands and were throwing the rocks at the dogs in an attempt to prod the canines back so that the people could reach their cars. I felt like a Roman watching the Christians and the lions but I wasn't really sure who was who.

This early morning spectacle followed a knock on my door earlier in the week by two of the young girls living in my building. They were about 11 or so years old. They handed me a clipboard with a document attached that looked like a petition and I heard one of them mention the word "dog". I assumed that they were looking for support to stop the police from carrying out their now long overdue stray extermination policy, and I handed back the petition, unsigned, to the girls, saying in bad Albanian, that "I didn't like dogs" - now this blanket statement isn't true, but due to my severe language restrictions, subtlety in meaning was not an option and it was the best I could do in conveying my actual sentiment which was: "I have nothing against dogs. While I have never owned dogs, I appreciate why pet owners love their dogs, they are furry and fun when they fetch, and I wish all dogs could be in loving homes, and I am sad that this situation exists in Kosovo where strays are forced to fend for themselves and become territorial through no fault of their own, and yes, life is unfair, but there is no way in hell that I am going to do anything to stop the potential removal of those four legged tormentors from beneath my windows." The girl, who took the clipboard back, fixed me with a stare so focused and determined that I was momentarily at a loss, and then she said in a steely, eerily mature voice, "we don't like dogs either" at which point I realized that the 11 year olds had started their own campaign to try and get the police to finally take action. I signed, willingly. And yet, the week went by with still no results.

So the morning after my circus show, I called my friend at the OSCE and she sent me all the apartment postings on their intranet. Within two days I had found a flat an additional 15 minute walk from the center (called the suburbs by locals), twice the size, nicely furnished, same price, and blissfully quiet (well, relatively, as despite being dubbed the suburbs, there are still lots of city noises), although me determining that resulted in dubious glances being exchanged between my future landlords as I grilled them and their 9 year old son about dogs and birds for at least ten minutes: "so tell me, how many strays are in the neighborhood? do they socialize with each other? ever been chased? ever heard them? tell me about the birds? do you hear the birds? how many birds have you seen? where do the birds sleep?" ... While they think I am a crazy woman obsessed with dogs and birds (and they are right), they still agreed to rent me their flat. The move was not traumatic, I have settled in, hosted my book club here and have even had two house guests from the States since then - Prof. B and T, Esq. - who alas did not get to experience the joys of the dog pack or the blackbird chorus at 4 a.m. Some things we can all live without.

A Montenegrin Glacial Lake & A Not Quite Thai Massage

Not long after the trip to Albania, I did indeed get behind the wheel of a car again, from the same rentacar company, to head to Montenegro. I traveled for a long weekend to Kolasin, a Montenegrin ski resort with a five star spa called Bianca. I picked the locale because it was only 5 km away from the Biogradska Gora National Park which is known for its primordial forest and its glacial lake, situated at 1094 m, where I hoped to do some hiking.

Prior to my departure, people warned me that the roads across the Kosovo-Montenegrin border were bad and that the Montenegrin roads were treacherous. Of course, these were the same people who told me that the Albanian roads were good. Fortunately, I paid them no mind. While I am certain that my Albanian adventure honed my driving skills the same as if I had graduated summa cum laude from an offroad driving school, the roads in fact were okay. There were treacherous mountain roads with hairpin turns, evidence of an unnerving number of rock slides, and an eerily long no-man's land between the Kosovo border post and the Montenegrin border post, but the road was paved and occasionally came equipped with a guardrail - what more could you ask for. I made the journey in 3.5 hours, instead of the anticipated 4.5 hours.
I checked into the Bianca spa. (Here's a link to a review of the resort: http://www.visit-montenegro.com/our-reviews-1.htm ). You can spot it miles and miles away as it towers over its surroundings. I was one of only two guests whom they were expecting that day and as such, I was addressed by name when I walked through the door. Like I said, it is a ski resort, so summer is definitely its low season. The plus is that there are no crowds at its indoor Olympic size pool and it is no problem to get an appointment at the spa, which my friend had told me, was staffed by a group of Thai women who had moved to Kolasin from their homeland. It wasn't exactly right. When I went downstairs to book some services, I discovered they are from the Philippines. Then I discovered that a five star spa, even one in the middle of Montenegro, is damn expensive. Gone was my dream of booking an entire day of spa treatments, but I had come all this way and was not going back without something at least, so I booked my 30 euro (about $40) pedicure (I figured it worked out to $4 a toe - not so bad) and a 60 euro back massage for the next day.


The town is tiny, although it purports to have a population of 9500, it looks more like 500. The center, and really the entire town, consists of one crossroads and a multitude of cafes. The next morning, I sat in one, drank possibly the worst coffee ever brewed and overheard a neighboring table of a group of local middle aged men, who were all smoking and doing shots, speaking of their plans for massages later in the day at the spa. One gentleman bemoaned the fact that he only had enough for a thirty minute massage. I must admit that for a moment I thought the spa might be a front for some other professional craft, but as I learned later, it really was a spa, and this tiny town in the middle of Montenegro was now getting used to having weekly massages. East meets West, or at least meets the Balkans.

I headed in my car to the National Park. At its base is a hut and a pole blocking the road. A woman in a uniform came out of the hut and approached my car and said "one euro". She then apologized, although I had not objected, that I would have to pay but said that was policy. I gave her the euro, the pole was lifted, and I set off up a mountain.









Eventually, the road ends in a dirt clearing and opens up onto Biogradsko lake. It's clearly worth the price of admission.
The lake is tucked into the mountains and surrounded by forest. An Austrian organization donated funds to clean up/create a path along the 4.5 km long shoreline of the lake.



You can hike around the lake or into the mountains on well marked trails. I did both until it started raining later in the afternoon. I didn't mind having to pack it in because I knew I had a massage and pedicure waiting for me back at the spa. When I returned to the spa, I saw the cafe gentleman coming from his thirty minutes of massage heading to the sauna. It all looked above board to me. My massage was okay - thirty minutes with the expected background sounds of some new age music featuring harp and punctuated by the occasional sound of nature - the croaking frog, babbling brook or chirping cricket, all of which usually makes me more anxious than relaxed, not being a particularly outdoorsy person. Why would I want to be in a room with a frog or cricket? During my massage? Mystifying. But the pedicure opened up a whole new world. For some reason, I suspect boredom, the woman who took care of my feet made it her mission that day to loofah, soak, paraffin and massage the bejesus out of them. Ninety minutes later, I felt like I had someone else's feet - never had I seen them looking so shiny and new. I felt bad having to walk on them at all and was sad that the five star spa did not have man servants standing by to carry me, Cleopatra like, back to my room. Alas, I returned to my room as any mere mortal, on my own two (now fabulous looking) feet.

(Not so) European Vacation - the end

Within twenty minutes of setting off from Shkodra, we reached the turn marked by a slightly askew and severely faded sign which contained the word "Koman" - the name of the town where the ferry stops. Sure enough, our badly paved road had become a dirt path covered in rocks of various sizes, dips and ditches, and I braced myself for the 2 hour drive to come. Within fifty meters though, the rocks become pavement, and not the badly scarred, dangerously pot-holed pavement we had come to expect on those rare occasions we encountered paved roads, but a smooth, even glossy, surface. I held my tongue sure that if I declared aloud my ever growing happiness at this development, I would jinx it. Yes, there were patches of rock, usually around the sharp corners, which I suspected may have been deliberately left unpaved in order to try and prevent more people from plummeting off the sides of the roads to their deaths, but for the most part, the road to Koman was a veritable autobahn.

About fifty minutes later, we had taken the picturesque road which goes along the mountains and hills which surround a huge lake, seeing a farmer here and there and maybe a half dozen houses scattered in the hills. We came into a valley with about a dozen buildings/trailers and I stopped to ask how far we had left to go until we reached Koman. The nice cafe owner told me I had reached Koman as he pointed to the sign over his establishment, "The Koman Cafe". Okay, so I am not the most observant person sometimes. The owner added that a policeman standing on the other side of the bridge could direct me to the queue for the ferry. It was only 8 o'clock. Our estimated two to three hour journey took a mere seventy minutes. Not bad.

We pulled across the bridge, had the policeman point to a couple cars parked on the side of the road around the corner, and we followed suit. Still not entirely sure if we were in the right place, because but for a couple trickles of water, there was definitely no place for a ferry to pull up, we sought reassurances from our nearest neighbors, the car in front of us, and satisfied ourselves that yes, indeed, this was the line, that we would drive through the mountain somehow and come to the ferry stop at around 10 a.m., when the cars coming off the ferry had finished coming down the same road.

And so we waited two hours in the three cafe town of Koman. They too demonstrated a fondness for ceramic tchotchkes. The town really does have three cafes, an electric plant connected to the dam (although there was no electricity in the town while we were there), and a "cement hotel", or so it was dubbed by my friend in Prishtina, whose tale of the evening she spent there once with her family and the deaf mute son of the owner contained many references to the establishment in The Shining. While we did not enter the cement hotel, we saw it down the road, a pink cement concrete block, and it looked quite benign. Perhaps, on another trip, we can stay there ourselves. Yeah, right. Moving on...

As we waited the two hours the line grew, which confirmed what I had heard about the ferry generally being full to capacity. Meanwhile, the local population went about their business including shepherding their sheep up the same mountain road we would take to the ferry.

Finally, at around 10 a.m., I could see a trail of cars starting to make its way down the mountain road in front of us. The ferry had obviously arrived. We waited another twenty or so minutes, then we were off. The mystery of where exactly the ferry comes in is solved when I see a tunnel through the mountain.

We cross through and come out on the other side of the dam, where the water is captured in deep mountain gorges. When we finally get to the ferry, the men organizing entry to the ferry tell me that I have to back the SUV onto the boat (instead of drive on/drive off). This nearly gives me a heart attack, but with the help of about four men, yelling at me in Albanian and gesturing wildly, I succeeded in not sending the car off the sides of the dock or into any major part of the ferry, and tucked the SUV safely onto the side of the ferry. The very first people on had to back on to the back gangplank and were practically hanging off the ferry.

Had I had to do that, it probably would have finished me off.

(By the way, the little tin hut which you can see to the right of the photo is in fact the ladies bathroom - I seriously curtailed my liquid consumption to avoid having to use it.)

Loading goes rather quickly and I think we are about to go because it looks like there is no more room when a truck full of huge cement pipes pulls up.

Surely, I thought, it can't fit, but the men reorganized the cars, and the truck driver backed the truck up on the ferry.

When this truck boarded, the entire ferry sank a foot. At last, we could go. And for two hours, we moved slowly through the gorges.

The two hour journey was impressive, beautiful and worthwhile. The tranquility of travelling by ferry almost made me forget the trauma of travelling by road. Because of it, I would actually recommend a weekend visit to Albania - skipping the Kukes-Shkodra road but taking the ferry in and out instead.

We pulled into Bajram Curri, where the ferry docks, and where our road to Kosovo awaited us.

A short twenty minute drive later, we came to the border. As soon as we crossed into Kosovo, but for the section near the border crossing, where we had to drive down a dirt embankment, at the instruction of the police, in order to reach the paved road, the roads were brilliant.

We stopped in Djakovo, a small town notable for having an interesting Ottoman period bridge and a large Catholic community (evidenced by the new Catholic church going up - I think the largest in Kosovo).

During lunch, Prof. D. asked me what it would take for me to drive back via Decani, a town near the western border of Kosovo, famous for its monasteries. Since I didn't know exactly how long it would take us, and I knew Prof. D. had a flight out that evening from Prishtina, I begged off, saying no because of time constraints. This was true, but also true was the fact that I was counting the minutes to when I could get rid of the keys, the car and the need to take up any further road challenges. Public transportation and taxis, here I come!