Day 5 - The Skadar lake

The next day we drove to another city as Budva was too crowded and overly tourist, and in a sense fake. The other place was called Saint Stefan. It was also pretty touristy, but at least it was calmer and there was a beach to swim. We rested there the whole morning and then we went to find the internet, because we decided that we want to leave the crazy coastline. After over an hour of fruitless search we had to take all of our stuff, because Zdeněk and Beata decided to return to Budva.

Mafia state

We picked quite randomly a small fishers village - Virpazar at Skadar lake that was recommended to us as a calm place to stay. First we wanted to go there by bus, but it didn’t arrive. Then all the self-proclaimed taxi drivers kept offering us a ride for quite a lot of money, so we rejected them. We decided to try hitchhiking there and it was surprisingly smooth. First a lady took us to a crossing to Virpazar. She worked as a tourist guide, but spoke only french, so we didn’t have much of a chat. Then we caught an amazing ride with a very talkative guy who ran a lot of tourist business in Budva. He went to Virpazar for lunch. He talked a lot about the history and nowadays of the region.

Those are some notes from his 30 minute monolog:

Montenegro’s government is not elected. They have the same president for years and the whole government is just mafia. The people don’t really care (or at least he didn’t), they mind their own business.
It’s a tribal state, belonging to a specific tribe is important, the tribe revenges a person from the tribe if something happens to him
Women are addressed as being “sisters, daughters, mothers”
Small admiration of Putin - his “strong” hand
Very big objection towards Albanians - probably because of the war - he warned us a bit before them. We’ll just see (our plan is to go to Albania from here).

In general it showed a very different perspective on the world that we know and it was very interesting to talk with someone with this view of the world. However we found it a bit too aggressive and it might be one of the reasons for all those crises. It was a very black and white view of the world.

Existing in a society network (being a node in a graph)

I think that there are some differences in the way a person observes/describes herself. In the western society a person regards herself as an individual with rights and freedoms, we think of us as being a person with our ideas and believes, we don’t refer to ourselves in the relationship to the society around us. On the contrary they (at least from the talk of this man) seem to refer to themselves a bit more in the connectionists way - they’re brothers, sisters, mothers, from the connections arises their value. This is very different and very important for understanding the relationships in the more traditional cultures.
But of course this is only “one man’s” opinion, so we can’t think that everybody thinks this way in Monte Negro

The hidden beauty

Then we arrived to Virpazar and followed the advice of two french backpackers to continue to a nearby small village Godinje at the Skadar lake.

Skadar lake

Virpazar

To get there we hitchhiked again and we caught another perfect ride with a Polish family from Wroclaw in their caravan (old one, but refurnished). The people were extremely nice and very excited about our excitement of their caravan :)
In Godinje we were looking for accommodation and found out that it was quite expensive even here, for instance a bottle of local wine cost 8 euros.
We decided to follow advice of the backpackers that we met before and to sleep on a hidden beach.
There we met another interesting travellers from US and UK. She was a PhD student of mathematics and he just finished his masters in water management policy. We had quite a nice chat, threw frisbee a bit and ate our watermelon.
What a beautiful place, calm, the views!, birds doing crazy things, diving to catch fish, such a great water.

Dinner views

We cooked our own dinner and because we found 8 euros/wine too much so we stayed “wineless”. But we enjoyed ourselves very much. @hr1 took a night bath, but I was a bit sick from the mountains, so I couldn't join him :(.
Still it was an evening to remember!