Again, uninformed...
Weather takes us prisoner
We wait out the storm.
The trees overhead last night did a decent job of keeping our tent dryer than everything around it, anyway. Our bikes were soaked, but we realised later in the day that it didn't matter. Things will pretty well get soaked here.
We packed up, biked out, stopped for coffee in a place with a broken bathroom. The coffee in Montenegro is hereby declared "just dandy." I miss tea country a little (Morocco and the UK), but Evan doesn't seem to mind. He's becoming a caffeine addict for sure. :)
The lay of the land here is silly. That's really the best word for it, I guess. There's a long tongue of sea that reaches inland for dozens of kilometres, fanning out at the end with little bays. There's a ferry that crosses it at the mouth, but we figured that if we can't justify going the long (70km) way around such an inlet then we have no reason to be seeing Portugal or Italy on the way from Denmark to Turkey, so we elected to go around. It's a good thing!
There's a video up of part of this ride, actually; the towns and things adorning the shores were lovely. After we passed the town with the ferry port, things became a lot quieter, and it was evident that most people can't be bothered to pass through here. The mountains, capped with rainclouds, looked mysterious and beautiful reflected in the water, and near the end of the bay there was a pair of islands with an ancient monastery upon one and an ancient church upon the other. Charming.
Along the northeast edge of the inlet, we came past a great cave into a town. The rain picked up, and we took shelter in another café to pass the time and stay a bit dry. We sipped our cappuccinos and whiled away the minutes examining our maps and tikking uselessly on the laptop. A few other patrons were sitting in the covered terrace of the café, having fled there as there was a workman inside repainting all the surfaces. Just as we were drawing blanks for anything else with which to occupy ourselves, the café's server approached us and asked us would we like any drinks, compliments of the gentlemen across the room. We raised our eyebrows and asked for beer.
Before the waiter returned with our drinks, we had collected our things and moved to sit with the men who had just treated us. Only one of the pair spoke English; his name was Vladko, and he loved talking. As our beers came and were followed by two more, he regaled us with some tidbids about Montenegro, the interesting water properties of the area, his concern over our biking in the rain, and tales of his own adventures abroad.
Near the café where we sat were two interesting areas; one had excessively high rainfall, but neither I nor Evan can remember the exact numbers related to it, unfortunately. The other area had the largest number of churches per person of anyplace in Europe, which is certainly saying something.
Montenegro being made nearly entirely of mountains as it is, water tends to flow in strange ways. He mentioned the cave we had passed; no one has successfully explored it fully, and dyes put into the water for more than 100km around flowed out there. He also told us a bit about the beer we were drinking. It's called Nikšićko Pivo, and it is made from "the clearest water you can find." He told us some stuff about the mineral content, etc., of the water, which we didn't really appreciate, I guess, but the beer was tasty, so we didn't mind listening to him and occasionally nodding or peering into our glasses contemplatively.
He gave us the somewhat disheartening news that especially around this time of year, rain in Montenegro is the rule. We're going to get very wet during our time here, and also during our time on the Albanian coast. He went off on a tangent about Albania for a while, telling us that it's not really ready for tourists (its border having been just recently opened after having been closed for decades), it has terrible roads (excepting one fabulous highway along the coast which we should at all costs take over the crummy paths through the interior mountains), and that the people there are very friendly.
His stories of times abroad certainly did a fine job of amusing us while as we continued warming up and drying. As the rain continued outside, he told us about a trip to the US where he endeavoured to experience the highs and lows of the country, applying for and getting a visa but electing to steal across the border concealed in a petrol tanker from Tijuana anyway, sleeping in a New Orleans penthouse and throwing airplanes made of $100 bills from his window, spending nights under bridges with bums, and eventually of his rather dramatic homecoming. He stayed 6 months past the expiration of his visa and decided he didn't want to pay for a ticket home, so he shipped his clothes back with his friends, got in a fight with a waiter at an Italian restaurant, and was flown at the government's cost back to Europe with federal agents as his flight attendants. He told us about the time he swam across the border between Italy and France just to see if it could be done. We aren't sure if he was full of shit or not, but we were amused and had free beers.
Vladko left for work or shenanigans around noon, and we hopped on our bicycles to ride. The scenery around the rest of the bay was similar to that at the beginning, and there were no navigational issues until we reached the final town, where we accidentally found ourselves on a road that twisted into the mountains and shortcutted a peninsula. Along that road, we spied a Jeep with California plates of all things, but he didn't stop to talk with us.
We rode along the main Adriatic coast for some time more, stopping around 16h at an area of abandoned terraces. Much of Montenegro seems to have shown promise for development, but Vladko also told us how the economy here went south when all the foreign investors across the ocean lost their shirts recently. No American money means no building, so many projects have been stopped in various stages of completion. These terraces cut into the hill have a path leading through them, but at the end of the path lies a one by two metre terrace and cliffs. They are evidently not used.
We set up our tent and cooked some dinner, fortunately during a break in the rain. It was off-and-on all day, but we were treated to a cloudy-yet-rainless sunset over the sea with sailboats floating by far below us. The rain picked up as we packed up, and we threw our things into the tent before hoofing it back to the gas staton nearby (about five minutes' walk) to have a couple beers and some chocolate. What a strange sight we must have been... a couple twenty-somethings dressed in cycling clothes with no cycles evident, arriving in a rainstorm to a gas station far from anything, having only beer and chocolate before disappearing into the night...
But that's us. That's our day. We're weird.