From Kotor to a random beach in Croatia

Winter was coming

After two days we were looking forward to be in the road again. We started to walk by the exit of the town which leads to the north. Some meters away we found another hitchhiking couple trying to get a ride. It was a Spanish-German couple. Kotor is definitely the most “hitchhiker friendly” town we found in our trip. Unfortunately it started to rain, so we decided to hitchhike from under a little corner shop’s roof. It was not a very good place but we needed only a few minutes to catch the first car. It was a middle aged woman (Vesta) with a good car and a perfect English that drove us to Perast, a little bit further than her destination. During the short journey the sky started to cover up in a very scary dark gray color.

Raining cats and dogs

I didn’t care about the rain

The heavy rain was waiting for us so we had to run to the nearest cafe. We didn’t have time to admire the view and that little village was really charming.  It was much less touristic and smaller than Kotor, so instead of big cruisers you could see little fisherman’s boats and transparent water, with the same crazily beautiful mountains around. We stayed in a cafe at least three hours.  It didn’t stop to rain all that time. I tried to bargain with the owner to exchange my guitar to another exposed in the bar as a decoration but my efforts didn’t have any reward.

Come on, sell me the fucking guitar!

After the storm a beautiful sunny color impregnated the whole bay, it was a magic moment. In the way back to the main road we had the time to make some beautiful pictures of the bay and the little fisherman boats.

Beautiful landscape

Already there, we realized that there was no place to hitchhike in our direction, so we tried out the more risky hitchhiking mode: “the reverse hitchhiking”. It was fucking hard… That’s not true. We needed two minutes for a car to stop.  That’s when we met one of the main characters in our trip story: Habib. At this time he was with another Turkish friend, Emir,  and he drove us from Perast to Herceg Novi. He also gave us two CD´s of Turkish music: Burhan Öçal & The Trakya All Stars  and Gönül Sayfam . Once there, we stopped to buy something to eat in a very small corner shop with a smiley old woman that actually give as a tomato for free. She was so nice that we decided to hitchhike few meters away not to block her entrance. Soon other hitchhikers arrived to this place, leaving us in a less advantageous position. Anyway, we were caught before them by an interesting Montenegrin guy with a ruined old Golf. He drove us to the border with Croatia and, by the way, with the European Union. We crossed the border walking again and there we found another of our animal friends. We very originally called him Pulgui 3. There he is:

Pulgui 3

He was specially trained to bark furiously and try to attack all the car that ignored us, specially the Germans. We finally got a ride from a very friendly Bulgarian couple whose car was already full without us. From Christian (the driver) we learned about “Dubioza Kolektiv”, a Bosnian band that we liked a lot. They wanted to leave us in a proper Camping site but we didn’t find the way to explain them that we were wild camping. After leaving them we felt a little bit upset, because we had the impression that they wanted to spend an evening with us (If you are reading that, sorry anyway). We finally were in Croatia but we weren’t very sure where exactly.

Kotor II, drink and recovery

As Aleksandra explained, Kotor was the town where we crossed more hitchhikers, so we had to celebrate it with a proper party. I don’t know how but we managed to bring all of them together at 7,30 pm on the Old town entrance. Finally, from all of the travelers we where there, only us and a young Polish couple were enough brave to climb up the 1,350 stairs to the top of the Castle with the backpacks.

Kotor old town entrance

We started at night, because from 10 am to 8 pm you have to pay 3 euros and that was too much. It took us around one hour and a half and 5 kilograms each. But finally all the effort was worth it, because the view from the top was really impressing. First of all, we looked for a place to put our tents. There are several covered rooms on the castle, but usually destroyed and full of rubbish, so we decided to settle in the only  more or less flat grass field we found. Then we cooked some soup in our burned pot (for the last time before throwing it away) and ate our dinner. In a nearby roof they were two Germans drinking some beer, so after the dinner we invited them. For that special occasion we  switched to wine for the first time on the trip and it was quite tasty but not so good for my stomach. We were playing guitar all night long and we finished sitting in a roof, 280 metres above the ground, contemplating the Kotor bay.

Kotor by night

Famous Spanish singer

We woke up the next day already surrounded by early tourists quite shocked about our presence, the same as me about theirs.  It was very hot, and we understood straight away that to come down was harder than to walk up. Once downstairs, we walked around the beautiful old town and made some pictures. We both started to feel a little bit down, so we decided to spend the day on the beach. As you can see on the map, the bay of Kotor is a piece of water into the land and Kotor is a town, that is furthest in the inner land. That also means it is the most contaminated by the big amount of boats and big cruisers that sail around there every day. The beach was quite artificial, but the surroundings were still amazing.

Morning view 1

Morning view 2

Our home

We didn’t recover the energy for the hole day, we even decided not to search too much and simply place the tent in the park, nearby the beach. We went to the supermarket and then straight to the park, waiting for the tourists to go back to their hotels. Then, again the hitchhikers luck came to us. We were drinking a beer and playing “I cross the border with” (very suitable for that situation) when two girls approached us. They asked if we where hitchhiking and where we planned to sleep. After a few words they invited us to sleep at their rented little place, They were two very very nice Lithuanian hitchhiker girls: Vida and Zivile. We spent the night talking about travels (they were quite experienced travelers), and the boring day turned into a great night. In the morning we also could have a shower. Thank you so much!

Kotor Bay

Nice street

Kotor

Hitchhiking in Balkans is like catching a taxi. It took us something like two minutes to catch a hike to Kotor. This time it was a nice couple from Denmark, who were spending their holidays in Montenegro. When I mentioned my nationality, it turns out that the Danish girl was actually half-Polish and she spoke Polish very well. By then, I’d started to think Polish grew to a rank of international languages. At least in Balkans. And Igor was getting more and more depressed that suddenly nobody cared about Spanish anymore. I felt just a little bit of sadistic pleasure seeing him suffer.

Sky after the storm. on the way to Kotor

We got to Kotor in 20 minutes and already as we were approaching the town we got absolutely amazad with the beauty of the bay. It was amazing. When we arrived, the first thing we did was to sit down on a first banch we found (with a beautiful view on a wall of old city. A usual, old wall) and we started to dig in our lousy food. Igor was very happy about his spicy chorizo. As we were delecting ourselves with an old bread-old anything else (but chorizo) sandwiches we saw somebody is waving at us. It was another backpacker wanting to where we were going to camp. Even though we communicated quite well with in backpackerssign language, he decided to come down and talk to us.

The wall

Kotor bay

He turned out to be a Lithuanian hitchhiker traveling with his friend. Just like us, they just arrived to town and they wanted to find a camping place, where they could leave their tent with stuff inside without a worry. We had a kind of a conflict of intrests there. We heard from the Germans that a good place to stay is Kotor castle. After 8PM there was no one to charge us 3 euros for entrance and the views had to be amazing. The only thing about it was that to get there, you had to climb 1500 steps.

random photo from Kotor

view on the bay

We’ve decided to look for some better camping places and meet up just before the sunset. We started the search (not very thorough though,we knew we wanted to go up). On our way we met a couple of young Polish hitchhikers with a guitar: Alicja and Tomek and we told them to come to our meeting point. “Great! We’re get fucking wasted” was the answer. I’d missed Polish mentality.

Then, we went to a shoping mall (a paradise to every backpacker, with all those free toilets and stuff), where we saw to our surprise that everybody smokes walking around the shoping mall aisles. But beware! Sitting on a ground next to a wall is strictly forbidden!

In the supermarket we saw some typical Spanish hyppies. It turned out they were hitchhiking around the area as well. Kotor seems to be a favourite hitchhiker destination, for some reason.

Anyway, when we all met up in the meeting point (some other hitchhiking Poles appeared, what a surprise!), it was the time to decide. Lithuanians found some guarded place, where they could stay, but we knew what we wanted. We wnated to write in our blog, we slept in the Kotor castle, and we got “fucking wasted!”.

So we took the Polish youngsters with us and we started to climb. I must say, it was an hour of a complete nightmare. But man, it was worth it!

Montenegro Coast

The first night wasn’t too interesting. At least villige where we stayed wasn’t too touristic, so we could camp at the main beach.

The next day in the morning we were quite confident about hitchhiking, because we were used to Albania, but Montenegro is another story. It was extremely humid, so we felt completely exhausted and powerless.

Tourists don’t want problems taking dirty hitchhikers, so they just passed by, we saw plates from everywhere in Europe.  Fortunately, a young Russian guy  (who by the way didn’t look Russian at all. Rather like an Australian surfer) stopped. He was very curious about us, as from where he comes from (Syberia) hitchhikers is not a common thing to see. We had a nice conversation and he left us in the entrance to Budva.

Sveti Stefan and us.

Budva is one of the most touristic places in Montenegro, so you can imagine the amount of swimming suits, towels, children and inflatable matresses that we saw there. We managed to cross the town and we started to climb a small hill, following the main road. We tried to hitchhike there for a while, but it didn’t work, so we continued walking. From the top we tried to reach small hidden beach throuhg the bushes but the path was getting narrower and narrower, just next to a cliff, so we had no choice but give up and go back to the road. Just before getting to the road again, we stumbled upon a car, obstructing the way and jumbing at the same time. Someone was making babies inside. Nevertheless we decided to pass, but we forgot to make a video (next time).

Ruins of a castle. Presently, a garbage dump

We started to follow the main road again. We had to walk something like 7 kilometers without any space to hitchhike and with the sun heating our heads. The worst thing is that we were watching incredibly beautiful small beaches only reachable by a boat. What a pitty we left our at home.

Nice view

When we finally arrived to some civilization, we were close to death, so we bought a typical 2l plastic bottle of beer. We were sure that the wine that we had wouldn’t be enough.

As we had realized from the top of the cliff, just behind the big main beach full of tourists, plastic sunbeds and all that crap, there was another one as big as the other, but with much less people (probably most of them killers, pedos and exhibicionists).

Our beach. The view from the road.

All we wanted is to have a rest so we just threw our backpacks on the floor, crushed at the stony beach, opened the beer and just relaxed. Some ten minutes later a young blond girl approached us and asked if we were thinking to sleep there. It turned out she was doing the same thing. It was a German couple of hitchhikers, Karl and Ana, that found a perfect place under an abandoned beach bar and spent already two nights there. It was like a present for us, we were on an impressive beach, we had a shelter, good company and alcohol. We spent a great time with them. We talked a lot, we played some guitar and we made a fire place.  We also swam naked in the transparent water and saw the fluorescent plankton.  Magic night. When I opened my eyes in the morning, first thing I saw, was a naked, old man, 5 meters away from me. Magic morning.  We left the beach quite sad, having to pass next to all the staring tourists.

Our paradise beach

Our home

Our home. The close up

Fire.

What the fuck are you looking at?!

From Tirana to a little beach near Petrovac

Tirana-Petrovac

Hitchwiki says there is a good hitchhiking spot from Tirana to the North and it should be around 2km from the city centre. We followed all the directions: went to Zogu i Zi square and took a bus to Kamez. On the way everybody, both passenger cars and mini vans, offered us a ride for money.

Informal bus station

The bus we took was completely crowded and the last stop was surely more than 2km away. More like 20. It was a bit embarassing to block the front entrance of the bus with our backpacks. But the driver did us a favour and stopped openning the front door, as he figured, nobody elso would feet in.

As we arrived and started to walk down the street in search for an apprioprate place for cars to stop, some car stopped (we weren’t hitchhiking yet) and the driver offered us a ride some kilometers up north. We shyly asked “Parap?”. As we found out before this means in Albanian “no money”. We don’t like to ask that, but after experience with our last ride, we wanted to be sure.
It turned out the driver was a really nice guy, who just felt sorry for us when he sa us walking in the heat. He spoke perfect Polish and English so we had an interesting conversation about Balkan tourism.

He left us somewhere between Tirana and Schkoder. After a short lunch break, we started to hitchike again. We didn’t wait 2 minutes before the next car stopped. The same story: “Parap?” “It’s OK, I’m not doing it for money”. This time there were two brothers from Tirana. We had a very interesting chat with them and started to regret we didn’t stay in Albania longer.

We stopped in Shkoder, saw the ancient castle and the beautiful  riverside, and started to hitchhike again. Again waiting time was shorter than 5 minutes. A nice young guy working for Herbalife stopped and took us to the Albanian-Montenegran border.

Castle in Schkoder

The river

In the border we met Tahir, very nice 65-years old hitchhiker from Albania who showed us where to find self-grown Cannabis and tried organize a ride for us. Just after he left, we got a ride with two Kosovian guys who told us a bit about the Prizren and the conflict in Kosovo. Again, we regret, we didn’t go there after all.

Igor wants to go to Bar (what a surprise)

Our last driver was Cimi from Schkoder, another Albanian guy who spoke perfect Polish. He took us to our final destination for the day and gave some advise where we could camp.

With Pulgi2

Hitchhiking in Balkans is like taking a taxi!