Today we’d be driving to Bar. Or I’d be driving, Tarrant would be sitting in the passenger seat periodically reminding me that we’re meant to be driving on the right and also I have a whole car to the right of me and she’d thank me to remember that when considering my road positioning. We got started early to try and beat the other tourists along the coast road and got to Sveti Stefan in pretty good time.

The exceptionally photogenic island is an exclusive resort and the only people who are allowed on there are the guests which is fair enough, but the resort owners also wanted exclusive access to the beaches. Obviously local people told them to fuck right off as well they should. They weren’t happy about the construction taking place either so it currently remains closed while the Montenegrin government and the lease holders try to come to some manner of agreement. I sincerely hope the deep pockets won’t win this battle and the beaches remain open for public use but I’m not holding my breath as I will likely turn blue and die.

It was peaceful at this hour with only a smattering of carbon based lifeforms around. We wandered around, took the obligatory photos, then went in search of food products to apply to our faceholes before continuing on our way. It was about 9.30am and it was already too bastard hot. I really need to start looking at holidays in marginally cooler places as I get older and less tolerant of anything above 25°C.

We swung by Manastir Gradište, a monastery, to gawp at their lovely churches. A monk sweeping leaves wordlessly nodded a hello at us as we strolled past him. Had he taken a vow of silence? Did he just not speak English? Or maybe he was already fucking done with leaf sweeping duty that morning and couldn’t be arsed with more than a nod. Completely valid. Sweeping anything nature deposits on the floor is a thankless task. You think you’re done then the bastard trees just keep dropping stuff.

From what I can gather the first church you come to, St Sava, is relatively new. 19th century I believe which in Old Religious Shit terms is basically still in nappies. The brickwork is lovely with alternating layers of red and white brickwork and the frescoes are clean and vibrant. It’s refreshing to see how the really old stuff might have looked when it was first built. There did used to be an older church on this site but the monastery has suffered over the years from war and a big earthquake and that church was, at some point, reduced to rubble.

St Nicholas is the second church and it’s old. I’ve read it’s 16th century but it’s had to undergo various restoration projects thanks to aforementioned wars and, ironically, acts of God. The frescoes are faded and worn and it looks like a lot of them, particularly on the ceiling, have been lost. Possibly due to the restoration works. I love seeing the old and the new side by side like this. The final church which is the smallest, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was locked so we couldn’t get in but it had the best views. We drank those in for a short while before getting back on the road.

I’m getting Greek vibes in Montenegro in that it’s all olive trees and bad driving. Speed limits are admittedly painfully low and instead of just trusting you to slow down for a corner on a 60 kph road they’ll post a 40 kph limit for you to stick to. Well, me anyway. No one else in Montenegro it seems and they will drive very, very close to you to make their displeasure known. But until I know how things like speed traps work here I’m afraid I’m just going to have to stick to the limit and pull over when I can to let the others past.

Next stop was Stari Bar, which literally means Old Bar. It was a Roman settlement which went through all the usual ownerships over the years – Venetians, Serbs, Ottomans – before the same 1979 earthquake which took a chunk out of Manastir Gradište buggered the aqueduct and the town was abandoned. The aqueduct was eventually repaired and people returned and it’s now home to nearly 2000 humans, probably double that in cats, and it’s a right little tourist hub too. I really liked it, it had a nicer vibe than Budva’s Stari Grad. It’s much smaller of course, the majority of it is a ruin and there’s only a street outside where the action happens. We wandered the souvenir shop lined street up to the really quite wonderful ruins of the old walled city.

I do sometimes wonder if, when they were building these forts atop hills with sweeping views of surrounding valleys were they literally just thinking about how well they could defend? Or at any point did the thought creep into their heads that they could watch some banging sunsets with a mug of whatever fruit-based distilled liver rot they’d produced that week from up there? There are a smattering of information boards for you to read and, in my case, promptly forget. You basically just potter around, there are arrows for you to follow or disregard, and you stumble upon view after view. Plenty of eyehole fodder here if you can see anything through the sweat pouring into your eye sockets.

After stopping for an iced coffee — which was more of a dessert than a beverage — to cool my brain down a little bit we navigated the batshit hairpins lined with inconveniently parked cars out of the town to go and find our campsite for the night which was all well and good until we swung onto the turn-off for the campsite. Dear sweet Jesus, what the fuck is this road all about?! Okay so it’s not the road’s fault – it’s inanimate. It doesn’t know it’s narrow, nor could it do anything about it even if it did. The problem is the other drivers who seem to think the road was built exclusively for them and tear along it at warp speed, Mr Sulu. Yeah sure, I pissed off a few locals by crawling along at 16kph, but I’d rather oncoming traffic spotted me before they rounded a blind corner — mobile glued to their ear — and embedded their pickup in the bonnet of our tiny rented Skoda Citigo.

We checked in, pitched our tent, harassed the many cats, asked them very politely not to use our tent as a climbing frame, then had a little chat about whether we’d drive into Bar down that insane road or get a taxi. The budget backpacker in me eventually decided that my poor nerves would have to take the hit on this one and we very gingerly made our way to the town via a particularly ancient olive tree. It’s meant to be one of the oldest, if not THE oldest olive tree in Europe, or the world actually and by default the universe really if you think about it. They’ll charge you the princely sum of €2 to go in and gawp at its 2250 year old majesty. Apparently if you walk around it seven times it’s lucky or something but I’ve done all the lucky superstitious things at all the tourist attractions and we still haven’t won the lottery so I’ll save myself the sweaty tedium of walking around anything more than once. I think the 2250 year old part of it is actually bordering on dead but to be fair I don’t think I could reach that age without losing a few basic motor functions.

So the modern town of Bar then. I don’t know if we just went to the wrong places or if it’s the time of year but it feels a bit, I don’t know, sad? Poor, disappointing Bar. What it does have though is a very fucking shiny church! The Church of Saint Joven Vladimir, a Serbian Orthodox church, can be seen for miles, largely on account of the sun blasting off the golden domes. It’s free to go in, just help yourself to a shawl for the “inappropriately dressed” from the basket outside if you’ve shown up looking like a harlot. We were instructed to cover our shoulders which we duly did and profusely sweated whilst trying not to think about how many other people had profusely sweated into it previously. Well we will insist on walking around with our joints on show.

It’s predictably lavish on the inside with vibrant frescoes covering every inch of wall and ceiling. Nothing overtly graphic like you get in the Roman Catholic churches. One bloke was missing his head but there wasn’t too much bloodshed otherwise and no one was nailed to a cross. Unless I’ve visited so many religious buildings I’m now completely desensitised to a bloke nailed to bits of wood and I just didn’t notice. Apparently they didn’t start building it until 2006 and it wasn’t consecrated until 2016 so it’s a baby in the grand scheme of religion. Well worth a visit if you’re in Bar for whatever reason you might find yourself in Bar.

We sat and had a cold drink in a café before we headed back to the campsite. It’s a nice campsite actually. Very peaceful but again, we’re in the off season. What we did do though was leave the food bag in the tent vestibule and the cats helped themselves to the salami which was a rookie error. They also put a tear in the tent with their furry little murder mittens which is fair enough. They’re cats. They don’t have the opposable thumbs necessary to operate a zip. To be fair the reason we use this tent is because it already had a kitten-related encounter in Greece so it is now the tent we take to places where a large quantity of the residents have knives for hands.

Jump to “Useful shit to know…”

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Bar & Stari Bar, Bar Municipality, Montenegro

Stayed at: Bartula – My Olive Garden Camp, Bartula

Useful shit to know…

• Entry to Manastir Gradište is free.
• It costs €5 each to see the ruins at Stari Bar.
• Parking at Stari Bar was 60c an hour or part thereof.
• It cost €2 to see the old olive tree.
• Parking at the marina in Bar was €1.30 per hour or part thereof.
• It was free to go inside Saint Jovan Vladimir church.

• The campsite is really nice. Secluded and quiet.
• There’s a bar/café where you can buy cold beers.
• The showers were brilliant. Lovely and hot.
• They took care of tourist registration for us, they took our passports into Bar to do it.