Okay, I sort of lied when I said I was heading to Croatia for a couple weeks of downtime. Really, it’s Croatia and Montenegro. I mentioned a while ago that I was planning to spend a couple months traveling around the Balkans; that was before I signed up for a convention and a larp in the middle of it. So what was left was Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, and Zagreb.

That felt a little weak, and Dubrovnik is very close to Montenegro, so I figured I could just catch a bus for a couple days here and there over the border, before returning for a half-week in Dubrovnik. So I’ve only spent a single night, and figured I could travel early the next morning down to Budva for a few days.

It’s apparently a 2½ hour drive. I left at 9am to catch the 10am bus. I arrived in Budva at 6pm.

This kind of gets at a lot of the annoyances of bus travel, especially if you don’t know the local rules. To start with, I couldn’t buy a ticket online because they only accept printed out tickets. I managed to get to the bus station in time to buy a ticket, only to discover that the bus was full; they just sell tickets and whoever manages to get in gets a seat.¹ The next bus was scheduled for 11am, but arrived at 12:45. This had plenty of space, although apparently putting your luggage under the bus cost an extra 2€, payable cash.²

At this point the slowdowns were traffic, the bus stops, and passport control. All of those should have been predictable, but I’ll admit passport control totally hit me by surprise. I guess I’ve been so used to avoiding it on trains and buses that it never crossed my mind I’d need to think about it. It’s 20 minutes where you have to get off the bus, stand in line, get your passport stamped, wait for everyone on the bus to go through it, then get back on the bus. Then you drive for about two minutes and get to do the whole thing again.

But I made it, eventually, and I’m checked in to the hotel and about to head off to dinner. I could choose to be angry, or annoyed, or frustrated over the time I spent sitting at the bus station waiting for a bus that never came and the fact that my phone just won’t connect to the Montenegrin phone network despite every indication it has successfully done so. Instead, I’m going to focus on the fact that I could have decided to take an afternoon bus and thereby arrived at midnight. I’ve arrived, I’m safe, and there’s air conditioning in the hotel. I’m trying to keep a sense of perspective.

Next: Kotor to Dubrovnik
Prev: Düsseldorf (DUS) to Dubrovnik (DBV)

Footnotes

¹ Apparently, buying a ticket ahead of time wouldn’t have helped. Several of them got turned away.

What would have helped was loading your luggage and then loudly refusing to get your luggage and blocking the door so they couldn’t leave, as I watched three people pull that stunt and argue with the bus driver for 10 minutes before being allowed to board. I assume they stood in the aisle for the trip.

² The guy loading the bus insisted on Euros, I assume because Montenegro doesn’t have its own currency. I didn’t have any, and eventually just shoved 20 HRK in his hands.