Podgorica - Budva - #93HT

Leaving from Podgorica and going to Budva, in our second and last night in Montenegro, we just reached a road in the exit of the city.

After visiting the Orthodox Cathedral that was the most beautiful one that I ever seen in my life, with gorgeous paintings in its interior, we just had a coffee in a nice and cheap place in front the church before we moved to this exit of the city, just few minutes away from there.

Our goal was kind of simple, we initially wrote same signals paper trying to reach Budva or Cetinje, 36km away from there. If our trip would fail, we could get a local bus from Cetinje, just 27km away from Budva. The bus from the Podgorica was 3 times more expensive than this one that we would take for almost half of the way.

In fact our trip didn't work so easily and even writing the signals in the local alphabet, it wasn't working well. It was my first time interacting with the Cyrillic alphabet that's completely different than we that learned the Latin one. Countries such as Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Tajikistan and Ukraine use this script. In the case of Montenegro and Serbia they use both, the Cyrillic and the Latin one. 

Anyway I tried to be as friendly as I could be, writing in their alphabet, but the maximum that we got was a riding for few minutes that dropped us in a gas station in the main road that connect Budva and Podgorica, theoretical a really easy spot to hitchhike. After one hour the only car that stopped to us was a taxi that had already some people inside and we were convinced to accept the offer that the taxi driver made. We were like in a place that there was nothing around, just a gas station and it was really cheap for a taxi and would cost us really less than the bus price to drop us in Cetinje. I didn't really expected to take taxi to travel, but this was my luxury moment. 

Arriving in Cetinje after the few minutes trip, the road was in construction and they were blocking part of access to the city. Slowly we reached there, but arriving in the bus station we got informed that the bus would just leave in one hour, because of the blocks in the road. In fact even finding the bus station was something not that easy, there was just a small kiosk in a empty street that I could never have imagined that was one bus station, Google maps forced to believe on it.

A guy around there proposed us to drive us to Budva, paying the same price of the bus. We were almost convinced to go with him, until certain point that he wanted show us the city before, saying that we couldn't leave from the city in one hour because the roads were blocked. It would be cool and unpredictable, but in fact the guy wanted charge us for the tour and we realized that he wasn't the guy that we could trust. In the ending we dropped this plan, feeling like stupid tourists around and caught the bus to Budva after walking in this nice village that the main street was full of small restaurants and shops. I could feel the smell of tourism around. But we just took of from our backpack the giant sandwich that we made earlier for traveling, finding just a nice spot to eat it.

There we were, in a short trip to Budva that we hitchhike, took a taxi and a bus to reach there. The second city and last city in Montenegro was everything that I was criticizing before: a tourism city. 

But listen, as I said before, great experiences can also come from Tourist cities if you know how to experience it well.