Another Travel adventure in the Balkans!

 Well we are now sitting comfortably back in London, but our week in the Balkans finished with another travel 'adventure', this time in Montenegro rather than Serbia. I'll write more about this tiny and very enjoyable country later, but let me tell you what happened when we were due to catch a New Year's Eve flight from Podgorica - the only airport in this country as far as I know. We were all up and ready when a morning message arrived from our lovely Airbnb host, Admir.

She said we should leave good and early because local protestors were blockading the roundabout leading to the airport. This was news to us, even though they had done the same thing on Dec 30th, though I vaguely remembered a video clip while flicking through the local TV channels. Excavators were being moved with lots of obviously non-excavator drivers standing around. Possibly excavator-spotters, like you can have train-spotters, but I rather thought not.

It turns out that the people living in Botun, a town next to the airport, are protesting about the building of a water-treatment plant in their town. It is clearly not just a simple protest, because the vehicles of the local municipality were used to do the blockading (see photo at the top) plus the local MP seems to be anti-EU, and the water plant is part of meeting EU- accession conditions. I do not claim to understand the real situation at all, but I'm sure someone does.

So we hopped in a cab a couple of hours earlier than needed, as we knew we might need to hike the last mile or two. The driver checked if there were any other ways around and his controller clearly said that protesters had blocked the alternative routes too.

And 20 minutes later we reached the barricade, which was a refuse collection wagon and a JCB blocking the bridge quite comprehensively and various cars involved too. We paid our driver and got out for our walk, but fell into conversation with a sturdy middle-aged Montenegrin who was clearly a bit cheesed-off with the protest, as he has a wheely-case and a fairly early flight to Frankfurt. But as he'd lived in Germany for 40 years and I had lived there in my 20s for long enough to still speak it, we had a common language. He had been back to Montenegro for a joint (extremely alcoholic by the sound of it) celebration with his family on December 25th for Christmas but also for his own Dec 25th birthday! (Although he assured us he had not been christened Jesus!). He said we could try find a taxi the other side of the barricades but Mary and I should stay silent or the price would be hiked.

After some not-entirely cordial conversations with the protestors he did find a rather sub-rosa local taxi who agreed a fair fare. As we passed another car someone who clearly knew the driver wound down his window to remonstrate but I heard the driver use one of the few Slavic words I remembered from school, работать, which means 'work', as in 'its my bloody job'.

So off we went through the farm lanes and back doubles, arriving at the airport well in time but passing many poor suitcase luggers in both directions.

So that was the end of it we thought. The airport was a bit crowded, with only half a dozen police, and many late travellers, but otherwise normal. Until the riot police turned up. Mary noticed that a couple of vans of tall, well-armoured riot police with batons and hard helmets were suddenly lining the entrance. This lot.

After a vague frisson of TV interviewers asking us "So you were there when the Montenegrin revolution started?"we realised that the cyber-cops would likely assure that we saw no interesting kinetic politicking. So we went through to the departure queue.

And the airport staff were calling through latecomers for earlier flights with practical helpfulness. Which was fine, but I was nevertheless slightly miffed when at the very moment that the passport control officer was going to stamp my passport, a tall, confident, well-dressed gentleman leaned past and put down four passports to be stamped as he effectively queue-jumped me. I chewed down my chagrin in a properly Balkan way, and Mary swore that the passport officer went all googly-eyed while doing the stamping.

So it rather knitted everything together when we read later that the tall jumper was the President of Montenegro, Jakob Milatovic, this guy:

I think the protesters wanted to have a word with him, though I don't know whether it happened.

But it all made our exit from the Balkans much more memorable. And may 2026 bring even more enjoyable chaos!