Budva; Montenegro
The beach at Budva, outside of the pristine maze of the Stari Grad (a miniature Dubrovnik of similarly scaled-down touristy boutiques and restaurants) is an unbroken, five mile stretch of tackiness. Early that morning, dusty and bleak Podgorica had emptied itself into a packed train, already stuffed with Montenegrins and Serbs from the Balkan interior, which had crawled to the coast, stopping in anonymous fields to squeeze in yet more beach-goers and their beach towels and inflatable dolphins. We had crossed the reedy fish-tail of Lake Skadar, and looked south-east through mist at the distant Albanian border. Then the bus from Bar, north along a mountain coastline packed with tourists and punctuated by ugly developments: Montenegro, its coastline its main economic asset, clearly could not afford Croatian restraint in planning permission. Also unlike its northern neighbour, taken over in summer by Italians, Germans, and Brits, the package tourists here were Serb, Russian, and pasty (or painfully lobster-coloured) Ukrainians. Past quaint Sveti Stefan island, where the uber-rich can be gawped at by the masses from their own concrete resort rooms, planted there in a mirror of obstinate voyeurism.
On the promenade there are stalls selling all kinds of greasy fast-food, restaurants with unfathomable Cyrillic menus, and several container ship-loads of souvenirs. It is forty degrees; there is no space on the shingle beach. The Russian women are coifed and dressed-up for their passagietta, tightly white with gold-plastic accessories. A small boat goes by every half hour, containing two men who use a megaphone to contend with the blaring beach-music to herald in Russian ‘the best Russian disco on the coast’. When I make it there it is blasting out a turbofolk mash-up of a Neil Diamond song at unholy volume. Its sound system is indeed powerful; I climb to an empty orthodox churchyard on the adjacent hillside, where the headstones are resounding to Neil. My notes for that night contain this short šljivovica-induced poem:
Call from a boat loudspeaker
A disco you might like to attend
This shore has it all:
Air hockey, crazy golf and henna tattoos
One restaurant has drawn a crowd, cameras clicking, as they did moments ago for a shiny red Ferrari in a hotel car-park. A shark has been caught in the bay – over two metres, big enough to bring automatically into mind the sea-kayaking I have planned for the next day. It seems perfectly undamaged, except that its mouth is bloodied. Its eye (it is the timeless eye of an old god) stares through the noisy throng that surround what they imagine is its final indignity. I pass it on my walk to Sveti Stefan. When I come back, it, and the crowd are still there (though probably the crowd is comprised of different individuals), but now the shark is on its side. It has been slit open, and one of the waiters holds, laughing, the great white sack of its stomach. He has a knife, and is about to cut the stomach open.
