July 24, 2012
Up and up the hairpins: Lovcen - Resna
KOTOR BAY - it rhymes with potter and totter and not with rotor - is in guidebooks as one of the world's gems. It is a World Heritage site, indeed. But...
The trouble, you see, is that from a bike you see so much more and so much better. So that by the time you get where tourists go, you've been satiated with more glorious scenery precisely where they don't go. And so it was with Kotor bay.
We set off early by chance rather than plan and we had the road to ourselves at first. It runs out of town and up one side of a spur. Taking the ferry across the small gap had put us on the trickier side for drivers and on the narrower and quieter road.
We could bowl along at our own pace and gaze across the water to the sun-shielded, blue-tinted cliffs. But then the road and coast turned back on themselves and what we'd imagined would be a quiet and abandoned road along a beautiful shore turned not into some tourist hell, that's for sure, but into half an hour of restaurants, boarding houses and astonishing numbers of For Sale signs in English.
Had we seen nothing better, on this trip and before it, we would have been impressed. But, not for the first time, a tourist haunt had failed to live up to the brouhaha. Shame, but it does show how lucky we cyclists are to ride so often on roads less travelled, through places without a name, still less a place in a guide-book index.
Kotor itself, the old town, is a smaller version of Split. We wandered it in peace until the first coach parties arrived.
I was the first customer of the day for two hairdressers, dressed as hot totty, who between them could probably finish any sentence with which they were confronted. By the time I re-emerged more sleek and handsome as ever, Kotor new town was crammed with tour buses, trucks and motorbikes.
It didn't promise much fun for the road to Cetinje but then, miraculously, after 500 metres the road split and the world pressed on for the tunnels that would lead them to the main coast road and we clicked down gears and heaved our way peacefully up the two dozen or so hairpins that filled our next two or more hours.
This must have been a car or motorbike race course at some time because a faded start or finish line crossed the road at the foot of the ascent and faded yellow and red advertisements peeled themselves leisurely off the concrete walls.
The road climbed relentlessly to more than 1 000 metres higher than it had been at the start.
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Grey cloud poured itself over the tops of cliffs and down gulleys that nature had left them as quick access to passing cyclists. The rain started immediately, not just light-hearted summer tears but murky, ill-mannered cold splodges. We rode with lights on, hoping that the little traffic coming the other way would spot us in the greyness.
Thunder burst and then echoed against the cliffs and fell away down into the valley. The road turned down and we braked gingerly down to a plain. Where for hours there had been nothing, now there were restaurants and fruit stalls and a small shop. We dripped into the first place to eat and ate cold ham, bread and green tea as water drummed on the roof.
The road climbed again. The rain stopped. We reached the second summit at 1 006 metres, dropped over the other side... and turned left into paradise. Our road now was barely wide enough for two bikes. It yawned lazily downwards through fields of rock and grass, past cows and goats with neck bells ringing, past men and boys whose voices we heard but whom we never saw.
For half an hour we rode, tiredness setting in. And then, on the right, a water pump with a long wooden handle and, beyond it, a long low seemingly abandoned building. We pushed our bikes over to ask whoever might be about if the pump brought up good water. There was nobody. But faded Cyrillic writing crossed the top of the end of the building with a dark door next to it. We pushed it and found ourselves in a tiny café, four tables, one customer and a lean, underfed man standing behind a simple wooden bar. Above him, a wooden frame held six bottles of spirits still in their cardboard boxes. The barman and the customer, a spreading, grey-haired man in an old shirt, were smoking and watching a history of the Olympics on a television the size of a milk crate. They were as astonished to see us as we were to find them.
Turkish coffee is more bitter than espresso and it's wise not to drink to the end, for that is where the sludge lies. It is also strong, and it fortified us.
I gestured pumping water and pointed outside.
"It's broken," the barman said. Or it could have been "The water's no good" or, for all that I could understand, "You'll have to come back on Wednesday week." I also understood that even the café didn't have running water. But he reached into a battered refrigerator and pulled out a lemonade bottle of water for us.
He must have filled it at home, or from another well, and brought that and the rest of the day's water that morning.
Feeling better now and having water for a night of wild camping, we rolled on downhill and then began climbing. And then we spotted an abandoned building set back from the road, opposite one of the many memorials to the dead that the former Yugoslavia has erected. We have put up our tent and we look forward to the quiet night's sleep that a wearying day's riding deserves.
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