Migratory Cash Cows

For the past 15 days, we haven’t seen much of the sun. We’ve had rain—lots of rain—and wind too, a perfect autumn cocktail. So we did like the birds and migrated south!

It's true that our options were also rather limited because of the geography. In southern Croatia and Montenegro, as soon as you move away from the Adriatic coast, you’re immediately in the mountains (real, serious mountains), and had we gone that way, we would have ended up in the snow. Even though we’re equipped for it, the predicted snowfall was quite significant, so we thought it wiser not to get ourselves into that.

But the reason for our migration wasn’t just the weather and geography. It was also because we were tired of feeling like cash cows… We can’t say we are thrilled with our time in Croatia, and even less in Montenegro, where we stayed just a little over 48 hours. Clearly, they don’t want people like us, nomads traveling with their little house on wheels. From the €99 fine we got in Pula to some outrageous parking prices (€15 per hour in Kotor), it seems we’re not the right kind of tourists in these countries. And the rest isn’t cheap either—the Dubrovnik city wall tour costs €40 per person! It’s more expensive than going up to the top floor of the Eiffel Tower…

You might say that these are the rules of the game, that it's just how it works and at the base of things, we agree. But the thing is the locals weren’t really playing the game. They didn't smile much and had little or no desire to interact. It felt a bit like we were disturbing them during their nap, during their winter hibernation when they’re supposed to be resting from all those tourists. In Kotor, just after we found a free parking spot, the police came screaming at us saying we weren’t allowed to park there. The place was full of cars, but for us, interestingly, it wasn’t allowed. "You, the tourist, you go over there and pay full price". Well, we didn’t pay and we left without visiting the town. It may sound extreme, and surely Kotor was worth it, but the officer was so unpleasant and aggressive that it really killed the mood for us. We figured we didn’t need that, that the weather was bad anyways, so if we were to constantly feel like we were walking on eggshells we might as well just leave the country altogether. Montenegro isn’t very big, so we reached the border pretty quickly.

There’s no doubt that the landscapes in both countries are stunning! But there are plenty of beautiful places on Earth, so we left to see if the welcome and weather is better elsewhere.

But as always, things are never entirely black and we shouldn’t forget the wonderful moment we spent in Split with my Experience Plus colleagues Toni, Mario, and his son Oliver 😊