Kotor to Podgorica, Serbia to Durmitor, Montenegro to Belgrade, Serbia

Day Eleven, 2.25.2009 If you could not tell by the title, this was a long day. We had breakfast again at the usual place. I had a little mishap with the toilet, aka they neglected to put any sign or give me any warning when they saw me go into the bathroom that the water to the building was turned off! I will spare you all the details, but after a week on a traveler's diet in the Balkans, we had to leave the restaurant rather quickly after paying. That aside, we were on our way to a national park in Montenegro called Durmitor. We had to take a bus to Podgorica, Serbia (not the nicest place we had been) and then catch a smaller bus to Durmitor. We crossed some incredible snow covered mountain terrain on the way and herds of cows and sheep were roaming on the roads. After a few hours in the bus (longer than we had expected), driven by a gregarious man who took many phone calls while driving inches from the edge of a ravine, we arrived in the ski resort town. It was fairly dark by the time we got there, and had no place to stay. We were having doubts about making it to Belgrade in time to enjoy the city and catch our flight home in a couple days. We stopped in the little bar at the “bus station” to find out the following day’s bus schedule. We asked if anyone spoke English, and an old man (they were all old in there) said he did. We thought we were in luck. It soon became clear that he just wanted to show off that he could basically count to 10 really fast in English, and that was about it. We tried to indicate that we wanted to take the bus, and another guy kept saying “avio Belgrade, avio Belgrade”. We gathered that “avio” was a plane. Another guy kept making sleeping motions with his hands against his head. After my glasses had defogged some (but the room was still completely smoky), I noticed that every man in the bar had at least 3 full shot glasses in front of them and 3 empty ones. Clearly their info was no good. We went back outside and luckily there was a younger couple who could actually speak English. The girls made some phone calls for us and we decided that it would not work out to ski so we ended up hopping right back on the multi-hour bus that we had just come on. For the first 45 min of the trip, we were stuck behind a huge snow plow. We finally got back to Podgorica. I got my luggage out of the back of the shuttle, only to find the top of my pack was open; everything had fallen and scattered in the trunk. I picked everything up and the driver gave me a couple very sympathetic pats on the back. Dinner at the station (all the restaurants had closed minutes before we got there) was some bread and cheese left over from lunch, plain peanut butter and a handful of almonds. At around 10:30 pm, we boarded the overnight to Belgrade (12 hours after we had boarded our initial bus) and arrived in Belgrade at 6:30 am. I was kept awake after around 5 am though because some lady’s cell phone kept ringing to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”. Keep in mind this was February.