"Hilary, come on, bring your bike!"
Exhausted, I push my motorcycle towards Radek's voice. I turn a corner around some trees and I'm surprised to see him standing next to an old woman, dressed in black with a scarf on tied around her head, sitting on a tree stump in front of a roughly built one room house.
She smiles at me, with more than a few teeth missing, and is completely shocked when she realizes I'm a girl.
She kindly gestures us to come into her house for food and drinks, and as I glance towards the small house another old woman with red hair and a purple dress comes out and waves us to come inside. I am exhausted and starving from our trip up the mountain, and I look forward to food and something to drink. We come inside to the one room house, where we sit on their beds, around a table.
I whipped my camera out and took a good look around.
We sit and talk with the nice ladies a bit, the red head stating that she has been to the Czech Republic in the south, Brno! It is a small world after all. The inform us that their son is out herding sheep, and that they stay in this small cottage all summer long! It was unbelievable. They ask us to stay longer but unfortunately we need to head out, and we say our goodbyes and thank them again for the refreshments.
As we are leaving I look back at their cottage and notice that there are other ones, abandoned a long time ago..
Our day continues with more dirty and rocky roads. Exhausting, but well worth it just in order to see the beautiful nature around us.
When we make it to the paved road I could almost kiss it! Enough of the dirt already, I'm exhausted but we still have a long way to go... and now that we are out of the forest, it is HOT. We head down the mountain on a never ending serpentine, with the sun shinning down on us and no shade in site. From the mountain we have a great view of the countryside and we see about 3 or 4 fires, evident by the smoke rising in the distance and smogging up the view. It made me feel even hotter. However, we survive, and at the bottom we meet up to discuss what to do next. Should we head to Podgorica? It is about 4pm, and we have lots of day light left so we decide to go for it... Until we see a sight that makes us break.
WATER! Hot and exhausted, we flip a U and head down to where some locals are swimming. I quickly rip off my (stinky) shoes and dump my feet into the water... ahhh, so much better!
The boys join me and we ponder about putting on our swimming suits. Then we look up and notice a restaurant... FOOD! Wow, we found the spot :) So we go and order the Meat mix plate... And as hungry as we were, we couldn't finish it, it was just way too big!
Now we are full of beer and great meat, I change in the bathroom and we go swimming. The water is freezing but yet still relieving. We hang out there for the rest of the afternoon, figuring we will camp there for the night. Radek starts to plan the rest of our journey, Mrazik decides to follow the local's and start to fish. I help Mrazik a bit, but we cannot catch the fish like this one local fisherman can. So I decide to go to the store to get some previsions. Water, some breakfast (as we do not need to eat anything else for the rest of the day!), and on my way back I see these young boys out cruising the town that I just had to photograph!
As it starts to get dark we discuss setting up camp. We noticed that the guy who was fishing seems to be the father of our waiter in the restaurant. We ask him in our Czech + hand language if it is ok to sleep here. The man shakes his head, and it took us awhile to figure out that at night drug dealers and such enjoy this place. Oh dear, what are we going to do? We don't want to travel far, we are exhausted, and we have all been drinking. Before we can start worrying much, the man invites us, in his Montenegro + hand signals to his garden. He says there is no problem to camp out there, and it would be a lot safer than at the local drug garden. Happily, we agree, and his son, who is now off work, leads us to their place.
It is almost dark when we get there, but his wife is out and about working and looking after their 1 year old daughter. Their are in the process of building their house, and while they have bedrooms and the living room done, the kitchen and washroom is outside in their garden. His wife offers us some coffee and their form of cola, which we agree. Soon the son and father come home, along with another daughter of theirs who is older (and simply gorgeous) and who speaks some English! So we drop the Czech and try to converse in English (though I think we were better off with the Czech personally ;) ). Then some more people come over, neighbors of theirs, and it turns out we have another party, sharing stories as well as different types of alcohol. They show us their animals they have (though it is dark and I can't see much), and there are kittens and cats running around everywhere. A different kind of life, but one I could enjoy!
It was a fun night, but I was glad to turn in. As the party breaks up, we roll out our sleeping bags and don't even bother to set the tent. We fall asleep under the stars to wake up to another day on our adventure.
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