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Jun. 8th, 2006 11:00 pmThis morning we got up early as usual, but we waited longer than usual to leave. We were waiting to hear from the shop where they'd taken the damaged bike, the night before. If it was fixable that day, we'd wait, but if not we would go on. It turned out that the bike was not fixable. The rider returned home by bus.
While we waited, the weather was nice. S got his dip in the sea, and I was about to go wading myself when the call came and we were scrambled back onto the bikes. We set out along the coast. The coast is beautiful. Mountains come right down to the sea shore, and the road along the coast is winding and often quite high above the sea, so we had great views. According to the signs, the speed limits are low, but no one pays attention to them, or to the passing zones. It made for a very entertaining ride. Before we knew it we reached the border between Croatia and Bosnia, and for once we didn't have to stop. Apparently if you're going through and not stopping in Bosnia, the usual border rigamarole is not required. A few miles later we passed out of Bosnia and back into Croatia, and not long after that we reached Dubrovnik. There's a lovely suspension bridge over the river, and just before the bridge there's a scenic pullout, where one of the pictures below was taken.
There's also a map of the area. After a little discussion amongst ourselves, and a consultation with some of the locals that we met in the parking lot, we decided to go up the hill and look at the view. With local advice, Igor picked a road up there, and led us up a winding goat trail to the top of a hill overlooking the city. (Only one person dropped their bike on this road.) There are some crumbling, ancient stone fortifications up there, with modern radio towers oddly juxtaposed on top of them. We parked our bikes on the landward side of the fortifications, and walked around to the city side. This is where they shelled the city from, during the siege. You can see everything, it's laid out in front of you like a map. It looks like the fort itself was also shelled, and it's very crumbled. One of the stone steps wiggled alarmingly under my feet. At the top of the steps, a piece of red plastic caution tape was laid across the hillside. We set our tank bags and helmets down on the ground on either side of the tape, and stepped out onto the walls. Robert was tired and he laid down on the ground next to the tape. That's when Igor said the tape might mark the edge of an uncleared minefield, and to stay on this side of it. Yikes!
After taking a good long look at the view, and snapping a bunch of pictures, we picked our way back down to the bikes. No one blew up. However S had trouble getting the alarm to turn off on his bike. He says it's happened before, that the radio tower was interfering with the controls. This alarm not only makes noise, it disables the starter. Fortunately it was all downhill from there, so he was able to roll the bike away, until he got far enough away from the radio tower, for the remote to work.
We stopped at a restaurant partway down the hill, and had coca-colas and coffee at a table in the shade.
Eventually we got back on the road, and went on down the coast. We reached the border of Montenegro. In Europe, they have a thing called a green card. This has nothing to do with immigration - it's an insurance thing. The green card is a list of all the countries where your vehicle insurance is valid. Unfortunately, the English insurance companies don't give out green cards. Instead they use a white card. The border guards considered the wrong color cards to be unacceptable, so S and I each had to pay EU$60 for insurance at the border, before they'd let us in to the country. Sigh.
While we were waiting for everyone to get through the border station, Elvis came up to us and said that the Montenegro police are known to hang out along the few miles near the border, and try to ticket the tourists, that they have zero tolerance, we should all be mindful of the speed limits. So once we started moving again, S was careful of the speed limits, and I stayed with him. We passed about six police cars watching the traffic, in two miles, but none of them budged, even though everyone else continued with the normal scofflaw behavior. They soon ditched us. WTF? I'd have sped up as well, since obviously the cops didn't care or they'd have stopped the others. But I wasn't going to leave S, since I was riding his bike. Eventually someone came back and asked us why we weren't keeping up, and S bitched about being told to obey the speed limits when even the people telling us to do this weren't obeying them. We sped up and rejoined the others. I still don't know if this speed limit thing was supposed to be a joke, or what.
Fortunately it wasn't far to our stopping point for the night. Boban owns a house on the beach in Baosic. Gasho would meet us there. Some of us would stay in Boban's house, and some in a neighboring guesthouse run by a friend of his, Miki. I was in the guesthouse. The guesthouse looked very dubious from the street. It was an unpainted building, a little uphill from the beach. To reach it you went through a decrepit wooden door in a crumbling ruin of a wall, past the carcass of an old car and some more ruins, and through a beautiful, mysterious garden full of lemon trees and flowers. There was an overgrown gravel path around to the back of the house, and then some crumbling stairs with large colorful beetles crawling on them, leading to a door on the top floor. Inside, the house was lovely! Clean and comfortable and very pleasant. We figured out who to put in which room, put our things in, changed out of our riding gear, then moved the bikes back down to Boban's house, where we'd park them in his fenced garden.
I offered Miki a ride back to Boban's house on the back of my bike. As he swung on, he kicked me in the ankle. My unprotected ankle, because I was wearing my sandals. Ow!
At Boban's house he treated me like an incompetent and insisted on parking my bike for me. Whatever, dude, knock yourself out. I enjoyed the chance to check out Gasho's new TDM900, and he even let me sit on it. After some beers, we headed out for dinner. We ate in a restaurant a few hundred yards down the beach. The food was excellent.
While we waited, the weather was nice. S got his dip in the sea, and I was about to go wading myself when the call came and we were scrambled back onto the bikes. We set out along the coast. The coast is beautiful. Mountains come right down to the sea shore, and the road along the coast is winding and often quite high above the sea, so we had great views. According to the signs, the speed limits are low, but no one pays attention to them, or to the passing zones. It made for a very entertaining ride. Before we knew it we reached the border between Croatia and Bosnia, and for once we didn't have to stop. Apparently if you're going through and not stopping in Bosnia, the usual border rigamarole is not required. A few miles later we passed out of Bosnia and back into Croatia, and not long after that we reached Dubrovnik. There's a lovely suspension bridge over the river, and just before the bridge there's a scenic pullout, where one of the pictures below was taken.
There's also a map of the area. After a little discussion amongst ourselves, and a consultation with some of the locals that we met in the parking lot, we decided to go up the hill and look at the view. With local advice, Igor picked a road up there, and led us up a winding goat trail to the top of a hill overlooking the city. (Only one person dropped their bike on this road.) There are some crumbling, ancient stone fortifications up there, with modern radio towers oddly juxtaposed on top of them. We parked our bikes on the landward side of the fortifications, and walked around to the city side. This is where they shelled the city from, during the siege. You can see everything, it's laid out in front of you like a map. It looks like the fort itself was also shelled, and it's very crumbled. One of the stone steps wiggled alarmingly under my feet. At the top of the steps, a piece of red plastic caution tape was laid across the hillside. We set our tank bags and helmets down on the ground on either side of the tape, and stepped out onto the walls. Robert was tired and he laid down on the ground next to the tape. That's when Igor said the tape might mark the edge of an uncleared minefield, and to stay on this side of it. Yikes!
After taking a good long look at the view, and snapping a bunch of pictures, we picked our way back down to the bikes. No one blew up. However S had trouble getting the alarm to turn off on his bike. He says it's happened before, that the radio tower was interfering with the controls. This alarm not only makes noise, it disables the starter. Fortunately it was all downhill from there, so he was able to roll the bike away, until he got far enough away from the radio tower, for the remote to work.
We stopped at a restaurant partway down the hill, and had coca-colas and coffee at a table in the shade.
Eventually we got back on the road, and went on down the coast. We reached the border of Montenegro. In Europe, they have a thing called a green card. This has nothing to do with immigration - it's an insurance thing. The green card is a list of all the countries where your vehicle insurance is valid. Unfortunately, the English insurance companies don't give out green cards. Instead they use a white card. The border guards considered the wrong color cards to be unacceptable, so S and I each had to pay EU$60 for insurance at the border, before they'd let us in to the country. Sigh.
While we were waiting for everyone to get through the border station, Elvis came up to us and said that the Montenegro police are known to hang out along the few miles near the border, and try to ticket the tourists, that they have zero tolerance, we should all be mindful of the speed limits. So once we started moving again, S was careful of the speed limits, and I stayed with him. We passed about six police cars watching the traffic, in two miles, but none of them budged, even though everyone else continued with the normal scofflaw behavior. They soon ditched us. WTF? I'd have sped up as well, since obviously the cops didn't care or they'd have stopped the others. But I wasn't going to leave S, since I was riding his bike. Eventually someone came back and asked us why we weren't keeping up, and S bitched about being told to obey the speed limits when even the people telling us to do this weren't obeying them. We sped up and rejoined the others. I still don't know if this speed limit thing was supposed to be a joke, or what.
Fortunately it wasn't far to our stopping point for the night. Boban owns a house on the beach in Baosic. Gasho would meet us there. Some of us would stay in Boban's house, and some in a neighboring guesthouse run by a friend of his, Miki. I was in the guesthouse. The guesthouse looked very dubious from the street. It was an unpainted building, a little uphill from the beach. To reach it you went through a decrepit wooden door in a crumbling ruin of a wall, past the carcass of an old car and some more ruins, and through a beautiful, mysterious garden full of lemon trees and flowers. There was an overgrown gravel path around to the back of the house, and then some crumbling stairs with large colorful beetles crawling on them, leading to a door on the top floor. Inside, the house was lovely! Clean and comfortable and very pleasant. We figured out who to put in which room, put our things in, changed out of our riding gear, then moved the bikes back down to Boban's house, where we'd park them in his fenced garden.
I offered Miki a ride back to Boban's house on the back of my bike. As he swung on, he kicked me in the ankle. My unprotected ankle, because I was wearing my sandals. Ow!
At Boban's house he treated me like an incompetent and insisted on parking my bike for me. Whatever, dude, knock yourself out. I enjoyed the chance to check out Gasho's new TDM900, and he even let me sit on it. After some beers, we headed out for dinner. We ate in a restaurant a few hundred yards down the beach. The food was excellent.
