Our two-week visit to the beaches of Montenegro was, overall, a bust.
The fault was mine. I tried to recreate the one perfect day we had there last year, on a secluded beach accessible only by boat and with crystal-clear water perfect for snorkeling but with amenities like a small cafe, working restrooms and lounge chairs. To do that, we booked a place that was minutes away from the dock closest to that beach in Rating for Čanj: thumbs down, one star, would not go again. Čanj, a small and fairly undeveloped town.
The idea was to take the 10-minute boat ride there each day and do nothing but swim, with some rest and book reading in between laps. The reality was that:
- The beach saw a marked decline in quality since last year, owing to — I kid you not — the proprietor of the cafe getting in a fight with the person with rights to put lounge chairs on the beach, resulting in neither being available, no working restrooms, and the surrounding area being littered with used wet wipes and worse (hey, if you gotta go you gotta go).
- Not every member of our large 12-person group was fully on board with spending most of the day on a beach like that, or any beach really, seeing that they weren’t great swimmers.
- The water was absolutely freezing, even in early August, which is on one hand good because rising temperatures in the Mediterranean sea were tied to climate change, but on the other hand you really had to swim to survive and again not everyone was up for that.
And then, 6 days into our 14-day stay, there was a fire. This sent one half of our group back home to Serbia earlier than planned, and my own clan to Rating for Ulcinj: thumbs up, five stars, will go again. Ulcinj, which was the furthest away we could have imagined to go and get away from the smoke. We spent 3 days there, and those were in fact the highlight of the trip because Ulcinj and our last-minute apartment booking were both breathtakingly beautiful. Sadly, the small town beach was a sandy muddy mess, and the larger, 12-kilometer long strip of sand was both too far away and reminded us too much of what we could get in our backyard, so we had to find an alternative for the remainder of our stay.
So we ended up at a resort. Not just any resort, but the first ever Rating for the Montenegro Radisson: thumb horizontal, 3 stars, would only come in the off-season so unlikely it would ever happen again. Radisson in Montenegro, or rather a 10-ish or so-year-old complex of beautiful stone-encrusted seaside property that got its Radisson license this year. Not exactly the beach — it sat on a piece of rock so the main way to get into the water were ladders — but it was again crystal-clear, only slightly warmer, and with a greater variety of sea life than the one we first had in mind.
The first day was a fairy-tale ending to our trip-to-date. Sadly, we had 5 more days that all but destroyed our initial impression:
- Smoking was encouraged, by the fact that there were ashtrays everywhere and that even the employees would light up during work hours, including while setting up lounge chairs in a just-opened and otherwise completely empty pool.
- On the other hand, wearing UV-protective swimwear was discouraged. We had several requests from the staff for our 6-year-old to take the upper half of his swimsuit off. Our takeaway from this and the above was that the Radisson in Montenegro had a general pro-cancer stance.
- There exists, we were reminded during our recent trip to Valencia, a kind of effortless hospitality that makes you feel welcome and at-home without being either too pushy or too bootlicky. Unfortunately, the resort staff was not familiar with that or any other type of hospitality, being more inclined to either argue or behave like they were my old drinking buddies.
Topping everything off, our return car trip reminded us that Montenegro sorely lacks infrastructure to accommodate the number of people it receives during the summer, which is not helped by summer-time road closures for repairs. This is unfortunate, because Montenegro is a microcosmos of every possible beach you can find, from Thai island-like seclusion to Greek island wilderness to the Wildwood-level expanses of sand, all in a sub-300km stretch of coastline. If and when we ever come back, it will be on a boat.