By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
The season on the seaside is coming to an end. Many say it was disappointing.
But under what circumstances would it have been better?
If there had been more tourist arrivals.
Yet, if there had been more arrivals, wouldn’t that also mean heavier crowds? Wouldn’t that also mean that you would need 12 hours to get from Ulcinj to Boka Bay if you set off at around 10 or 11 am, instead of the current 8-10 hours of travel?
I’m sorry but it won’t get any better when they finish the construction of the Tivat-Jaz boulevard. You will arrive 5 minutes earlier and then, as usual, will need an hour to pass through Budva or Tivat.
A massive 10-kilometre traffic jam on Ulcinj’s Velika Plaza. Then a 3-kilometre queue through Zaljevo, at the entrance to Bar. Before that, yet another kilometer-long jam between Utjeha and Zaljevo. Then the chaos through Susanj. And Sutomore, that, unless you’re a zen master, you pass through on the verge of losing your sanity. After that, from Budva towards Tivat, Herceg Novi, or Kotor – it makes no difference – there’s a bottleneck so massive it could, much like the Great Wall of China, be seen from the Moon. If these car queues were even longer, would the season really be considered better?
Montenegrin towns on the seaside do not look like places built for people to live in them. Because they are not. And what do those towns look like? Well, exactly what they are: rental slums. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_slums
Go to a supermarket at 8 am on a Monday morning. I know we know what to expect, but the scene you’ll find there doesn’t look anything like Monaco. More like Hoxha’s Albania or Romania under Comrade Ceaușescu. The shelves are empty. Exhausted women working there are on the verge of collapse, serving tourists all day long – tourists buying a kilo of sausage and a kilo of gouda cheese because restaurants are too expensive (and who wouldn’t find a €15 pizza or a €30 steak pricey?). Bakeries have been turned into makeshift restaurants: tables are set up outside for tourists to have their lunches and dinners, because bakeries are the only places selling prepared food tourists can actually afford.
So, we need more crowds and then everything will be just fine, right? And by all means, don’t forget to build even more apartments along the coast so that foreigners can buy them and they and their relatives and friends can spend the whole summer there, all of them doing their shopping at the local supermarkets.
How greedy and stupid do you have to be – and how dysfunctional and poorly organized does a country have to be – to rely on renting out apartments for a living, while continuously increasing the number of flats that will be occupied for free (or paid to foreign owners instead to locals) by people who would otherwise have had to rent accommodation from you?
Just keep building apartments: there are still few parks left where no apartment block has sprung up yet, and a few stretches of sidewalk that haven’t yet been colonized and glassed in by coffee bars.
You might be surprised but some people have children. They carry them around in strollers. But where exactly, when even the little sidewalks that supposedly exist in winter vanish in the summer? If you live in Ulcinj and want to go from Mediteran Hotel toward the centre of the town, which sidewalk would you use to push a stroller? The one blocked by tourists’ cars parked in front of the houses along the road? And once you reach the centre, where would you go? Along the sidewalks turned into café terraces?
If you catch a summer cold, don’t even think about calling an ambulance. Because it needs at least an hour to get to you. Some people would gladly let them pass but there’s nowhere to go – as they themselves are stuck in the car queues, navigating a narrow corridor between two lines of parked cars stretching as far as the eye can see.
Forgive me a moment of unpatriotic honesty: are the people who come here to vacay even normal? How do we even call this kind of tourism? Are we really becoming a destination reserved for masochists?
And the worst comes only after the summer ends. Because of the fact that residents of Montenegro want to live off of their 2-month rental, food prices in local markets are higher here than in silly Germany – where the poor folks who didn’t come up with our “brilliant” idea of living off two months – actually work all year round to make a living.
But… have you ever heard of prices going down after the season? Of course not. This means you have been overcharging travelers for two months, and yourself for the entire year. Higher prices mean higher pays but higher costs of living in those 10 months outside the season as well. Having in mind that the prices keep soaring, no matter how much you earn in those two months, it can’t be enough for the rest of the year.
How are we going to solve it? By increasing the prices. And then repeat the whole story, over and over again.
There is that one definition of insanity and it goes like this: doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results every time.
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily the opinions or views of the CdM news team)
