You're reading: World Traveler: Montenegro, Albania hidden gems of Europe

My Montenegro vacation started at a sunny beach with pink pebbles. My feet plunged into the warm, light blue waters of the Adriatic Sea. I swam further, and saw various brightly colored fish, octopuses, and starfish. And there were no stingy jellyfish.

After swimming, I enjoyed the oddest dish I’ve ever tried – chicken stuffed with minced pork and paradises. “Paradise” is what they call a tomato in the Montenegrin language.

But Montenegro, the newest member of NATO, has even more heavenly things to offer to a tourist on a modest budget: ancient castles, islands, canyons, and a tour to the most mysterious country in Europe – Albania, a state that was closed to the rest of the world for more than 40 years.

Montenegro is a young small country in southeastern Europe on the Adriatic Sea coast, bordering Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Croatia, and Albania.

Albania and the six countries of the former Yugoslavia, a socialistic union of states in southwestern Europe that vanished in the 1990s after the long and bloody Yugoslavian conflict, have all been involved in devastating wars of independence.

In 2006, Montenegro became an independent state. Despite its pro-Russian leanings, in 11 years, this country of only 650,000 people has managed to become a member of the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Council of Europe, the Central European Free Trade Agreement and is now a founding member of the Union for the Mediterranean.

For a long time, Montenegro was a pro-Russian oasis in southeastern Europe with 250,000 Russian tourists visiting it every year. But after it became the 29th NATO member on July 5, Russia imposed sanctions on it, including an import ban on some goods.

Nevertheless, Russian tourists are still welcomed in Montenegro, “as long as they bring money” to the country, locals say.

Montenegro is an agrarian country that benefits from its location as transport crossroads and its attractiveness to tourists. To save an unstable economy from post-war collapse, local authorities decided to introduce the Deutsche Mark and then euro as the currency.

A view of Perast town, located in Boko-Kotor Bay in Montenegro. ( photo by Igor Sudakov)

Perast, an ancient town, is located in Boko-Kotor Bay in Montenegro. (Igor Sudakov)

Hummingbird

The towns of Budva, Kotor, Bar and villages Rafailovici and Sveti Stefan (Saint Stephan) are the most popular tourist destinations in Montenegro. My husband and I stayed in a small hotel in Sveti Stefan, a small village next to the luxury Aman Sveti Stefan – a resort located in a medieval fortress on an island, which was opened in the 1960s and reopened in 2011, 10 years after the war.

The island-hotel is open only for clients who can afford to pay 800 euros per night for a suite and 100 euros per day to use the beach.

We spent our evenings sitting on the beach with cans of the local Nickcisko beer, (price: one euro), watching black armored cars entering the Aman Sveti Stefan.

Locals say the hotel is popular among Hollywood stars and Eastern European dictators. Brad Pitt was allegedly seen swimming here in 2013.

We didn’t see any celebrities, but met a real hummingbird collecting nectar from a Mimosa tree next to our villa. The entire villa cost us 800 euros for the whole week.

Montenegro is in a subtropical climate zone. There are no zoos in the country, but hummingbirds, curly pelicans, lizards, snakes and other exotic animals can be seen not just in Dormitor National Park and Skadar Lake, but also during the tours to Montenegrin canyons, or even in the streets.

And impressions weren’t the only thing we were stuffing ourselves with.

Montenegrin cuisine offers prosciutto and plenty of seafood at rather cheap prices. The portions are huge, so beware. Once we ordered what was called “a sea plate for two” and they brought us a kilogram of seafood: dorados, giant shrimps, mussels, risotto with squid and octopus – and all for 45 euros.

A lunch or dinner for two costs 30 euros in local restaurants in Sveti Stefan and nearby Budva.

The best Montenegrin souvenir is a bottle of the local Plantage wine. A bottle of semi-dry red or white wine goes for as little as three euros.

Albanian national flag waves at Skanderbeg Square in the center of Albanian capital Tirana. (photo by Igor Sudakov)

The Albanian national flag waves at Skanderbeg Square in the center of Albanian capital Tirana. (Igor Sudakov)

A trip to Albania

When we had had our fill of picturesque nature, medieval architecture, and the cuisine of Montenegro, our guide offered us a trip to nearby Albania, selling it as the most mysterious country in Europe.

Albanians, of course, were unlucky to get one of the craziest dictators Europe has suffered.

Enver Hoxha (Hodga), the leader of local Socialist Party of Labor, who came into power after the World War II, was a fan of the murderous Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, and his ruling style. In fact, Hoxha founded a prison-city and named it Stalin. People were sent to the city-jail for wearing red, traveling, and wearing beards. After Stalin’s death, the dictator, unhappy with Nikita Khrushchev’s rejection of Stalinism, decided to close off Albania to the world. As the rest of Europe recovered from the war, building new plants and factories, Hoxha was building bunkers.

Confident that the Soviet Union or the U.S. would start a nuclear war any minute, Hoxha ordered the construction of 750,000 bunkers across the 28,748 square kilometers country of three million people.

I saw one of those bunkers in the yard of a small café where we stopped soon after crossing the border.

Hoxha died in the late 1980s, and in 1991 the Socialist regime dissolved. The borders finally opened for Europe to see a country of handsome people, but with no traffic rules and with almost no traffic lights, as they existed only in the capital city of Tirana.

Although Albania is an official EU member-candidate, some people here live on just one euro a day.

I was also surprised to find out that it is normal in Albania for a Muslim woman to marry a Catholic or an Orthodox Christian.

The local government is trying to make people happy, though sometimes in odd ways. In the 2000s one of the mayors ordered all the buildings in Tirana to be painted in bright colors.

The local currency is the Lek (one euro equals 150 Lek). The country is famous for its tasty and cheap vegetables and high-quality silver jewelry.

I couldn’t help myself, and bought a silver ring encrusted with tourmalines, zircons, and emeralds – for just nine euros.

What I also liked was that the Albanian language doesn’t sound like any other in the world. It is an independent branch of the Indo-European language tree, but it sounds a bit like the language of the Dothraki, a fictional horse-riding tribe from the “Game of Thrones” television series.

So I wouldn’t say “thank you” for reading this, I would say: “Falënderim!”

My husband Igor Sudakov enjoys local beer on an outdoor terrace of the small cafe in small town Shkodra, Albania.

Ukrainian tourist Igor Sudakov enjoys a local beer in a small cafe in Shkodra, Albania. (Veronika Melkozerova)