buses, buses and still more buses!!!
Travel Location: Trebinje,Serbia
I don’t know why all my crazy travel stories seem to stem from transportation but they do! Anyone who read emails from my trip last year knows that me and modes of transport put together always seems to equal a funny story! So here we go. Well we left Budva and were trying to get to Mostar in Bosnia and Hercegovina. It looks easy on a map I mean there like a half an inch away from each other! Instead of just going back to Dubrovnik in Croatia and going that way, which we knew we could do we decided we could just do it our way.
We took a bus to Podgorica, which is the capital of Montenegro and very ugly. We of course figured since its the capital there would be plenty of buses to Mostar, which is also a pretty big city in the neighboring country. Well, there was only one bus which didn’t leave until 8 at night and it was like 10 in the morning. We definitely didn’t want to sit around Podgorica for 10 hours so we got on a bus to one of the border towns, Herceg Novi, and were going to go back to Dubrovnik…this would have required three to four buses to get us to our destination. At the last minute we hopped of, got our luggage, ticket stubs and decided to take a bus to Trebinje instead as that was in the same country that we were hoping to go and pretty close (again that’s close on my map, not so much in real life!). Again we assumed there would be a couple buses.
It took us a couple hours to get to Trebinje…we arrived at THE most ghetto bus station ever! I’ve been through alot of bus stations and this one takes the prize-ceilings caving in, windows broken and buses that looked about a hundred years old! It was pretty great! So we checked the schedule and were pretty psyched to see that a bus left for Mostar in an hour. We were quite proud of ourselves until we went to the ticket man and he said “no bus, no bus”. He told us the only way we could get to Mostar was on the 9PM bus! We finally gave up since it was our third town and third try…actually we probably would have kept trying but there were no buses to anywhere until the 9PM bus and the station was deserted so we had no choice. Fortunately for us we were stuck in a cute little town, unfortunately it was Sunday…not much happens on Sunday. We grabbed our packs and walked into town where guy asked if we needed help, I think it was written all over us! He took us to a few places and asked if we could leave our luggage but everyone said no. Finally he took us to The Playstation Shop which had about 50 reclining seats where young guys were sitting and Playstationing, it was quite a site. Even though we were Americans, which the owner wasn’t thrilled about, he took a chance on us and let us leave our bags there for the day. We managed to see the town in about 15 minutes and just bummed around the empty town the rest of the day. Again there were no other tourists here and I think everyone in the town knew who we were and where we were from since we kept walking abck and forth! When we got back to the bus station at 8 it was empty but slowly people started arriving…where they were all day I have no idea. Then the ticket man came back and laughed at us! We finally got on our bus and on our way 12 hours after we started!! My advice to everyone after two trips to Eastern Europe-never ever make assumptions on transportation in Eastern Europe, YOU WILL BE WRONG… but you’ll always have a good story!!!
