Making up for lost time

[Andrew O Byrne White - Ireland AO]

On our way out of Albania, as one last little bit of crazy that the country decided to throw at us, I got pulled over by the police.  I wasn't speeding (and Chris was in front at the time, so not sure how they would have picked me up and not him if we were, but as soon as I saw that I was being flagged down, I pulled over.  Immediately, the officer started shouting at me for stopping, and telling me to go again.  I have no idea what was going on there!

 

Next up was Montenegro, and it pretty quickly became a highlight of the trip for me.  I didn't know much about Montenegro, so was slightly concerned it might just be more of Albania, which I sort of needed a break from!  From the beginning, the border crossing gave me confidence though.  It's the first place on the trip I've actually been asked for insurance (which I had, but more on that later).  For anyone that didn't have insurance, such as Chris, they had a formal office set up, and it was just €15 for the week.  Yep, Euro.  They're not in the EU, but use it anyway.  That's because back in the '90s, the country decided to switch from their own currency to the German Mark.  Then when the Germans switched onto the Euro, so did Montenegro!  

 

Ireland were playing in the RWC that day, so we stopped for some lunch across the border.  It was good, cheap, and the people were friendly.  Couldn't ask for much more!  We carried on from there, and almost immediately were driving alongside a beautiful gorge.  I thought I'd take out the gopro for a couple of minutes, but ended up leaving it on for the whole drive.

 

 

 

 

You couldn't go too fast anywhere though, as the roads weren't only used for cars!

 

 

 

Miles, and miles of twisting, winding roads.  After the first hour, the roads emptied out, and we had this to ourselves until we got to our destination in Zabljak.  We set up camp for the night next to an abandoned ski lift, ready for an early morning and a big hike.  It maybe got a little colder than anticipated overnight though!

 

[Westfield Chesil Limited]

On 19/10/2019 at 15:14, AndrewOBW said:

Happy to do it!  It's quite nice for me to have a bit of a record of things anyway.  With the numbers of countries we've travelled through and miles covered, some stuff can blur together, so taking the time to write about it here helps me to keep the memories a bit clearer!  Glad you're enjoying it too!

 

It's a real pleasure to read and feel part of your journey. Your making me want to do more travelling.

[CarbonWest - Chris Broster - Bristol & Bath AO]

Great so far....and you aren't finished yet! 

 

The car will need a good inspection on your return - I wonder what souvenirs you will find?

 

Best wishes for the remainder.

[Andrew O Byrne White - Ireland AO]

8 hours ago, Westfield Parts Dept said:

 

It's a real pleasure to read and feel part of your journey. Your making me want to do more travelling.

 

Thanks guys! This club, and of course Patrick and Jason from the WSC parts team are a massive part of this trip happening. There's no way I'd have finished that car and gotten this far without all the help along the way so I'm glad people are able to enjoy the updates! 

 

For anyone thinking of doing this or something similar, really just go for it! It's not the most relaxing way to spend your free time but it's brilliant fun, and really not that difficult or expensive (assuming you've got a car to go in!) 

 

7 hours ago, Chris Broster - Bristol & Bath AO said:

Great so far....and you aren't finished yet! 

 

The car will need a good inspection on your return - I wonder what souvenirs you will find?

 

Best wishes for the remainder.

 

Hah, yeah, it's definitely going to need a good clean and a service when I get back! There's dirt from 19 countries all over the car so far. God knows what I'll find under that! 

[Andrew O Byrne White - Ireland AO]

This one is one of the best days I've had so far, and as a result is so photo heavy it's going to be at least 2 posts if not 3, so bear with me! 

 

The cold morning certainly didn't put us off our hike for the day. If anything it made us a bit more efficient with our packing to get moving!  We were hiking up Bobatov Kuk, with a summit at 2523m. There are a couple of different trails you can take to get to the peak, but to give ourselves more views, we chose to do a different start and finish point, so we dropped my car at the end of the trail, bundled all of our stuff into Chris's mx5 and drove to the start of the trail. Even the view from the car park was amazing! 

 

 

It felt freezing when we got out of the car so we were wrapped up warm at the start of the hike. The elevation at the start was pretty steep though, so it was only a matter of minutes before we were down to a t shirt and shorts. Of course with the cold start we forgot to put on sun cream though! 

 

The views just improved as we climbed:

 

 

 

 

The final bit up to the summit was a slog, but definitely worth it! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Andrew O Byrne White - Ireland AO]

Normally I lock my steering wheel in Chris's car when we go hiking but this time with the cars being separated, that wasn't an option, so I couldn't resist this shot.

 

 

When you want to do a big hike but can't stand leaving your Westfield behind (or when you have no doors and want a but of extra security). Either way, FreeWheel has you covered! 

 

The way down continued to yield some beautiful views too. 

 

 

 

8 hours and 16 minutes after setting off, we arrived back at my car. The guy in the national park ticket office there told us that there had been at least 200 photos taken of my car that day! We packed up and drove around to Chris's car. After the cold the night before, we thought we had better lose some altitude before we found a campsite, and this is where I found my only issue with Montenegro (although it's really an issue with my car, rather than Montenegro...).

 

I had struggled a little in the build with figuring out how to get the Westfield fuel level sender to communicate with the koso dash. After reading back on some old posts on the forum, I bought a Spiyda gauge wizard. I spent hours calibrating it to the point where it sort of works. The top half of the tank is fine, but when I go below 40%, I'm not really sure what's happening. We set off for a 56km drive to where the campsite was, which was right on the limit of where I thought I could reach. Somehow, Google turned that 56km into 80km, and there were no places to fill up on the way. By the time we pulled over, my guage had been flashing at me for a long time!

 

To top it off, the first two camping spots we had aimed for were no good, and when trying to leave to get to a 3rd one, Chris bottomed out on a rock and got stuck. Fortunately I had packed a tow rope, so strapped it to the roll bar and managed to pull him free.

 

We made it to the third camping spot without running out of fuel, parked up and cooked some dinner figuring we'd find a petrol station in the morning. Not the perfect way to end the day, but still one of my favourites all things considered! 

 

 

[Geoffrey Carter (Buttercup)]

Those views are spectacular.

[Westfield Chesil Limited]

Amazing journey. 

[Simon Westwood - Westfield Sportscars Ltd]

Epic journey.

[CarbonWest - Chris Broster - Bristol & Bath AO]

Stunning views and love the way the rock is folded into bendy striations like plasticine! O level Geography all over again! 

[Kevin Pullen]

Really enjoying reading about this epic trip

[Andrew O Byrne White - Ireland AO]

After Bobotov Kuk we planned to move on to Croatia next.  While we were packing up the tents the next morning, two farmers came by, herding their sheep.  Only one of them had a little broken English, but they stopped by for a chat anyway, talking about the cars before wishing us luck and carrying on with their day.  There was a petrol station 8km away, so that was the first stop we needed to make.  Chris had it on his satnav and I almost had a nervous breakdown when we drove past a station that was closed for renovation.  Fortunately, it was one 500m down the road that we were aiming for anyway!  We fuelled up, although I definitely paid for at least a litre that went on the floor.  In a lot of the countries we've been to, the petrol stations have attendants who insist they fill the cars.  A lot of the time they either don't understand when I ask them to fill it slowly to stop it from spilling, or they just don't believe me and try to crack on at full speed.  This was one of the latter, and the self stopping function on the pump seemed to be broken so dumped a lot more on the floor than usual!

 

With full tanks, we set off North.  We had another busy day planned, but no hiking this time.  Unusually, we were trying to do two cities in one day - Kotor in Montenegro and Dubrovnik in Croatia.  It was always going to be reasonably tight trying to get both in one day, but we hit some roadworks after about half an hour of driving.  After 30 minutes of waiting, Chris walked up to the front with the driver of another car to figure out what was going on.  The road workers told them the road would be closed for the next 2 hours.  The only other route around we could see on the satnav was back the way we came and an extra hour and a half of driving so we had to cut one of the cities out.  We had both enjoyed Montenegro so much that we decided to keep Kotor in and cut Dubrovnik.  It's easier to fly there in the future anyway!  So off we set to find some twisting narrow lanes around a big lake.

 

 

The roads then took us into the mountains...

 

 

...and eventually ended up giving us a beautiful view of Kotor, which foolishly I forgot to take my phone out for a photo of, so the best I can offer is a gopro shot!

 

 

 

From this point, we carried on down a narrow road with about 30 switchbacks to the level of the town itself.  This would have been great fun if the road wasn't so busy with cars, buses and cyclists!

 

 

We parked up, had some lunch and took a wander around the old town.  It was beautiful, but a little hard to get a good photo of as it was mobbed with tourists!

 

 

The walls from the fortress run the whole way down the mountain and surround the old town.  I can imagine this place was pretty easy to defend back in its day - probably why it's still in such good condition now!

 

 

 

 

We didn't buy a sim card in Montenegro so didn't have internet, so we figured we'd get across the border into Croatia before figuring out our camping plans for that night.  It wasn't far to the border anyway.  When we got through border security, we pulled over and had a look at our camping options.  There wasn't much anywhere near us, and you have to be a little careful around Croatia as there are still quite a few minefields around the place, so we decided our best bet was to drive on, through Bosnia and back into the next bit of Croatia, before camping there on a beach.  I still don't really count Bosnia as a country I've visited despite having been there twice, as I've literally driven straight through it in less than half an hour, but I'll count it for the car's purposes!  The coastline up Croatia and Bosnia were beautiful, but we were driving into the sunset so there aren't many photos that came out well from the gopro.

 

[JohnCh]

I've been on various se7en forums and mailing lists for over 20 years.  In all that time, this may be my favorite thread.  Count me as someone who is not looking forward to the end of your journey 😉

 

-John

[CarbonWest - Chris Broster - Bristol & Bath AO]

2 hours ago, JohnCh said:

I've been on various se7en forums and mailing lists for over 20 years.  In all that time, this may be my favorite thread.  Count me as someone who is not looking forward to the end of your journey 😉

 

-John

I have to agree, love this and can’t guess what’s coming next...

[Andrew O Byrne White - Ireland AO]

We woke up early to get a bit of a head start on the day. Camping on a sandy beach may have been an error, as no matter how careful I tried to be, sand was everywhere!  We shook off as much as we could and packed up.

 

We were heading to Krka Park that day. It's one of Croatia's biggest attractions for a reason, but that also means it's rammed with loads of tour buses.  Croatia seems to have jumped on board with monetising tourism pretty quickly though as a the parks are set up with loads of parking for cars and buses, as well as clearly signposted walkways etc. The bit they haven't gotten on board with is customer service for tourists. Maybe they've just had too many in a short space of time and are now fed up with them, but there seemed to be a constant coldness towards tourists that just took something away from the beautiful surroundings.

 

But in their defence, they were very beautiful surroundings.

 

 

We had read online that you could swim here so we brought our shorts with us. There was a sign at the ticket desk though saying swimming wasn't allowed from the 1st of October onwards so rather than carrying our gear with us we just dropped it all back to the car. We probably should have gambled though as it turned out there were loads of people in the water and it would have been a beautiful day for it! 

 

 

 

Our next planned stop the following day was Plitvice Lakes.  There was about a 2.5 hour drive between them, so we figured we'd stop to pick up some dinner and find a place to camp about an hour away from the lakes. 

 

We found a lovely little camping spot well out of the way - down a dirt track, across a bridge over a reservoir, then further down the road. There had been a campfire there previously so we got one lit and settled in for the evening. Some dinner and a few beers later, we tidied everything up, put out the fire, set up the tents and went to bed.

 

Then came the most passive aggressive thing I've ever experienced.  Around 12:30am we were woken up when a car pulled up next to our tents and, without saying a word to us, started blaring euro pop about as loud as it could possibly go.  Nobody asked us to move or anything. Me and Chris were texting each other trying to decide what to do. We could hear 3-4 distinct voices. I was very cautious about getting out of the tent, as they might have assumed with 2 cars and 2 tents we were also a group of 4. I was nervous that if they realised there were only 2 of us things could change. So we decided to wait them out. Surely they couldn't keep this going for too long? 

 

3 hours later they finally gave up and moved on. 3 hours of the worst music I've ever heard in my life. As soon as they left I went and checked on the cars but thankfully, everything had been left alone.  We went back to sleep for a few more hours, but got up early in the morning to pack up in case they came back.