Travel & Shit

Cologne has got an interesting beer culture which I didn’t know about until after I’d thrown money at the mighty Ryanair for the privilege of cramming myself into one of their fine pressurised metal tubes for just over an hour. If I’d have known about I’d have come sooner! Let’s talk about the beer because it’s one of the most important things you’ll need to know about visiting Cologne as a human…

Schloss Drachenburg is an easy train ride from Cologne so it’d be rude not to check it out. Well, I say a train ride, you get off at Königswinter then it’s up to you whether your wallet or your calf muscles take the hit for the last little bit up to the castle. There’s a historic railway, the Drachenfelsbahn, which is Germany’s oldest still-functioning cog railway. It’ll take you all the way up…

I had a bit of time off work at the same time as a mate, Lydi, was back in Europe after a long absence which makes it sound like she was in prison. She wasn’t, she was overseas. So I thought, “Why not fuck off to Germany for a bit for a catch up?” Why not indeed. We decided on Cologne on account of it having stuff to do, but also it was super easy to get to other interesting places. I’ve split…

BMW Museum & BMW Welt Neither of us are particularly into cars but visiting the BMW Museum is kind of The Done Thing™ so we duly took the U-Bahn up to Olympiazentrum to put lots of vehicles into our eyeholes. BMW Welt is just kind of a showroom and is free to enter. If you like looking at shiny vehicles this is for you. The museum has an entry fee and covers the history of the company from when…

Tarrant had had her little heart set on visiting some actual, proper German Christmas markets for bloody ages, so this year off we fucked off to Munich in order to consume our body weight in Bratwurst. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of Christmas markets, I’ll be honest. Once I’ve shovelled a phallic-shaped dead pig and a mulled wine into my facehole, I’m pretty much done with markets back home —…

What better way to spend the last morning of our honeymoon than walking up about 1300 steps to a ruin? Tarrant had opinions about pretty much every aspect of this endeavour as did my leg muscles after yesterday’s impromptu climb up a bell tower. We got up early to start climbing at 8am to beat the heat. It’s one thing to walk up a big bastard hill, it’s quite another to do it in an oven. It’s a…

I love public buses. No, wait, that’s a complete lie. I love public buses in countries that aren’t the UK. I get a lot of joy out of using public transport whilst travelling but if I’ve got to do it back home I find it overpriced and unreliable. Y’know, all those things I don’t give a flying fuck about when I’m off on my jollies. But I do love exploring new places by public transport and I do…

We had a bit of time to kill this morning on account of the fact the car didn’t need to be back until 2pm. We’d planned to drive the utterly batshit Serpentine road into Kotor but we’d done that the previous day to beat the weather and fuck me, I am so glad we did. It would have been horrific in this visibility, plus the fact safe braking distances are a strange and foreign concept here. It…

I like to get up early on holiday to go and Do The Things. It took a while for Tarrant to get used to this but, after some initial protesting in the early days of our relationship, I brought her round to it. A little gentle coffee-related coaxing and we’re generally on our way before the locals even start thinking about their morning commute. I wanted to get to the Mausoleum of Njegoš for when it…

The original plan was to go to Plužine via the northern section of the scenic Durmitor Ring drive and leave via the southern section, but I did a bit of a Google on this road and decided I did not have the necessary nerves for this endeavour. People in forums who described themselves as confident drivers used words like “challenging” and “difficult” and “very narrow” and “cliff edges with no…

I’ve been learning how to pronounce Montenegrin place names by simply wildly mispronouncing them in front of Montenegrins. This isn’t deliberate — I’m not trying to be disrespectful — it just so happens that my best guess is usually laughably inaccurate. So far people have just been gently correcting me with a smile and I learn a new thing. Yay. So Plužine, it turns out, is more of a…

We need to talk about burek. I could eat this shit all day. It’s a flaky pastry stuffed with meat, or spinach, or cheese, or whatever. We first had it in Virpazar, little cheese and spinach triangles and tiny cheese spirals. But this morning our host baked a massive cheese spiral for breakfast and it was fucking awesome! Far too filling, we packed up what we couldn’t eat so we could have cheesy…

The reason I wanted us to camp here within the Biogradska Gora National Park was because I knew it’d be chaos when the day trippers were here. I wanted us to experience the calm when they left which I’m sure Tarrant did but I was too busy with my head down the toilet. At least we got to sit by the lake in the morning and enjoy the peace and quiet as I slowly introduced a coffee to my digestive…

I’m really enjoying Montenegro but I feel like learning road etiquette would be so much less stressful if other drivers weren’t so impatient. You can take the calmest, most rational person in the world but as soon as you put them behind the wheel of a car they become filled with the Rage of a Thousand Hulks, utterly aghast that someone has the audacity to drive slightly under the speed limit in…

We booked our lake cruise on Get Your Guide before arriving in Montenegro because I wanted to make sure we got one. I needn’t have worried, this place consists entirely of people trying to sell you a boat tour. You’ve got everything from one-man bands who don’t really speak English to full outfits with staff in branded shirts and multiple boats. You can go out for an hour, two hours, three hours,…

The plan this morning was to go for a swim in a nearby river followed by a little jaunt up to a waterfall for more swimming. Possibly the kind of swimming that would cryogenically freeze all of your organs but the days were sticky and hot so we’d probably relish these few minutes of cold. It had, however, been a very dry summer. There’d been wildfires when we arrived, that’s how hot and dry it…

Today we’d be driving to Bar. Or I’d be driving, Tarrant would be sitting in the passenger seat periodically reminding me that we’re meant to be driving on the right and also I have a whole car to the right of me and she’d thank me to remember that when considering my road positioning. We got started early to try and beat the other tourists along the coast road and got to Sveti Stefan in pretty…