Budva – Montenegran for Please Give Me Money

We arrived at Budva at around 6pm and anchored out, well past the Marina. We then had a boat come out and tell us that we needed to either 1) move into the Marina 2) pay a 35 Euro fee to anchor, or 3) move around the point to another bay. We were tired and we needed to clear customs anyway, so we decided to stay and pay … Marina and I went into town and were totally blown away by how nice an old city Budva is. It’s like Korcula or Dubrovnik (though less touristy) and is quite impressive. We decided that we would need to bring the kids ashore in the morning to experience how nice it is. On the way back we were challenged by some port police that wanted to know why we didn’t check in with them when we arrived (actually I did but they didn’t stamp anything). We told them we wanted to leave in the morning around 8am … they talked to each other and asked us to come back after 9am … with a smile. It is a great anchorage except for during the day the traffic is thick and nobody cares about the size of their wake so we were regularly assailed by 30 foot powerboats zooming by … and then there was the disco that played music at ‘10’ until 1:30am … making it difficult to sleep.

The next day we went back in the morning to grab a quick bite, do some marketing and check out of the country. It turns out the Police didn’t want to process anyone until 10am. It took most of an hour and the customs guy wanted a bottle of wind because it is “tradition” to present wine to Customs and Police in Montenegro.

I think Jessie summed it up best “so you want me to give you wine to leave the country where you charged us 35€ to anchor in where a discotheque aimed their speakers at the water keeping us awake until 2am?”

We’re not sure we can recommend Budva to anyone – particularly relative to the value Porto Montenegro represented.