First Impressions of Budva, Montenegro 🇲🇪

So right now I am in Budva which is the biggest tourist attraction in Montenegro and in this video I'm gonna cover my first impressions of this place and my experience of getting to Montenegro. Okay so it's around 3 30 p.m and I just arrived in Montenegro from Belgrade and I'm in the capital city of Podgorica and this is my first time here and I just got off the plane and got myself a sim card for 30 days. It's 4G but it was like 500 gigabytes for 15 euros which is like a ridiculous deal. By the way guys if you missed my last video about getting an e-sim you can always do that and save yourself the trouble of having to find a sim card when you get to a new place. This trip was so rushed I didn't have a chance to like figure out the e-sim or do anything before I caught my flight so I just came over here and I got the first sim I saw at the airport. Right now I'm heading to the train station by the airport and then I'm planning on taking a train to the center of Podgorica and then hopefully a bus to the coastal city of Budva. It's not too hot but hot enough to get me sweating. Okay so I somehow managed to get on the wrong train going the wrong direction so I got off as fast as I could and I'm waiting for the next train going to the right way which is that way. Second attempt. Hopefully I'll get to Podgorica this time and I'm in these fancy cabins. Hopefully I have money to pay because I only have like I think 20 or 10 euros in me right now. No one asked me to pay. I thought I was going to pay inside. I guess this is like the buses in Belgrade. Okay so I am at the main bus station of Podgorica which is very conveniently located right next to the train station which is basically on the other side and I got a bus ticket going to Budva in 45 minutes. There was an earlier train but I need a little bit time to catch up on eating some Balkan food. My least favorite thing about euros is that you have to use a lot of coins. Looks like it's going to rain soon. So I got a pljeskavica which is not the pljeskavica I'm used to in Serbia. I guess they just gave me a random burger that was already cooked which is kind of strange because the whole point of a pljeskavica is that they're supposed to cook it in front of you. So it's 7 15 p.m and I just got out of the bus station and I'm finally in the town of Budva which looks like a lot of the other mediterranean cities or towns that I've been to. And when I was coming here from the bus I saw some jaw-dropping views of the city. It's probably too late today to drop off my stuff and take out my drone and camera and film the coastline but some good shots are coming tomorrow for sure. This is really pretty, really fancy too. Pretty good. All right good morning. I am inside the old town of Budva and yesterday I came and stayed at this hostel which has a good location but there's not much else that's really cool about it. Today I'm gonna go explore the old town. I think I basically just walked into this really cool beach in the middle of old town which is kind of weird. Usually old towns are fortified not with beaches. So unlike Kotor, the old town of Budva is like actually pretty tiny. You can go from one end to the other and just walk around it in like five minutes and when you walk outside the walls you see the ruins of a roman acropolis from I think like 2200 or 2100 years ago which says a lot about how old this place has been or how long this place has been a settlement for. So Budva is 2500 years old and is one of the most ancient settlements on the Adriatic coast and a lot like Kotor, this place was ruled by many different empires over the last couple of thousand years. First by the Greeks, then by the Romans, then by the Byzantines, then at one point by the Venetians, then by the Austro-Hungarian empire if I remember right. I think even Napoleon's France was ruling this place for a couple of years. Then eventually along with the rest of Montenegro this came under the Yugoslavian kingdoms or states for most of the 20th century or all the 20th century and then finally in 2006 when Montenegro gained independence from Serbia, Budva basically became the premium tourist place in all of Montenegro. So right outside the town if you walk along one of the most famous beaches you come across the statue of a ballerina which a lot of people come and like to take pictures with for some reason, I don't know why, but right there you can see this really cool island right off the coast of Budva with the beach but you need to take a boat to go there so I don't think I'll have time today. So just like Kutor, if you've seen the last video this coastal town of Budva is also right next to the mountains but the cool thing I think here is like the mountains are not right against the town itself but like a little bit far away so you get some pretty nice views of the mountains in the distance So I just came inside the old town again and this one's just as confusing as any other Mediterranean old town that I've been to but I found this place with a lot of cute little cats and they ignored me like all other cats do but anyways I just went to an ATM and took out money so I took out like 90 euros which is a lot of money for most places in the Balkans but you have to remember this is a tourist resort town where most of the tourists are very wealthy people from like Russia, Ukraine, Turkey so they're not exactly catering usually for broke backpackers so I had to do laundry and that cost eight euros and everything else costs a lot of money too and a lot of places don't even take cards so you have to take out cash and I had to pay five euros as a fee for taking out 90 euros of cash not happy but that's how it is when you come places like that by the way if you're a Bangladeshi living abroad and trying to go through a lot of hassles trying to send money back home you should really check out this app called TapTapSend TapTapSend is a very simple app that allows you to send money very easily from the US, UK, Canada or Europe with euros straight to Bangladesh without a lot of effort there's a lot of lot of really good reasons to be using TapTapSend first of all there's like zero transaction fees so you don't have to pay an extra fee or any kind of fee to send your money back home number two the exchange rates are very great compared to the competitors number three the transaction times are also very fast compared to competitors number four and this is a unique selling point if you're sending money to Bangladesh you can send the money directly to a bank account or a Bcash account number five I've been talking to TapTapSend and they've offered like a special promo code for my viewers which is OTG and if you use that on your first ever transaction you get a 10 credit bonus on that so if you're sending dollars from the US you get a 10 dollar bonus if you're sending euros from Europe you get a 10 euro bonus for Canada you get 10 Canadian dollar bonus for UK you get 10 pounds bonus so make sure you use that code if you end up using the app and make sure you check out the app if you do need to send money back home so in the middle of Old Town of Budva is this really pretty square and the highlight of the square is definitely this church of Santa Maria which is I think more than a thousand years old and looks like they've turned it into a restaurant so now I'm going to go check out the citadel fortress and the walls of the old city of Budva so I'm finally on the walls of Budva I didn't go inside the citadel because it like cost money to get in there and didn't seem like that special and these walls seem pretty cool these are basically 20 feet high walls that separate the city and defended the city from outsiders back in the day I guess you can walk around this place but thankfully this is not as expensive as Dubrovnik you know because over there it was like 30 euros to get on the wall I didn't even get on here it was only two euros which is like not bad at all relatively I'd say so I want to get some coffee but for that I want to go outside of Old Town outside the walls to this place that's supposed to be a lot cheaper because I'm a cheap ass I got some ice cream healthy portions iced coffee and this cheese pastry and all of it cost like less than three or four euros okay we're gonna go cliff jumping right now at the spot it's almost tested out so we're not gonna die hopefully and on the way here my sandal is completely ripped so walking with one sandal hopefully no blisters are gonna come out of this we got some new sandals which should do the trick for now for 10 euros not too bad nice little beach here I had no idea this is here I'm gonna give it a go go for it it's shallow that's the only thing you know straight are you gonna do it yeah I will wow are you gonna go no short guy go for it okay there's a small gap but I think I can clear it so much fun I'll pay for both man oh ---- I only have cash I got it thank you for coming with me how much is it I paid already we did okay the post jump beer to celebrate our survival yeah Thomas got a few cuts but it's okay you have one on your hand yeah you have on your lip right like yeah can I pull it up can you see it yeah yeah yep there's a cut there okay so for the next stop today we're going to this place that looks like one of the most stunning places on the whole Montenegrin coastline but it's not inside the city of Budva itself and it's 10 kilometers away so I'm gonna try to figure out how to get a bus to get there somewhere over there okay so we have finally arrived at this place called Sveti Stefan and this used to be an island back in the days but then became an islet that is connected to the mainland today by this bridge previously by just a channel of sand so the earliest records of history state that this was the capital city of this region that was a protectorate of the Venetian empire back in the 15th century and then like a couple of hundred years later this was basically a village out here where 400 people lived then later on basically there were places on this island that served as the residence of members of the Serbian royalty because you know Montenegro used to be a province of Serbia for the longest time ever but afterwards in the 20th century this became a resort where huge names like Marilyn Monroe used to come on vacation and party I guess even in the 90s this was run by this hotel and the only people that could come here were big names like David Beckham who were allowed to come on the beaches on both sides that you see here and take pictures normal people were not even allowed to come here but recently the hotel I think has been closed and the beaches have been reclaimed by the people of Montenegro the people of the Balkans as they should be honestly to me it's interesting because this reminds me a lot of Dubrovnik but like a much smaller village version Dubrovnik is like so unfortunately you can't really go inside this village and explore further but I think the best way to see this place is not from the inside but from certain viewpoints on the outside over there and from the sky so I literally could not have picked a better time to be done with the drone shots because it is starting to rain and I was in danger of losing my drum and I need to get out of here find some shade so on final note I think I'm gonna end this video here and the next video is going to be from the mountains of Montenegro if the weather allows don't forget to like this video if you liked it feel free to subscribe to my channel if you want to see more and follow me on instagram for real time travel updates I'll catch you guys in the next video from somewhere else in Montenegro