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Guest Appearance

July 29, 2010 in Camping News, Naturist, Team News | 1 comment

I can’t believe this is my first blog entry for a month!!!  Apologies to anyone who actually looks forward to these updates and has started to give up on me…

The good news is that I have just been too damn busy to blog.  And not just with partying & having fun (I can see my Mum’s concerned face & wagging finger!) – although to be fair, there has been quite a bit of that too!

I have about 20 mins to get this post posted so I’m not going to mess around with fancy words & poetic descriptions of the events of the past few weeks.  I’m here to chuck up some photos and give you a brief run down of the visitors…

Bob, (Saint Bob, patron saint of lovley guests and general good luck charm), you know about by now.  Here’s a lovely picture of the 3 of us & sweet peas from the garden sprouting from Steve’s shoulder!

Next up came Benjamin, all the way from California.  The soon-to-be professor found us in the Lonely Planet (we had an entry long before we even had the campsite set up but thankfully the web address is correct and people can still find us!) and we stayed up til silly o’clock talking eco.  He commented on having the best night’s sleep in Montenegro at our campsite.

Then we spent a pleasant evening with Jonathon from Camping Cheque.  Sadly I don’t think we’ll be able to work with his organisation but he gave us plenty of food for thought and was our first French guest.

1st July was a very special, happy day… Nik returned to his heart home – the Balkans – & became a key member of the Camp Full Monte team again:

Next to arrive was Wally… an old class mate of mine who found me on Facebook and made it to Monte after the second week of his tour in Belgrade got cancelled.  We hadn’t seen each other for 24+ years and he certainly saw more of me than he’d ever seen!  I was anxious about how the week would go but once he arrived I relaxed.  He was great fun, easy to be around and very supportive.

During that week we had visits from special friends:

and their kids:

At the same time, Nik’s friends Ema & Alex & baby Viktor came to stay at our house in Topla to combine a holiday with catching up with Nik who they know & love from his Macedonia days.   Sadly I didn’t get any pics of dear Alex but here are the Mums & kids…

Next up was Marcus & Annabel (from the UK and France respectively but now both living in Portugal).  They were pretty self contained but we understand that not everyone wants to eat with us and get involved and it didn’t stop them enjoying our space and leaving some lovely comments in our now very precious Guest Book.

Olivier & Tanja, a beautiful Belgium-Flemish couple became part of the family for nearly 2 weeks.  They were just the sweetest, nicest folk and loved the campsite, the wildlife and my cooking.  It was so easy to be around them, to play games, share a bottle of wine etc and we have so many great memories of their time with us.  Here they are with my friend Carrie (who hadn’t visited the site since the old days of field tent up top and was gob smacked by the progress)…

Two Hungarian guys, Adam & Christian, were waiting in the car for us one day when we all returned from the beach.  They hadn’t booked or even emailed a tentative enquiry – they just showed up!  Thank goodness we arrived when we did or else they might have given up on us!  (needless to say we are now on the case with proper signage & a telephone number).  They were great fun and so, so smart!  We learnt loads about Hungarian politics, history & culture in the 3 nights they were with us.  I turned 40 on the day after they arrived and they brought out a little chocolate cake with candles to celebrate.

My birthday celebrations brought a whole bunch of other folk – not exactly guests and I haven’t downloaded any of the pics from the week long celebrations so all that will have to wait for another post…

Yesterday, Emma & Andy arrived from the UK.  They plan to stay at  least 3 nights and maybe longer… August sees a steady stream of guests – mostly in their own tent and mostly for just a night or 2 but guests nonetheless and the Dish of the Day is selling well in advance…

More soon, I promise!

Bob’s your uncle…

June 22, 2010 in Camping News, Team News | 5 comments

This time last week things were looking gloomy… bookings were so thin on the ground as to be disturbingly scary and we were starting to have serious discussions about not if, but when, we would pack it all in for the winter and head for cover in the UK.

Then, ‘Bob’s your uncle’, Bob turns up!  Bob is our first guest and he came out of nowhere.  We got an email saying he was heading to Dubrovnik and was thinking about visiting the campsite and next came a text saying he’d be there on 16th June in the afternoon.  When we got the text we were at our house in town, struggling with our marketing.  We packed up our stuff and jumped in the car, arriving at the campsite late at night.  We cleaned and polished into the early hours so we would be ready for Bob the next day.

As ever, there was this horrible knot in the pit of my stomach all morning – waiting for him to arrive.  What would he be like?  Would he be suitably impressed with the tent we’d prepared for him and the campsite in general?  What if he didn’t like my cooking (he’d requested our Dish of the Day)?

As Steve went off to pick Bob up from the bottom of the hill, I finally saw my first tortoise on the land this year.  I took this to be a good sign… in the Chinese culture, tortoises are loaded with symbolism.  Its inanimate shell represents the lifeless rock that is acted upon by divine inspiration (the breath of the heavens) to produce life.  Maybe we were due some divine intervention?

Seems that way… our first guest has turned out to be the most amazing chap.  He’s in his late 60’s but full of energy and a sense of adventure.  His partner was supposed to be making the trip to Montenegro but had to change her plans at the last moment, so Bob changed the traveller’s name and flew out in her place.  He found us on the internet and thought we might be fun.  He wouldn’t describe himself as a naturist but he’s enjoyed being naked in the sun on various trips so didn’t see a problem.

We hit it off straight away.  By the end of the first day, as we were sharing a bottle of wine over dinner, we already felt really comfortable in each other’s company.  He’s a fascinating character – full of stories of places he’s been, people he’s met, things he’s done.  He used to have a small-holding so he knew the struggles of tending the land, growing your own produce & trying to make ends meet.  We also share a love of music – he’s a massive Bob Marley fan and had been to Jamaica for the great man’s birthday last year; he was lucky enough to have seen some incredible gigs (Little Richard, The Everly Brothers, Ray Charles) and was a mine of information about almost every musical artist.  He was well impressed with the laptop & its 15,000 pieces of music.

Despite my worries, he loved the campsite.  He was awed by the views, the wildlife, the peace & seclusion, the birdsong and the stars. He would rise early and go hiking around the area, reporting back on trails he’d found and locals he’d met and in the afternoon he would doze off in the hammock. He had seconds & thirds of every meal – the plates wiped clean at the end of the meal told me all I needed to know about the acceptability of my cooking!

The nicest thing of all was how Bob made himself at home.  He volunteered to water the garden and to mow the terraces…

He insisted on doing the washing up after meals… Despite us pointing out that it was his holiday and he should be relaxing & letting us look after him, he was determined – he argued that he thoroughly enjoying mucking in with us.  It seems this is one of the ways in which the experience at Camp Full Monte is different and appealing…

He’s a footie fan so we took him to meet all our mates who had gathered at Izvor to watch the England game.  He had a great time and was in his element, shouting at the telly and getting to know new people.  He left us, reluctantly, on Saturday.  Plans had been pre made for him to spend time in Perast, but he left some of his stuff with us and will return later this week for another 4-5 days.  He’s adopted us, like a benevolent uncle, and we get frequent texts from him telling us what he’s been up to, nagging us not to work too hard and giving us weather & World Cup updates!

I swear he’s our good luck charm.  We now have another guy joining us for 2 nights this week  & a couple joining us next week, for 3 nights.  We have just got a further booking for 11-12 nights in July.  The idea of having someone else cook seems to be really popular with everyone, so the Dish of the Day is selling well.  On Sunday we’ll be visited by a rep from the camping team of a holiday company that specialise in off-peak holidays.  We’ll just let Bob do all the talking for us – he can sell us better than we can!  I’m dying to see what Bob puts in our Guest Book before he goes, but my favourite quote from him so far is:

“I love Montenegro.  I love it even more now I’ve met you two!”

Alongside all of this, there is hope for employment for us here in the winter months.  We won’t speak too soon but we may have found a great way to work with friends and earn enough money to continue to pay our rent here.

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Moondance

May 30, 2010 in Camping News, Fun Stuff | 4 comments

Months ago we’d put together a calendar of events and the first one was now looming up fast: The Full Moon Party, May 27th.  We’d just thought the party would be a fun thing to do and marketed the ‘idea’  not really knowing who, if anyone, would be interested or how exactly we would execute it.  But friends locally kept mentioning the party:  ‘really looking forward to it’; ‘it’s still on right?’  OK, time to get serious…

The ‘hard bit’ was pricing it.  The prep for the party was going to be a lot of work and we had to make some money but equally we wanted the event to be ‘good value’ so people would want to come again.  The toughest part was that we suspected that most of the party guests would be our friends so effectively we’d be charging our mates for a fun time at the campsite that they were used to having for free.  In the end we had to stop deliberating and get on with it – we came up with a pricing structure for the event & for camping the night and accepted that we might not get it right first time but it would be a start; a place to move forward from and a learning experience…

We really wanted the campsite to look as good as possible – painting the building was one huge step forward in creating a positive impression but there were a million other little things we wanted to do so.  That was the biggest challenge – getting everything done before the party.  It was probably our biggest mistake too – we focused so much on completing little jobs (which probably people wouldn’t have even noticed were unfinished!) that we left little/ no time for really marketing the event or being 100% ready for our guests as they arrived…

Hindsight’s cheap so & I’ve learnt not to agonise too long & hard over what could have been – the fact was: the event created an urgency that got stuff done.  We put the last glass bricks in the last toilet window; we mowed and strimmed:

Steve finally figured out a solution for the greywater system into the raised beds.  There are now lengths of hosepipe that run along the ground with connecters (with stop valves) so that the hose can be pulled off in sections and inserted into the pipes dug into  the raised beds.  It’s simple, cheap and effective – it deserves a post all to itself and pictures, which I will get around to one day soon…

Steve spent a day working on the music – first figuring out how to get all our 15,000+ pieces of music onto the laptop so we could operate everything just from the laptop; then testing that ordinary electrical wire would work as speaker cable (we needed metres of the stuff so this would save us a pretty penny); then setting up the amp & speakers and checking it all functioned and that the speakers didn’t buzz.  Then we took the entire kit up the campsite and set up the sound system there – speakers were positioned up in the roof on the platform with the hot water tank; speaker cable was fed down vent pipes into the basement where they connected up with the amp and the laptop…  It was a very special moment when we started the genny and flooded the night air with sounds…  Good, loud sounds at that!!

The only thing bugging us now regarding its incomplete status was the plastic bottle windows.  We had finished 2 of the 3 frames needed to fill in the south facing window completely – they had been painted white inside and a gorgeous blue outside (the same paint we used for our blue & white theme around the pool in our former life – remember those Watford pool party days people?!) and all the bottles de-labelled, handles removed, dusted and then wedged into the frames & stuck with silicon.  So – just the last one, the big middle window, to do.  I blame myself for ‘bullying’ Steve into focusing on getting this done because we finished it half an hour before our first guests arrived for the party!!!  But, hey it’s done; the damn bottles are out of the way (they are easier to manage in frame than cluttering up the basement!) and it looks FAB – a real talking point at the party…

We moved all the tables out onto the grass to have a flat, clear space, near to the music for dancing in the moonlight but hadn’t got around to levelling these up on the uneven ground when the Lanes and their guests arrived.  Thankfully Matt and Anton (the random American youth that Amy had befriended and brought along) were total stars and warmed to the tricky task of ridding the tables of their jaunty angle using bits of wood to prop the legs up; whilst Amy & Jen mucked in collecting wood for the fire.  When we should have been greeting our guests as they arrived, we were actually: stumping the last big trunk that would likely trip people up as they made their way to the fire site; running around checking tents and organising sleeping space for our campers; finding batteries for lights; and finally showering & changing.  Katie & Sam had made lanterns and brought greasproof paper to make simple tea light holders and they did a fab job, hanging lanterns in trees and positioning candles around the site to mark paths and steps and eating areas.  The building itself looked cool all lit up and we got to see our new plastic bottle windows from the outside with the light shining through them (if you look carefully you can see them here…)

We finally got into ‘host mode’ and organised drinks and got the bbq fired up.  I had the inspired idea of labelling each plastic cup so that everyone knew which was their cup for the night – it also had the added benefit of making it easy for people to remember names of people they’d not met before.  The ‘Full Moon Tea’ (get it???) that we had concocted from wine, vodka & juice was flowing nicely!

Despite the frenetic build-up and stress in the early stages of the evening, the party was a success.  Of the locals that turned up, 2 had never visited before and a further 3 had not visited since the shower block had been built and we had another 7 guests who were Camp Full Monte first-timers: 5 English folk, 1 American and a Canadian.  There were 31 of us in all, plus 2 babies and 3 dogs!  Little Oliver was 5 months old and Amber was our youngest raver & camper at only 9 weeks old.  Here she is the morning after, full of smiles

Steve had prepared a playlist for the evening but Paul the Beard turned up with his laptop and Tomo with his so we had 2 other great DJs for the night.

The Full Monte Feast (mounds of meat, salads and bean burgers for the veggies and 1 vegan) was quickly scoffed and then it was time to dance off the calories.

(Check out the plastic bottle window in the pic above!)

A splinter group developed once the fire was lit.  Tony & Jen got their guitars out and much strumming and singing ensued…

Weather-wise, the evening turned out ok.  The previous 2 days had been glorious sunshine with clear, crisp evenings – not a cloud in the sky and the site bathed in moonlight – and we suspected we might have peaked too soon on the good weather.  Thankfully the rain held off (a soggy party would have been a nightmare) but it was quite cloudy.  The moon made a stunning appearance early on before the clouds really gathered, rising up above the trees, big & orange but then spent a lot of the night draped in cloud.  The advantage of the cloud was that the evening was noticably warmer so all in all, it worked out…

At 12.58, when the moon was at its fullest, the howling began… We all just stood and howled into the night whilst the dogs went bonkers!  God only knows what the local villagers made of it all!

The last of the guests who weren’t camping drifted off around 3.00am.  The hardcore fireside crew stayed up til just before 6.00am and Katie & I were the last women standing at 6.30am.

I was up at 9.00am helping Steve clear up and preparing breakfast…

It was another dry, warm but cloudy day – perfect really as none of us could have coped with sweltering heat in our post-punch drunk state but it was comfortable enough eating breakfast outside…

The last of our guests left around 2pm and we beamed at each other – we’d survived; the genny had coped admirably (my worst nightmare was a power failure – no lights and no music!); people had a great time and we’d actually made some money!

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Progress report

May 20, 2010 in Camping News, The Build | No comments

Sorry if the last post was full of doom & gloom.  I’ve decided to cheer myself up by posting about all the stuff we have achieved.  This is a scheduled post as we are now back on the campsite…

I’d like to say this was an update on the BIG LIST but actually most of the things left on that list are staying there for the foreseeable future until we get a) good weather; b) a period of time with no events, no friends staying or other distractions and c) some more help (please let the promised volunteers actually turn up!).

We’ve decided to focus on the high impact stuff – doing the things that visually make a difference so that the place looks good, even if when you peer into the corners of the place they turn out not to be fully tiled etc.

So, here’s a little round up:

  • The glass bricks are mostly in – just the last window in the last loo to do.  We haven’t been able to tackle this up until now because the cables for the solar PV were threaded through the window.  Now that the solar cupboard has been made and the cables have been re-positioned through the wall we can get on and fill that last gap.  Here are some pictures of the windows:

  • We have hooks up for towels – by each shower and around the wash basins – and strings of battery operated lights adorn the wash basin area at night:

  • The basement is painted & has a lino floor down.  We took everything out, sorted & organised it and moved it back in.  We now have a wardrobe and chest of drawers for our clothes in the inner sanctum, which is also the storage area for tents & tiles.  The main room now has an office area with a desk we can work at; cushions for the chairs are neatly stacked & readily available; there’s a cleaning cupboard with all the mops & brooms; there are tables containing gardening stuff and an area for ‘illumination’ (candles, gas lamps & refills, solar lights etc).  I need to take more pictures but this is what it looked like with the walls painted and the floor down:

  • The solar fairy lights have been positioned around the site, lighting the steps and walkways.  The solar spot lights are up (bar 1, which will be installed any day now) so the entrances to the building are all well lit and 2 spot lights illuminate the kitchen area at night.  It’s a tricky ole job because they need to be positioned at night to ensure the angle and height of the spotlight is really lighting the important areas.  Here’s Steve up a ladder, drilling holes at night:

  • The solar equipment is all tidied away in a wall cupboard, which has been made strong enough to accommodate a second battery as we hope to be generating enough power in the sunny months to charge 2 batteries:

  • All the window ledges in the kitchen area have now been tiled, so we have a smooth surface to perch on and, more importantly, a neat frame for the plastic bottle windows to fit into.  This picture was taken on the rainy morning of the working weekend but shows the nice brown tiles of the window ledge:

  • And here’s the new design of the plastic bottle window and us making them (proper picture to follow when the entire window is complete and the rough wood frames have been painted!):

  • Most of the strimming, stumping & raking around the site has been done now, although this is a bit of an endless task and we have deliberately left some areas to let the new grass grow as long & as strong as possible.
  • The 45,000 litre water tank is pretty much full – just one more tank of fuel in our trusty pump and that should do it!
  • The wooden fence that will be planted with beans and provide additional screening for the lower camping terrace is finally up.  It looks great and its strung with solar fairy lights so its all lit up at night and provides a way-marker for the camping area.  Just got to get planting those beans!

This weeks tasks include:

  • painting all the grey cement still left inside the building
  • finishing the plastic bottle windows and getting them fixed into place
  • putting the last 4 glass bricks in
  • limewashing as much of the outside of the building as we can reach and as the weather allows
  • re-digging paths and using the piles of gravel and sand we have to create smooth, mud-free trails around the site

Watch this space to see how much we actually get done!

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Weathering the storms

May 16, 2010 in Camping News, Den | 1 comment

We are feeling a little buffeted…

The actual storms have been pretty hardcore and its hard to sleep at night with the rain pummelling the thin material between you and the great outdoors and the wind tugging at poles and ropes.  But so far (and I hope I’m not tempting fate when I say this…) we’ve remained dry & cosy in our new ‘home’.

Our Weather Oracle tipped us off about some mental weather & strong southerlies and sure enough in the early hours of yesterday morning, the storm arrived.  Despite preparing the night before & battening down the metaphorical hatches, we found that things inside the shower block were still getting wet (“Oh, it’s a southerly wind – that means it’ll be blowing right through that gaping doorway and onto the tile cement! Doh!”).  We raced around locking even more stuff in the basement (thank god for that big, dry, clean space – what the hell would we do without it now!) and that’s when I noticed that one of the fence panels was about to blow away.  The wind had rocked the fence so badly it had snapped the metal bands holding it to the post!  In the driving rain we effected a temporary bodge with more wire and bits of metal post.

Then it was a dash down to the camping terraces to check the tents.  Matt & Amy’s tent had to re-pegged with more heavy duty pegs and most of the tents needed the guy ropes tightening.  By this time we were soaked to the skin & getting disheartened.  The walls & balustrades hadn’t yet had their second coat of heavy duty outdoor paint and the first coat was washing off.  The path to the shower block that Tim had dug and filled with gravel & sand was washing away as mud and rivers of waters ran onto it… One step forward, two steps back.  There was nothing we could do until the storm passed so it was time to de-camp and head for the shelter of our house in town.

Back at the house things weren’t much better.  Our landlord has helpfully installed 2 huge water tanks to provide us with water when the main supply fails and a sprinkler system to keep his garden irrigated so we don’t have to worry about it during the dry months when we are on the campsite.  However the plumbers have done a terrible job and our basement is now filling up with water so Steve had to dash about fixing the problems.  Last night the power went off and was still off this morning.  We have had a stressful morning watching the storm and worrying about the campsite and not even being able to do anything useful here.  Thankfully the electricity came back on in time to watch the Monaco Grand Prix and the storm has abated, for now…  Ironic isn’t it that at the campsite we have power when we want it and a dry basement!

Riding the waves of ups and downs is exhausting.  We were elated that we had several potential bookings for our house over the summer – some useful income to buy us another month or 2 out here, we hoped.  But now the interest has dwindled and we only have the place rented for one week in July.  The wider political & economic storminess (made up word?) isn’t helping either.  We always seem to pick the wrong time to change pounds into euros as we try to second guess the effect of the markets on the bail out of Greece, the UK election etc, etc…

We are surviving but getting a little sea-sick of it all.  The weather is set to remain stormy for the next few days which puts us behind schedule and we are racing to complete important tasks now before we host a naming ceremony for Matt & Amy’s daughter, Eloise next weekend and hold our first paid event this season – the Full Moon Party in just under 2 weeks time.

Bookings are still way too thin on the ground so the future looks uncertain.  It’s good news that we are getting interest and people are finding us on the web but most calls/ emails are from travellers with camper vans or caravans which we can’t accommodate.

We remain optimistic – what else can we do?  If you’re stuck on a boat in the midst of a raging sea, you have to keep believing the winds will change and the bad times will pass or else you’ll give up and drown for sure…

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With a little help from our friends…

May 16, 2010 in Camping News, Team News | No comments

Last weekend we invited friends to come & help us tackle some of the many, mounting tasks at the campsite and despite the weather looking like this on Saturday morning:

some brave souls pitched in to help.  Amy & Danny stayed over with us Friday night so were already mucking in (or should that be ‘in muck’ as they were up to their eyeballs in dust & spiders webs clearing out the basement) when reinforcements arrived around lunchtime.

The weather cleared up and it turned into a glorious afternoon, so thankfully we were able to tackle some outdoor jobs too.  Here’s the run down of who did what:

  • Amy & Danny emptied, swept and hoovered the basement and got a coat of limewash in the inner basement

  • Therese took over from where they left off to limewash the outer room of the basement

  • Zuzana painted walls and balustrades

  • Fiona planted 2 walnut trees that Steve had grown from seed, then helped Tim lug barrows of sand down to the second terrace (where a rough sand & gravel path was emerging from the mud!) and finally helped Zuz finish the painting

  • Matt & Jo got the small water tank on the top plot functioning again; got the water tank going and started to fill our huge water tank with fresh spring water and made a strong, nice-looking cupboard for all our solar PV equipment

  • Katie picked up stones on the first camping terrace – sounds boring but an essential job and carefully chosen not to stress her poorly wrist

  • Sam (Katie’s mate who cycled to Monte – yeah, Wow!) strimmed the first camping terrace and helped pick stones & dig up roots

  • Tim stumped & raked the on the camping terrace, mattocking the hell out of nasty tree & shrub roots

Steve & I ran around supervising, getting tools & materials & keeping people fed.  Thankfully the evening stayed dry for the bbq and we all got sozzled around the fire, comparing aching muscles.

It was a special day – we achieved great things through great people and in a great way.

We felt so humbled by the dear friends who gave up their precious weekends to come & graft with us.   And some of these folk are not likely suspects for a working weekend…

Danny is  also known as ‘Danny Upgrade’ as she is lucky enough to be able to afford the nicer things in life.  How would she really feel about ‘roughing’ it on a campsite?  Well, of course she didn’t ‘rough it’ because she only knows how to do things in style, so yes, she had her mansion tent & her enormous blow up bed.  But she wore the head torch with pride and had no qualms about looking daft:

And far from blanching at the compost loos, she adores them & raves to everyone about how fab they are.  This sophisticated chick who only wears Clarins, Tiffany & Karen Millen kept marvelling at the fact that there’s “No smell!” and even had a good look down the chamber with her head torch!

She has a ‘proper’ job & turned up on Friday night, weary & jaded.  She had the best night’s sleep she’s had for weeks on Friday night and enjoyed herself so much she stayed until Monday morning and drove to work early straight from the campsite!  It was a delight, watching her unwind and relax – in all kinds of ways… She not only survived, but positively flourished, without her posh glasses, her hairdryer and most of her clothes.  We are considering putting signs up saying: ‘Camp Full Monte – sponsered by Danny Parish Consultancy’ as she has donated so much to the site: crates of wine; her tent & blow up bed that will stay up all season & be available for rent; bedding; cutlery; table & chairs… Her generosity is touching and yet she says we give so much to her by providing a place she feels safe, comfortable & relaxed in… a compliment indeed.

Therese is another lady you don’t expect to see with a paint brush in hand. The fact that she turned up with a hangover was even more admirable.  And heck, did she graft!  She pretty much single-handedly moved furniture and limewashed the outer basement room and didn’t stop until it was done.  It was hard to keep the surprise from our faces  – she simply said: “I promised I’d help, so here I am”.  It really meant a lot to us and that was why she did it…

Zuzana had never camped in her life before, so an eco-camp with unconventional loos, no mains power and plenty of wildlife might have put her off.  Her & Jo have stressful jobs so giving up their precious time off for us must have been a wrench.  But they made the effort and made valuable contributions, in their quiet, unassuming ways.  Zuzana reports to have enjoyed ‘losing herself’ in painting – mindless, solitary, peaceful – a world away from her busy, people-stuffed week.  She foraged for wood in the evening, not put off by tales of scorpions and relaxed with a book in the sun on Sunday morning.

Amy & Matt remain loyal friends & fervervent supporters of Camp Full Monte as a business.  Despite their 2 kids and a crazily busy life, they booked a babysitter for the weekend and came to help.  When the dust and limewash in the basement got too much for Ames, she scrubbed manky roll mats in the sun until they were fresh smelling and super clean.  Matt, as ever, was a total star.  He knows his way around Steve’s tools and our site like it’s his own and just “gets shit done”…

Fi should have been there with Dave.  (Dave was driving a Cadillac from the UK to Monte with 2 of his old buddies & didn’t turn up until around 11pm! But to be fair they turned up laden with goodies and provided us with excellent entertainment…). She seemed to work even harder to make up for her absent husband and all this on top of an exhausting & stressful week.  As ever Fiona was positive, encouraging and just a lovely, supportive influence.

Katie & Tim always provide a great boost because they are so in love with the campsite.  Despite being busy making ends meet with their sailing yacht charter business and working as hard as we are they turnedup, with their friend Sam with them, whose youth and experience of  woodland conservation was a real bonus.  Between the 3 of them they transformed the first camping terrace. Their obvious delight and amazement at how the place looked reminded us what a beautiful place we have and how far we’ve come.

Observing people working together, encouraging each other, praising the work done and applauding the progress made was incredible.  We felt so proud to be part of the community of folk who came together round the fire that night.

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The Green Grass of Home

May 3, 2010 in Camping News, The Build | No comments

There is a tradition here of going up into the hills to camp and light fires on May 1st, so we thought, what the heck – we’ll go up to our own hills and camp & light a fire.  So we moved into our other ‘home’ this weekend…

Our new tent is up and a couple of others too:

The kitchen is starting to take shape again after having been locked away in the basement for the winter (it now includes the new units we got from Mil):

The showers are getting lots of action as we relish soaking our bones in the hot (free!) water and we are generally getting the camp open again.  It feels good… and yes, the grass IS growing.

The ants loved the grass seed: they collected it in mounds and took it to their nests.  We sowed more.  The soil was too poor to sustain growth.  So I collected soil from surrounding woodlands and lugged it in buckets to the worse areas.  The rain that had been a feature of most of April stopped round about the time we sowed our grass seed.  So we have been watering it with a sprinkler – diligently.  Love has made the grass grow!

Now that Steve’s kicked his various bugs, we are hard at work again.  We have started tiling the last shower:

We’ve tiled the window ledges in the kitchen area so they will be smooth surfaces to perch things & bums on.  Most of the glass bricks are in the windows in the loos – just one more to go.  We’ve experimented with limewash and are pretty happy with the results:

We’ve started the long, slow process of strimming, stumping, raking and picking up the stones around the garden and on all the camping terraces:

The BIG LIST is getting smaller… and we are looking forward to a productive weekend ahead as a bunch of our friend have agreed to help us tackle some more big tasks.

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Moving home…

February 15, 2010 in Camping News, Nature | 6 comments

We realised when we arrived on the land yesterday that it was time to take down the big tent up top because it was getting hammered by the weather and now looked like this:

Steve threw me lots of dirty looks.  Mea culpa.  Sorry.  We should have taken it down in the autumn hun.  You were right.  I was wrong.

We set about dismantling it reliving fond memories.  It was our home for the best 2 months of last summer when us & Nik slogged to get the campsite ready and the tent was our field kitchen, our bar, our ‘living room’ when it rained & the canvas that our 2-man tent snuggled inside.  We hoped we would salvage enough from the wreckage to be able to re-erect it on the main campsite. Mmmm – most of the canvas is rotten beyond repair and the tarps we used to patch up the leaky roof last year are shredded but most of the poles are still (incredibly!) intact.

Poor tent had even got struck by lightning – well that’s the only explanation we can come up with for the burnt canvas right below one of the metal poles:

Turns out that the tent was home to a bunch of other creatures and we (inadvertently) evicted a load of tenants!

A family of ants:

A pair of spiders (well – way more than a pair but these were the biggest and most photogenic!):

A beautiful scarab beetle that shone like a gem.  Unfortunately it had ‘beetled off’ by the time I had retrieved the camera from its dry place out of the rain (yep, nothing like a little grey drizzle to make the already difficult task of tent dismantling even more treacherous – lots of slipping about & wet, muddy bums!).

A salamader-type-thingy dude (sorry – don’t know the exact species – just got lost in the labyrinths of herpetelogical classification and …. aaargh!!):

And most exciting of all… an ickle bat.  We think it’s a Common Pipistrelle.  Sooo cute.  Soft too – I stroked it:

And here’s the site with the big tent gone…

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Officially, October

October 31, 2009 in Camping News, Den, Team News | 1 comment

For most of October we were consumed by planning, worrying about & preparing for our ‘official’ Open Day.

Duncan had the great idea of raising our local profile and using the British Ambassador as ‘bait’.  When Gospodine Mandic heard that His Excellency, Mr Kevin Lyne was coming for a nose-around the ‘Eko Kamp’ surely he would want to come too?  We certainly hoped so…  It would give us an opportunity to ‘come clean’: “Here we are Municipality officials.  Here’s our campsite & the buildings upon it, so what next…?”

As usual, we could not have pulled this stunt off without the help & support of dear friends.  Here are the folk who are, officially, *stars*:

  • DD for having the idea in the first place & pestering us into submission
  • Matt for being the Ambassador’s buddy & making sure he turned up
  • Slobodan for getting the invite to the Mayor and helping to ensure an official Opstina (local council) contigent on the day
  • Cedomir for translating our informative posters into Serbian, quickly & brilliantly
  • Jovica for translating the invite; for charming the villagers; for being the local interpretor on the day & so much more…

The week before the ‘big day’ the weather was awful.  It rained every day.  The drainage ditches we had dug were doing their job so the site wasn’t the boggy swamp it could have been but it was still wet & miserable.  We got on with ‘indoor’ jobs like preparing posters in English & Serbian to explain the eco facilities:

Open day - posters

Saturday came & Steve & Jovica went to meet some of the neighbours in Malta & Prijevor and give out invites to the Open Day.  The weather was still gloomy but the collective wisdom was that Tuesday would be fine.   Sunday, was exactly that – a day of sun, glorious.  The heat really started to dry everything out.  Monday was a fine day too.  We spent the day on site, getting ready.  The garden had hung onto its flowers despite the wind & rain but needed a good tidy up so I dead-headed, staked & weeded.  Steve swept and scrubbed and mopped the shower block until it shone.

Tuesday dawned – misty & cloudy.  Nothing to do but put on a brave face and get on with the day.  Maybe the plates of prosciutto, cheese, olives & tomatoes & the bottles of wine and homemade loza would compensate for any gloom & muddy shoes?  By the time we got up on site the sun had burned through the clouds and it was turning into a jolly nice day.  Phew!

Steve, Jovica & I arranged tables & chairs outside; laid out eco books and reference materials (thanks to Mon for sharing books that made our eco library look so much more impressive!); put up posters and spread pots of flowers around to make the place look attractive.

Open day display

Flowers & books - on every shelf!

One of our neighbours, Filip (we think, although all the names became a blur) was the first to arrive with a bottle of 5-year old homemade wine.  And then suddenly, things got mad.  Matt arrived with Kevin and as Steve was showing the ambassador around a bunch of villagers showed up.  Then members of Montenegro’s emerging Green Building Council – Misa, Robin, James, Anke & Amy – arrived and… more villagers.  Then key people connected to our project showed up including Esad (solar thermal tank supplier) & Mil -  although he couldn’t convince our builder Miso to accompany him. Then Slobodan arrived with the Opstina contingent.  The Mayor couldn’t come but he sent his Deputy (who is from the nearby village and is well respected) and some others who all spoke great English.  Friends showed up to lend their support and… more villagers!  In all, there were around 45 visitors!!  It was particularly lovely to see Sonja (our architect) & Jelena (the water system designer) who had never seen their drawings come to life and were visibly delighted with the result.  They stuck their heads down the toilets and in the compost chambers and looked at all the pipework in the basement, beaming and saying: ‘Unbelievable!’.

Steve gave a fantastic speech.  He begged forgiveness from the villagers for not inviting them earlier but we had to get the site to a state where it would accomodate visitors – they forgave him; he explained a little of the good eco things we were attempting and invited the Opstina to use our expertise & the site to make things easier for themselves – they thanked him; he explained that in order to make ends meet we were operating a campsite & had already had visitors from around the world – the villagers said they hadn’t noticed; no-one from the Opstina batted an eyelid; he thanked everyone for coming & we all applauded.

Open day - Stevo's speech

The villagers had the full tour of the facilities, with Jovica translating.  They seemed genuinely fascinated by it all but surprised that we were going to such lengths to clean and process our waste water.  “Why don’t you just run it straight in the stream?” they asked…  Hmmm – more education needed!

Finally the numbers dwindled and we sat down to relax with a drink, to toast a successful afternoon…

Here's our 'main man' Jovica looking very, appropriately 'green'

What else to say about October?

Autumn is here, it’s official.  The colours of the hills are truly stunning.  As ever when you try to put a frame around things in nature the impact is lost but here are some autumn leaves…

Autumn leaves outside Mil & Mon's house

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    Honey Moon

    October 10, 2009 in Camping News | 2 comments

    The moon was about the only thing that was kind to our honeymooners who stayed for 2 nights the first weekend in October.  It was big and beautiful (and full, on their second night) and the moonshine was so bright there was no need for torches…

    We had a couple of days of rain before Keith & Ulla arrived so the site was muddier and less attractive than normal.  The turn in the weather caused a drop in temperature too so the nights were really chilly.  As usual, we fretted about whether our guests would have a good time and as usual, we needn’t have worried.  The peace & beauty of the site and quality & cleanliness of the facilities more than made up for any shortcomings.  They didn’t mind (probably didn’t even notice) that the shower curtain rings were made from plaited plastic bags – so happy were they with the hot showers!

    Plarn shower curtain ring

    They enjoyed the food which was homemade & healthy.  Ulla wasn’t a big meat eater so she really appreciated the tasy salads and veg straight from the garden.  The cool evenings gave us an excuse to light a fire and toast ourselves around it:

    Steve, Keith & Ulla around the fire

    And the fireside fun reached new heights when we ceremoniously burnt Nik’s shorts.  Honestly, what a treat?!  What else could you wish for on your honeymoon but to watch a pair of tattered, smelly shorts go up in flames?!

    Flaming shorts

    The real shame was that their last morning was the start of a stunning day, with the sun shining brightly and they had just a couple of short hours to go before catching a plane back to the States.

    We wish them a long & happy marriage and better weather next time!

    Ulla & Keith

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