Today on the radio they broadcast about forest fires in Montenegro. Podgorica (the capital of the country) is covered in smoke, doctors advise not to leave the house.We drove there at the end of August (returning from a campaign) and even then the forests were burning. The smell of smoke in the city was still barely distinguishable, and we did not see any fire at all. It appears that over the past two weeks the situation there has not improved, but worsened. Which is not surprising – even on my first visit to Podgorica, I was amazed at how dry and hot it is in this basin (compared to Budva, for example).There is no sea here to soften the heat, and the surrounding mountains are low and have long since become hot in the sun. The wind from them did not bring the slightest relief. On the contrary, this hair dryer dried up everything in its path – the leaves began to fall off the trees ahead of time, all the colors burned out and faded, the already not very full-flowing rivers became shallow … Even my shirt, always wet from sweat, dried up in this hell and turned into hard starched shell (in fact, not starched, but salted). I went to the gas station in this shell to get gasoline for the stove, and still could not figure out how to protect the container from this flammable atmosphere.Thank God, in the high mountains, where the route of our campaign passed, everything was completely different and there were no fires. But returning to the sea, to Budva, we witnessed two fires at once (see the video a little higher).Early in the morning, on the way to the beach (nothing human is alien to me), I noticed two columns of smoke rising almost from the sea itself, somewhere behind the island of St. Stephen. The fire moved rather slowly (ground fire), but very inexorably. He crawled up the side of the mountain at a speed of only a couple of hundred meters per hour. But no one could stop him. True, one of the fires went out safely by itself – resting against fireproof rocks. A single-engine airplane was constantly circling over the second, probably dumping water. But it was not possible to stop the advance of the flame. By evening, the fire had crossed the mountains and gone deep into the continent…The funny thing is, I realized that the Montenegrin fires interested me only because I personally visited those places and saw something there. If the radio had broadcast about the flood in Serbia, I would not even have led my ear (I don’t know how) – I would have passed by and not noticed. It can be assumed that travel does contribute to the rapprochement of people. The more countries I travel, the less indifference will remain in me.
