Week 2 Montenegro (and how we broke the backpacking rules, a couple of times)

We spent the whole week in this small country and the whole week was packed with WOW factors so this part of the blog will be really challenging to write succinctly. And I am sure my writing skills and even the photos from my small lumix camera cannot give justice to what we saw in Montenegro. It is really amazingly beautifully (this word might be slightly overused in this blog unless I find more sophisticated synonyms) and sort of surprising; at least surprising to me because unlike Gavin I have not really read much about it in advance. For me travelling through Montenegro was like I some 10 years ago I went to the movies and randomly picked “Beautiful Mind” and left the cinema thinking that this was one of the best movie I have ever seen. So kudos for this week goes to Gavin and his planning.

How did we break the backpacking rule 1?

We based ourselves in Kotor, at the top of the beautiful Kotor Bay and stayed in the quirky apartment in the old town, again by letting ourselves be hunted by the private accommodation owners. After the visit to the local tourist office and a few conversations with the most unhelpful tourist information centre we decided that we will be bored, cause other than climbing some 1000 steps through the ancient Kotor city walls there was nothing to do. The lady and other fellow tourist agencies personnel were all clearly surprised that we wanted to take a boat trip through the bay or hike the top of Mt Lovcen (highest mountain on the coast) or even rent a bicycle…. I guess mid-October is really a bit off-season.

After 3 lovely days in Kotor from where we did short hike through some 1000 steps of the city walls, and to some old church, self-organised short boat trip to a monastery from Perest, we rented a car….. to drive north to the Durmitor National Park and then through Tara and Moraca Canyons with small detour to Lake Skadar back to the coast for some more beach in Budva.

I never heard of backpackers renting a car but we did and it was great. Me, slightly anxious about the driving through the windy and not the best quality mountain roads, decided to pick a small Mercedes but it broke right when I was trying to drive off the car rental parking lot on a hand break.(this paragraph is dedicated to my friends working for Mercedes in Poland:-)) so we ended up with a small cute Suzuki.

The drive was amazing and actually with a few exceptions that roads were really good. Through the drive we made probably a hundred 360 degrees turns and went through fifty mountain tunnels and after each more and more beautiful view emerged. After driving through the green and lush Tara Canyon, I thought we would just go on a boring motorway leading to Podgorica but no, we entered Moraca Canyon surrounded by the beautiful slightly dramatic rocky mountain. The roads have a lot of signs with just the exclamation marks which I think are there just to refocus the drivers on the driving instead of admiring the surrounding scenery…

How did we break the backpacking rule 2?

As we were driving from Kotor to Durmitor we wanted to stop on our way at the Ostrog Monastery, a Montenegro highlight resting on some 90m cliff over the Zeta river somewhere half way through Podgorica and Durmitor. Given that it is one of the major tourist attractions in Montenegro we were hoping for plenty of accommodation…. To our surprise when we arrived there was only one sign for hotel in the area all the way down the Zeta river valley. I took the challenge of a steep drive there just to find out that the huge but completely empty communist era hotel offered double room for 40 Euro with the shower so dirty that even that hard-core backpacker would refuse to stand in! By then it got dark and our only option appeared to be a near-by second largest Montenegro town of Niksic… that is so unattractive that even Lonely Planet (that sometimes tends to overstate certain locations) did not mention in it in its guide… And even there accommodation was very scarce. It seemed to have only one sign posted hotel Marshal with **** clearly designed for business visitors. Lacking other options, tired and in the dark we ended up staying there for 75 Euro in the room with the view of the motorway and the hotel breakfast from the terrace with the few of the same motorway J This is probably the only time where Montenegro was not looking beautiful.

How did we break the backpacking rule 3?

After 3 days of driving, we were back on the coast in Budva, the aim was to chill out from the overwhelming beauty of the central and northern Montenegro and see another tourist highlight, Svety Stefan. On the very sunny and very windy too Sunday morning we set ourselves for the 8km walk on the coast. We reached Svety Steven after 2 hours of beautiful (of course) coastal walk just to find out that the island closed for tourist 2 days ago. But the view from the beach was still beautiful. After the quick (and way overpriced soup lunch) in the only open restaurant in town, we started our walk back but even too much beauty can be boring so we debated whether to take a local bus back to Budva… and then we saw it. The forest in the mountains above the coast was on fire and you could see Budva and the entire costs covered in smoke! Once we got back from the beach to the main coastal road we caught a taxi thinking that we could just drive through the fire area back to Budva. We were in the taxi for some 5 minutes just to find out that all the roads, and also the pedestrian beach walk were closed. We waited about 2.5 hours until it was quasi-safe to walk back again. We walked through the smoke still seeing patches of the wood burning out. The damage was heart breaking. I am not sure if this fire was reported in any word news (probably not) but if it was and you were worried, we are safe! 

This is the packed week in some 1000 words but I still have to make 3 closing remarks before we move on later today to Kosovo via Podgorica.

One: The highlight of Durmitor National Park is the Black Lake set between Durmitor Mountains, but I would not be Polish if I did not make a comparison to Morskie Oko in the Tatras. As biased as I may be our Morskie Oko is even more stunning than the Durmitor Black Lake…. Gavin of course did not like me saying that but I got my validation over diner with a travelling Australian couple who said the same, or maybe they were also biased cause the man claimed to have polish ancestry from Zakopane

Two: Coming to Montengro in October is clearly off-season so one has to ‘endure the hardship’ of limited facilities or closed attractions like Svety Stefen but I think I wouldn’t have come in any other time because in turn you have much the (now famous) beauty to yourself and the small windy mountain roads are certainly easier to drive not being packed with the tourist buses.

Three: I even woke up at 6 am this morning to write up this blog and keep the disciplineJ and not to disappoint Asia and Florka… Though my English rambling at this hour might not be the best quality, so sorry:-)