Tag Archives: durmitor

Balkan Doživljaj Part IV: fog, breathtaking nature, and the road to hell. Sort-of.

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Read more about our road trip: Part I: Arrival | Part II: Into the Mountains | Part III: Fleeing the Russians

As we’d come to discover in this part of the world, the fog nestles in the canyons, blanketing the landscape in a dreamy cotton morning, sun warming the day and revealing the treasures that lay beneath. And it’s no exception when we arrive at the bridge spanning the Tara Canyon.

The story goes that the Đurđevića Tara Bridge was put into service just before the Italian army invaded at the beginning of WWII. Built between 1937-1940, it was quite the engineering achievement, earning the title of largest concrete arch vehicular bridge in Europe. Rather than help the enemy reach deeper into Montenegro, one of the project’s engineers sacrificed the bridge by blowing up its main arch and hindering the advance. When this man was ultimately captured, he was executed on the very same bridge he helped erect.

Sad history (and ziplines) aside, the bridge is gorgeous. As the fog swirls to reveal the canyon below, we are even more excited for the rafting trip we’ve just booked. So the (birth)day’s adventures are set: rafting in the morning, hiking Durmitor National Park (Part I) in the afternoon.

It’s rather off-season for the rapids as well, but we enjoy a spectacular view of the Tara Canyon from the river, C takes a dip in the frigid waters (I’m further convinced that Swedes do not feel cold), and we arrive back at our starting point with smiles on our faces and hopes to see the river again at its peak.

It’s late in the day to start a real hike, so we lunch in town, find a reasonable-sounding guesthouse for the evening, and take a nice afternoon stroll around Durmitor’s lake, where Chris is adopted by a local dog and we watch the sun fade over the water, mountains reflecting their tranquil mood in its mirror.

Birthday: pas mal, as they say. Also bonus: this night’s guesthouse ranks many stars above our previous evening’s experience. We’re greeted by a vivacious (!!!) host who not only gives us answers to every question we had but also answers to those we didn’t even know we’d wanted to ask. Suffice to say, we’ll be fully-armed to hike tomorrow, as it’s our last day and a last madcap dash through Montenegro, into Bosnia and back into Croatia to get C to his flight on time.

It’s only at dinner that we realise that each of us had the same thought whilst in the shower: our very friendly host lives with his mother in a little house in a little village and nobody knows where we are. But we meet mom in the morning (she prepares the strange and massive hodge-podge brekkie before we set off), and we’re convinced that they are just Montenegro’s sweetest mother-and-son team.

Erm, one hopes…

The next day: more cool nature, crazy roads, and why I’m going to hell.

Our host sends us off to the other side of Durmitor National Park, pointing us towards a hike he suggests will take approx. 5 hrs round-trip. We guestimate it’s a 4-hour drive from here to Dubrovnik, and we want to make the most of our last day. So we clip the hike a little (I think C feels a little guilty for giving me his cold and then sending me up and down mountains with a head feeling like a wax factory), then wend our way through the moon-like hills of this part of the park, stopping occasionally to gape at nature as it unfolds (several-fold) around us. NB: I could spend days here.

silly Google Maps direction aside, join us as we wind our way through Durmitor

We decide we’ve got time for lunch at another (ok, the only) roadside place, and also time to do a quick pass by the Ostrog Monastery, a marble wonder carved into (or superimposed on) the side of a mountain in 1665. Again we climb a white-knuckling switchback road towards this next really weird experience.

First, the pilgrims. People from all over the world come to this monastery to be blessed. They walk the umpteen bajillion steps, barefoot, to pay homage to the saint, who lays wrapped in a shroud in a cave in the monastery. When you get to the upper monastery (there are two), you are met with a sprawl of humanity, the pilgrims (literally hundreds) sleep on mats outside the monastery (to what end, I’m not clear), and queue to take their turn kissing (and, presumably, being blessed by) the shrouded saint. It’s at this point we decide to enter the monastery to see its intricate mosaics. We apparently get in the wrong queue because as I duck into the cave*, I realise I’m in line to view the saint. Who is flanked by a priest. Who is holding a wooden cross at my face so I can kiss it. And so I panic, wave it away, shake my head, bow a little and say no, thank you. To which he answers, aghast, shocked, maybe pissed off, Vere. Arrr. You. Frrum? in a rolling-rrrr voice that sounds more Count Dracula than priestly. (inside my head is shouting: What. Is Happening???) In my humblest voice, I say, The US. The priest nods. I leave (again, cursing my blue passport and all that it represents). Chris has a hearty laugh. I’m going to hell.

We heathens continue up to the top of the monastery, and into the other cave to view the frescoes, well-preserved in the cave’s cool atmosphere. There are thankfully no more run-ins with priests. All I can wonder is what kind of curse I’ve been dealt, and cross fingers, touch the Ganesha that rests around my neck, and hope the rest of the trip is incident-free.

(Note: blue sunbrellas were not part of the original design)

This bit of adventure takes a tad longer than expected: the book does not account for the harrowing road or the local traffic jam (a herd of sheep). But each little experience adds some fiber to the story, and we still have time to drive through Bosnia (country #3!) en route to the airport. The views are not bad as we go…

Tea in Bosnia, check! Passports stamped, check! Airport, check!

And, like that, the week’s adventure comes to an end. C is en route home and I’m on a bus back into Dubrovnik, and to the port from which I’ll take a ferry up to Split tomorrow and continue my wandering through Dalmatia. Just in time: there are 2 cruise ships in port when I arrive.

Some final observations: Montenegro is a tiny country with a history as meandering and unforgiving as its mountain roads. But it’s also beautiful and packed with terrain I never expected, its landscape reads as if nature tried to use everything in its palate to paint this little part of the world: rocky coastlines and breathtaking canyons and daunting mountains and rolling hills… Wild and rustic and rough around the edges, it’s a little place with a giant heart. In contrast to the attitudes we encountered in Croatia, the locals we met were warm and proud and content. Even in the bustling silliness of Budva, we were warmly received by our hostess.

It felt as though Croatia had somewhat sold out to the cruise ship industry, trading tourist € for a slice of their own heritage. And while Montenegro’s reputation as organized crime central is not a secret, one hopes that the tourism blight that has tainted Dubrovnik’s charm will take its time spreading beyond Montenegro’s coast, sparing the inland the tour buses and selfie-crazed throngs.

One can only hope. And look forward to revisiting the mountains, hiking the canyons, and maybe having some of that kačamak or cicvara again.

*Ostrog: how they built this is unknown. For centuries, monks and others have used these caves to hide out and hang out doing their meditative retreats (or, erm, whatever else one does when hiding in a cave in a supremely remote location). And so, the enormous marble façade of the monastery is actually built in front of the caves, creating a surreal structure when viewed from below.

Read more about our road trip: Part I: Arrival | Part II: Into the Mountains | Part III: Fleeing the Russians

Balkan Doživljaj Part III: Fleeing the Russians for the countryside

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Part I: Arrival and a much-needed holiday | Part II: Into the Mountains

The guidebooks do not paint a welcoming picture of Budva (or they do, but perhaps I’m not their target audience): a seaside party town with an exploding club scene (or as explosive a scene as one finds in this part of the world), fuelled by a booming Russian tourist crowd. Welcome to the Daytona Beach of Montenegro. Knowing this, our plan is to find a hotel outside the general hubbub, take a stroll through the old town, and leave early enough in the morning to get into the countryside. This we do, and settle into our surprisingly posh and quite cosy little hotel (booked while we were still atop Petar’s mountain in Lovćen).

The old town is now a familiar formula, with its fortified walls and narrow alleyways. This one is equally charming, but not nearly as big as Kotor’s, nor as bustling as we’d expected. And then we venture down the boardwalk, or the assemblage of the Daytona-esque restaurants and shops that constitute their waterfront. It’s a string of big, over-lit, trying-too-hard-to-look-like-South-Beach seaside restaurant-bars advertising their drink specials, tho it’s the very end of the season and there are literally no customers. We walk by dozens of proprietors who are too done to even bother with their seasonal cat-calls (Where you from? Are you hungry? You look for best dinner? You like feesh?) or to look up from their smartphones to sneer at us as we walk by. The impression it leaves is that of a desperate has-been resort town, where you’d expect a neon sign to pop and fizzle out, or a dangling H from the ‘otel Budva sign to wobble, grab on to a disappearing iota of hope, and fall into the (coarse, cigarette butt-ridden) sand.

Curtain falls on Budva and we wake to have a weird and terrible breakfast at the Hotel Moskva across the street. Had our Russian been better, I think the service might have been too. Budva done and dusted, our next stop is Skadar Lake National Park, where we hope to take a boat ride around this bird sanctuary on the Albanian border.

We drive up another exquisite-yet-harrowing mountain road to the interior of the country and arrive in another end-of-season town where we find a guide ready to serve. Within 30 minutes, we’re on a boat heading into the national park. They’ve supplied us with enough crnogorske priganice (Montenegran fried dough with honey) and cheese (and juice and wine!) to serve a boatload, and it’s late in the season, so we have the entire boat to ourselves.

It’s a treat to be motored through the wetlands and out into the enormous lake. The only problem is that it seems to be late in the season for the birds as well, and we see only a smattering of waterfowl and cormorants. The ride is relaxing enough, but we’re eager to move now… and we’ve got our sights on northern canyons!

Montenegro’s interior is literally littered with mountains and valleys, canyons and rivers. We leave Virpazar and wend our way along what Lonely Planet has dubbed a “thrilling, spectacular stretch of road.”

Morača Canyon; you know, just another horrible roadside view!

Our route, from Podgorica northwards, takes us along the Morača Canyon, over mountains and eventually down an increasingly sketchy dirt road to arrive at a trailhead in the Mrtvica Canyon. We’re greeted by a random guide, waiting for his clients to return from their hike (umm, okay), and he points us the trail with a warning that the locals have not forgotten the war and (oh, by the way) we have Croatian plates on the car. Hike in peace…(and hope our stuff is there when we return)

It was actually the waning daylight that worried me more than his warning as we hiked into a hairy fairy forest so full of greens and blues that photos could not do it justice. The trail, fantastic; the light, not so much, and I was sad to cut this hike short, but relieved to be off the trail before sunset (and to find the car intact – that is not a travel story I wanted to tell).

Another late reservation thanks to international data roaming, and we were off to find a guesthouse in the hills of Kolasin, strategically chosen so we could hike Biogradska Gora in the morning.

The guesthouse owner points us in the direction of Restauran Vodenica, a local place famous for its regional specialties, so we try the kačamak, a potato and cheese dish (this region’s answer to mac and cheese), and cicvara, its partner-in-crime, a polenta and cheese indulgence. We top this off with a local red (pas mal) and wobble back to the guesthouse to crash.

Local specialities served with a pot of “sour milk” (handmade yogurt) on the side. This goes on top of the other stuff. Because, you know, one can never have enough dairy products in one dish. The knives are merely garnish…one barely needs teeth to eat this.

It’s on to Biogradska Gora, and the trail at least 2 locals have professed as the best in the park. I’ll wax poetic about pristine mountain trails, exquisite views and luscious canyon floors. But if I’m honest, the 14+ km slog up a gravel road to a lovely but not fantastic view was not my favourite of the trip thus far. The tea at a trailside farm, with local med (honey) to soothe a creeping cold, did help improve the mood tho.

After tea, we find the trail, finish the hike (shortcuts, yay!), and line up another last-minute guest house. It feels as if we’ve gone 412kms, tho the tally was more like 24, and the only thing I’m looking forward to at this moment in my existence is a hot shower and a comfortable bed in our next stop, a country chalet.

…At which point we reach the Tara Riverside. What they’ve failed to advertise is that the river is alongside the busy local road, and that the chalets are something more like IKEA kit cabins. Too shattered to protest (and, really, for 25€ a night, can one?), we partake in the folly and revel in a tepid shower (the intricate details of which I’ll spare: suffice to say it included a hand-held showerhead and no actual shower enclosure; oddly reminiscent of showering on a boat, or a weird roadside cabin in the middle of nowhere…). We indulge in the local fare for dinner, crash, and high-tail it to Tara Canyon in the morning, wending our way up the switchbacking, windy, foggy roads. Not the way I’d hoped to wake up on C’s birthday, but it is memorable if nothing else.

Next stop: Birthday adventures in Tara Canyon and Durmitor National Park.

Read the other Balkan Doživljaj installments: Part I | Part II