Durmitor National Park, Montenegro

Sat 26th – Sun 27th July

Wild Beauty is the tourism slogan for Montenegro. All of the TV advertisements and local posters describe the country as being filled with majestic beauty... it's just a little wild. But rather than showing you images of horse back riding through the forests or sailing along the coast, what they should really show you are the mazes of unmarked roads, monstrous pot holes, and scowling waitresses.

Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh. Montenegro was an adventure I'll never forget and I would certainly never want to exclude the experience from our trip. The countryside itself is well worth a visit and for the most part, the people are really lovely. But we did run into a few rough patches.

Winding road through Durmitor National Park

Most of the main roads in Montenegro are in good shape, it's just trying to detour off the tourist beaten path that can create a problem. I wanted to see the Ostrog Monastery, so we took a slightly less travelled route from the coast to Durmitor National Park. Turns out that the road to Ostrog hugs a rather steep and vertically challenging cliff face with barely enough room for 2 cars to pass, much less a huge purple camper van. Fortunately we could see the road from the main village and I chickened out pretty much straight away. It just didn't seem worth dying for and there were plenty of post cards in the neighbouring shops to get the general idea of what it looked like. So we had driven nearly 2 hours out of our way for... nothing. God bless Bevan and his patience.

But my chickening out would haunt us for the rest of the day and we ended up on a tiny, pot hole road from hell that snaked through the mountains. It wasn't just the road, but the goats, cows and oncoming local traffic darting in front of the van which made the next 4 hours a white knuckle terrorising experience.

A minefield of potholes behind the van

We finally arrived in Žabljak late that evening and the next day it was all worth the effort as we found a gorgeous 5 hour hike to two of the most famous lakes, then made our way to a local pub to relax. Enter the nasty waitress. Now I don't speak Serbian, but I am going to pat myself on the back for at least learning how to say “Do you speak English?” and how to order 2 beers in a language I have literally never been exposed to before this trip and can't imagine that I'll encounter again after moving back to the states. Despite our language efforts, this waitress HATED us. You could never really tell if you'd ordered a beer or if you were just invisible. When the beers finally did turn up, there was ½ pint of foam on top but strangely none of the locals seemed to be going as thirsty. I'd like to chalk it up to a waitress just having a bad day, but sadly we encountered this attitude quite a bit in Durmitor.

We also learned that Montenegrins have an outstanding sense of direction because they don't need any road signs, GPS mapping or even paper maps! Aside from the black lake, the next must-see in Durmitor is Tara Canyon but sadly after 8 hours of searching we were never able to locate it. The Tourist Information Centre made it sound so simple, so we attempted to drive there in the van. After nearly 1.5 hours of trying various 4-wheel drive roads, we decided to drive back to Tourist Information to buy a map, but there were only large photo books about the National Park. So we decided to hire a taxi who would know how to get there. Unfortunately all of the taxis were already gone for the day, so we tried to hire a car. There were no ½ day rates available so the shop lady suggested that we hike the short 6km to the canyon. Six kilometres?? Turns out we'd been driving down the wrong road the entire time. She wrote the directions on to a tiny yellow post-it note, “Stay on main road. No turn left or right.”

Bevan standing at one of the many crossroads along our hike. All signs to Tara Canyon were in Serbian so we didn't stand much of a chance.

Two miles into the hike, it started to drizzle and we encountered a cross roads that was completely indecipherable as to which was the main road. We must have chosen incorrectly because 8 miles later, we finally turned around in the deserted forrest and gave up. It was 4:00pm and we'd accomplished nothing except drenching our clothing. We retired to our tiny 70's styled hotel room and proceeded to get very drunk.

Beautiful views on the road to Žabljak

View Durmitor National Park Photos