The Mountains of Montenegro

Entering into Montenegro from the North means that the first place you hit is the Tara River. First though we needed to get through the border. While waiting in the queue of cars, we noticed a woman going around all the vehicles. We initially thought she was going to hassle us to buy something we didn’t want but actually she was handing out free sim cards for one of the Montenegrin mobile phone networks. This was really useful and a first for us at a border crossing, saving us a task at the first town we came across.

The border itself was really easy and we weren’t asked if we had insurance – good thing too as our insurance didn’t cover Montenegro!

From here it was a short drive to our first stop which was a rafting camp high on the Tara river Gorge’s sides. We arrived in the afternoon and arranged to go rafting the next morning.

After a short minibus ride down to the river we joined up with another company as our camp only had three passengers for our rafting trip. The river was a beautiful turquoise colour and the trip down through the gorge was very beautiful. The river was pretty placid though given the time of year so there wasn’t a great deal of white-water rapids.

We stopped a couple of times on the trip. The first stop was to see a spring-fed waterfall that ran into the main river. The second, was a small beach where we could climb some rocks and jump into the river or simply enjoy a swim. The water was definitely on the cool side but we are getting pretty used to that.

At the end of the trip the minibus ground its way up a very steep gravel road out of the gorge, getting us safely back to the camp where we were served a hearty lunch and spent the rest of the day relaxing in the sun.

The next morning we moved onwards to a campsite in Durmitor National Park, only a 10 minute walk from Black Lake which is the most visited place in the Park.

The busy campsite was a real shock to us. We hadn’t seen this many campers anywhere on our whole trip.

The location was great though, being so close to Black Lake, which has a few sandy beaches and was a lovely temperature for swimming.

There is also a lovely bar overlooking the lake where we had a couple of afternoon beers in the sunshine with a great view.

While staying at the campsite I did the popular hike up to cave Ledena Pecina. It was a reasonably hard hike with 1000m of vertical and a total distance of over 15k.

The views from the top were spectacular but the most interesting things were the ice formations in the cave. You could climb down into the cave to see them closeup but it was really slippery as you were basically walking on ice. During the winter the whole area is in deep snow and the bottom of the cave never thaws out.

When we were in Serbia we bumped into a British couple travelling in a Land Rover camper conversion, Donna and Jon from the Roverlanders (@theroverlanderadventures on instagram). We got on so well that we arranged to meet up with them in Montenegro in a few weeks.

We had agreed to meet in a campsite in a valley just to the East of Niksic in a lovely campsite called Ilijin Vir. The campsite is by a beautiful river with a swimming hole – the source of the river was nearby so the water was freezing cold which was a good thing because the campsite was out of the mountains and very hot.

We spent a couple of nights exchanging travel stories with our new friends and in typical British fashion a few bottles of wine were consumed.

High up a cliff side above the campsite is one of the most famous monasteries in Montenegro, Ostrog Monastery so we all decided to drive up there when we left the campsite.

Not unexpectedly, the road was narrow and pretty busy with traffic but we managed to make our way up to the final set of switchbacks below the monastery when we hit a queue of stationary traffic. After sitting in this barely moving queue for around 30 minutes we finally got to the front where a guy marshalling the traffic told us that we were too big for the already full car park and we needed to turn around. This was pretty frustrating but we weren’t deterred as he also told us there was a bus that would bring us up for €1 from the half way stage, where we could park the motorhome.

After a tricky U-turn on a switchback, we slowly inched our way back down the mountain past the queue of traffic on the one lane road and made it to the mid way car park where we spent around an hour trying to find a bus or taxi up to the monastery without any luck. It seems we were not meant to see this particular monastery so we decided to call it a day and head back into the mountains of Durmitor National Park.

Our first stop was a lovely lake where we were able to park right on the lake shore. Unfortunately it wasn’t great for swimming as the floor of the lake was deep, soft mud but we got the kayak out and had a play with that instead. Jon was also keen to give it a try as he’d been thinking of getting a pack-raft himself.

After spending the afternoon by the lake we all packed up and headed up the P14 road to Sedlo Pass. The P14 is a really scenic road that crosses Durmitor National Park but it is narrow and gets pretty busy. That’s why with our bigger vehicles we wanted to do the drive towards the end of the day to minimise the amount of traffic that we met. It was still fairly frustrating when we met oncoming traffic but at least it was a lot quieter than it would havr been during the day.

Sedlo Pass is at 1900m so we had a lovely cool night and were well placed for a hike the following morning to the highest peak in the park, Bubotov Kuk. This is listed as the highest mountain in Montenegro but there are actually a couple of higher mountains in the Accursed mountains to the East.

It was great to have some company on the hike as Donna and Jon had invited me along.

The hike up to Bobotov Kuk was very steep and quite a lot of climbing was required in the final ascent. But eventually we reached the top at 2,523m. This was fairly misleading as the route to the top had involved traversing a fairly deep valley at the foot of the peak, so we had still managed to climb a gruelling 1,000m on the hike.

On reaching the top we were shocked to find a few stray dogs sleeping at the peak. I suppose they must get good pickings from hikers having lunch but it’s a first for me finding dogs on a mountain peak.

The views were fantastic and we were able to see all the way to Black lake and beyond one way and views of the intricately folded Prutas mountain the other. We felt lucky to see the views when we did as not long after we arrived the clouds came in.

On our way back down we were also pretty stoked to run into some relatively tame Chamois and one almost seemed willing to pose!

This was our last night in Durmitor with Donna and Jon and we were heading off early the next day, so we found a picnic table with a view on top of Sedlo pass and shared some drinks, snacks and stories as the sun went down. We retreated pretty quickly to the warmth of our vehicles after sunset though as the temperature fell pretty quickly.