The wild mountains of Montenegro

Hello again from Montenegro! 

Picking up from my last blog post, we finished our walk through the parks of southern Montenegro and spent a night just relaxing on the lake. It was a nice enough place, although it was quite touristy. We could see across to the mountains of Albania.

The next day we did a convoluted mix of buses and a taxi to get back to the town where we left our bag then up to the capital city, Podgorica. We got to know one particular stretch of coast quite well as we travelled along it a number of times. We passed the island below which looks gorgeous but it's an exclusive place. You have to book (very expensive) accommodation there to be allowed onto the island. We mere plebs have to just take photos from the mainland.

At the end of a long day we arrived in Podgorica. We had booked a rather fancy hotel there and it was very cool. Here's John looking suitably posh next to the bookcase-wallpapered wall in our room.....

Even though it's the capital city, Podgorica has less than 200,000 people. With only 600,000 people in the whole country, it's a large city by their standards! Our hotel was on a great car-free (sort of) road and it was the place to hang out in the evening. On our first night there there was a lot of excitement happening and we worked out that Montenegro was playing in a big soccer competition. The stadium was at the end of our road. People were singing, lighting flares and getting very worked up - and that was before the game even started!

The riot police were on standby but we didn't see anything untoward happen. It turns out that Montenegro won 4-0 so the locals were very happy.

We had one big job to do in Podgorica -  we had to buy a bike for John! We are heading to the Croatian islands in a couple of weeks and John wants to ride a bike around them. From our online research, it seemed to be easier to buy a bike in Montenegro than Croatia so that's what we did. We found a great shop and probably made their day because we had to buy everything - bike, helmet, pump, tubes etc. We then left the whole lot with them while we rented a car for 10 days and headed off on the next stage of our journey - exploring areas further afield.

Day one with the car saw us heading up the Tara Canyon, a canyon that is only supposed to be 200 metres shallower than the Grand Canyon in the US. I think that comparison is a big stretch of the truth but it's a beautiful canyon nonetheless. We wound our way through beautiful green forests with ever-growing mountains beside us, passing though a multitude of tunnels on the way.

The houses suddenly changed to look very much like those you would see in the Swiss Alps or ski resorts around the world. They must get a lot of snow here. The roofs are all steeply pitched and the walls are often wooden. The temperature dropped 9 degrees from our start to our finish points but it was still lovely weather.

To get to our accommodation we had to drive up a lovely valley. It reminded us so much of a valley we walked up in Romania with Courtney, Connor, Alana and Mads. Hay was being cut with a scythe and was being stooked and stacked into beehive haystacks by hand. 

The valley was lush and green and the houses were gorgeous. We went for a short walk and saw another snake - although we think it might have been a legless lizard again.

On day two we continued up the canyon, checking out the somewhat famous Tara Bridge along the way.

The Tara River is pretty spectacular. The thing to do here is to take a rafting trip. We saw some people heading off and their gear looked pretty shoddy plus the water was quite low so we decided to give the rafting a miss.

We arrived at our town and spent the next few days exploring Durmitor National Park. Oh my goodness - what a spectacular place it turned out to be! 

Our plan on the first day was to walk for a couple of hours or so but we got just a little bit lost - twice! We've walked hundreds of kilometres on this trip and never have we been lost before. We resorted for the first time to using our compass and found that it wasn't working properly. It had been stored next to our phones which have magnetic clips on them and they must have upset the magnetism balance. To add to our frustration we were literally attacked by flies and mosquitoes - at the same time! - during most of the walk. We were pretty pleased to get home and jump in the shower!

The scenery around us while we were getting lost was pretty gorgeous though......

At this stage we gave up trying to follow paths and just headed towards where we knew we had to go. What a wonderful place to go bush! 

The squirrels around here are very dark but very cute. Check out their funny ears!

We spent the next couple of days doing a series of short walks to mountain viewpoints and were absolutely blown away by the spectacular views. We were now high up in the mountains and, oh boy, were they amazing! I had no idea that such a small country with a lovely coastline could have such amazingly big mountains!

Forgive the multitude of photos here - I got a bit excited about it all!

The vastness of the views was incredible. To give you an idea of space, see if you can find John in the photo below.....

Again, we found heaps of beautiful wildflowers. On some tracks we saw flowers that we had never seen anywhere else before. 

We also saw a number of butterflies on one gorgeous walk. Some landed on me and stayed for a while, even though we were walking. When one left, it was replaced by another. So cool! 

One was on my pants.....

One was on my backpack.....

And one was on my finger!

Of course, there were plenty on the flowers....

I think the reason there were so many butterflies on this walk is because there were so many wildflowers. We were literally walking through fields of them in places.

I love the pine trees too - they're so European!

On one of the walks, we caught two chairlifts to reach the starting point for the walk. The mountains are so high that it took about 20 minutes just to ride the chairlifts up!

Some of the drives to get to these walks were also spectacular - long, windy roads cutting through the mountains, pretty villages nestled in rolling green hills and paddocks of wildflowers kept me constantly oohing and ahhing.

Next stop - Bosnia!

So long for now.

Heather and John xx