I’m really enjoying Montenegro but I feel like learning road etiquette would be so much less stressful if other drivers weren’t so impatient. You can take the calmest, most rational person in the world but as soon as you put them behind the wheel of a car they become filled with the Rage of a Thousand Hulks, utterly aghast that someone has the audacity to drive slightly under the speed limit in their general vicinity. I include myself in this statement. I’m not immune to the Driver Effect. Plonk me on a road I’m familiar with and if someone hesitates for 0.4 seconds I’m all like, “MAKE A FUCKING DECISION YOU UTTER FUCKING KNOB CHEESE!!” Yeah. The tailgating I’m getting here is probably karma for the time I gave a taxi driver the middle finger for failing to give way.

This was all taken into consideration when deciding on which route we’d take to Rijeka Crnojevića. Option one would be a 26 kilometre drive along narrow, winding roads, potentially with a sheer drop to one side, crash barriers optional. But there would be no double back, we’d carry straight on past the things we’d earmarked to see. Option two was a 46 kilometre trip the long way around on bigger, better roads but we’d have to double back over 22 kilometres of road to continue our journey once we’d done the intended touristing. Google Maps thinks it’ll take the same amount of time either way. I’m sure the wiggly road is stunning and Tarrant will have a lovely time putting all that scenery in her eyeholes but I’m not sure my bum has completely unclenched since the sorry journey to the spomenik so the big road it would be. Plus I’m sure there’ll be many more opportunities to nearly cry on the edge of a cliff as another wild-eyed tourist in a campervan edges past us.

To be fair option two included a whole extra spomenik which considerably sweetened the deal so off we fucked the long way round as other drivers glued themselves to my arse for absolutely no fucking reason. The first spomenik we saw was near Goričani, in a small, unkempt park. If Tarrant’s interest was piqued by the first one she saw she was well and truly hooked after this one. It’s a thing of beauty and quite large too, built in 1974 to commemorate the fallen fighters of Golubovci during the Axis powers’ occupation in WWII.

The second spomenik of the day was a big bugger at Baratuna. It even has a sign on the highway pointing you in the direction of it but once you’re there it feels abandoned. There’s a proper information board though telling you what each aspect of the monument represents. It’s the largest complex we’d seen so far with three concrete “eccentric flower clusters”: one each to remember the fallen from the Balkan Wars, WWI and WWII, and an amphitheatre made of stone seats. There was a bunch of dead roses at the base of the main part of it, the large “torch”. So someone does come here I guess. It’s a shame to see them neglected but I think for some people they’re symbols of the old communist regime. They really are so very uniquely Yugoslavian so I can see that.

As you’re wandering around Virpazar you’re going to see photos of quite an attractive horseshoe bend in a river. This is Pavlova Strana, a viewpoint over the Crnojević river, Rijeka Crnojević in Montenegrin, near the town of the same name. You have to leave the lovely big road to take a very narrow road towards the village so pack your spare nerves because the ones you have are going to be unceremoniously shattered. There’s a car park by a hotel and restaurant but the view is very obscured by the trees. The money shot is 300 metres east of here, you can sort of tuck your car into the side and hope you still have an entire vehicle when you return but that’s the view you want. Even now with the water levels being so low it’s still a stunner. Part of me wonders if we should have come here in June when the water levels were probably higher but I think I would have melted to death around day three and my remains would have had to have been repatriated in a bucket.

We carried on to the village of Rijeka Crnojević to see another spomenik which is right there on the roadside, then headed back the way we came as a bloke who’d aggressively overtaken me on a particularly narrow stretch of road nearly forcing me into a wall came back the other way, steering with one hand and wrestling a map with the other. I pulled over and let him past. That’s how I’d pretty much been handling these roads because I accept that my driving is utterly infuriating for those behind me and I’ve probably been cursed several times in about six European languages alone going off the licence plates. I’ll just pull in as soon as I can and let the convoy go by and disappear off into the distance. Bye-bye, crazy drivers. May your roads be wide and clear of neurotic British lesbians.

When we picked up the car at the airport I asked the usual questions about things we’d need to know. I asked about toll roads because it’s pretty important that we know how to pay any tolls we might incur. “There is only one,” he told us, “The new highway!” He seemed pretty pleased with Montenegro’s shiny new fast road. “Oh and the tunnel,” he added as an afterthought. We’d already done the tunnel and today we’d be taking the new highway north to Kolašin. How exciting? It was devoid of traffic and we were legally allowed to reach the dizzying heights of 100 kph. With these three-digit speed limits you are really spoiling us! We got to Kolašin, parked up and went in search of some waymarked hikes I’d heard about.

So yeah, there are three that go from the main square and we went to tourist information to find out about them but she told us their information is out of date so we were best off going to Restoran Vodenica. There was a big information board opposite there which listed four walks with QR codes that take you to the trails on Wikiloc. All well and good if you have a Wikiloc premium account but if you don’t it’s tough titties. We talked about what level of walk we wanted to do, decided that even though it was much cooler here than the coast we still didn’t fancy trekking into the hills for hours and opted for a short loop. We thought it would take us to a hamlet but it didn’t it just led us through a pine forest and back out of it again. Oh. Well. Okay. A bit disappointing but there you go.

We went in search of a cold drink, bought some beers from the shop for later on and carried on to Biogradska Gora National Park. Just over half a kilometre from the turn off you have to pay your entrance fee but we’d bought the annual passes. We approached the woman in the hut, proudly brandishing our QR codes which she scanned. So I had to upload photos of us when I bought the tickets online and I will admit they’re not the most flattering of photos but I don’t think she really needed to snigger that much when my mugshot flashed up on her PDA. She did the same to Tarrant too. Alright, so we both look like we kick puppies for fun. Yes yes. Now let us in, lady.

I will not lie to you, when we got to the lake it was utter carnage. Queues of traffic were trying to get out as tour jeeps were trying to get in. Coaches vomited their passengers into the road and tourists wandered around seemingly oblivious to the cars trying to manoeuvre around them. Once you’re in parking is just a free for all. You just have to find a space among the trees and hope you don’t end up with a boulder stuck in your oil tank. We were camping here tonight, there’s a rocky space opposite the souvenir shop so we pitched our tent, paid our money aaaaand I was not feeling very well at all. Oh. Oh dear.

If I’m honest I’d not been feeling great since Kolašin. Just, I don’t know, like my stomach didn’t feel amazing. A bit unsettled. By the time we’d pitched the tent I needed to have a lie down so I napped as much as I could through tour guides shouting for their flock. Then I got up. Then I lay down again. Then I got up, traipsed to the toilet and threw up. Oh. Fun. Tarrant looked up nearby accommodation so we could have our own bathroom because I do sound like velociraptors having sex when I puke and that does somewhat ruin the ambience of the national park. I wasn’t fit to drive by this point though and we hadn’t put Tarrant down as a driver as she wants to drive on the right about as much as I want to be depositing my stomach contents in the toilets at a Montenegrin national park.

It was a beautiful evening, the moon had risen and looked gorgeous over the lake. I left Tarrant to enjoy that with a beer and went to throw up again. It was a difficult night. I was so dehydrated that my bladder, which is apparently as passive aggressive as I am, kept insisting that I was painfully desperate for a piss. “Why don’t you go for a wee, Claire? You definitely need to. You’re pretty desperate. Oh is it just a trickle? Why is it just a trickle, Claire? Is it because you haven’t drunk enough water and your internal organs are basically sand? Hmm? HMMM?” I woke up pretty much every 90 minutes and couldn’t get back to sleep until I’d made the pilgrimage to the porcelain throne but I could eventually start keeping water down and supply some much needed fluid to my poor, shrivelled cells.

Jump to “Useful shit to know…”

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Virpazar, Bar – Kolašin, Kolašin – Biogradska Gora, Kolašin, Montenegro

Stayed at: Campsite at Biogradska Jezero, Biogradska Gora National Park

Useful shit to know…

• The spomenik near Goričani is the Golubovci spomenik, described HERE in the database. You’ll find it at 42.326657, 19.219952.
• The large, torch spomenik in Baratuna is located at 42.393801, 19.141621 and has a profile page on the database HERE.
• The spomenik in Rijeka Crnojević is at 42.355669, 19.027855.

• The Pavlova Strana viewpoint is officially at 42.362788, 19.057754 and this is where you’ll find the safest parking. But the best view is at 42.362985, 19.060559.

• The toll for the new road, the A1, differs depending on the size of your vehicle.
• You take a ticket on the way in and hand it to the toll booth operator on the way out.
• There are different lanes, I think one of them is if you have some manner of automatic pass. We just paid cash to a human. I think you can use card though.
• We got on a Smokovac and exited at Mateševo. It cost €3.50.

• Camping is permitted at Biogradska Gora opposite the souvenir shop but not right by the lake.
• It’s very rocky, you might have issues getting your pegs in. Our tent is freestanding so were alright.
• It’s €3 per tent then €1 each for the tourist tax. They wrote our passport details down in a ledger which I assume counts as registration.
• I believe if you want to sleep in your campervan it’s €10 for the vehicle plus the tourist tax.
• There are toilets and showers and I’ve been told the showers have hot water. We didn’t use them though.
• There’s a drinking water tap by the toilets too.
• I believe there’s a fire pit which you can use for €5 but we didn’t ask about it on account of the fact I was dying a bit, and no one else had any fires going. Honestly though, it’s been so dry I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a fire ban.

• It costs €4 each to get into Biogradska Gora. You can buy it there or online HERE.
• The annual pass gets you into all Montenegro’s national parks until the end of the year as many times as you like. It’s €13.50 and you can get it HERE.
• You need to fill in your passport number and upload a photo, then you’ll be sent a QR code which you can add to Google Wallet.