Montenegro 9: A Day In Plužine

Travel & Shit

I’ve been learning how to pronounce Montenegrin place names by simply wildly mispronouncing them in front of Montenegrins. This isn’t deliberate — I’m not trying to be disrespectful — it just so happens that my best guess is usually laughably inaccurate. So far people have just been gently correcting me with a smile and I learn a new thing. Yay. So Plužine, it turns out, is more of a Ploo-zheen-eh and not the Ploo-zeen I’d been going for. That little upside-down hat over the z changes everything it seems. It’s like the s in “measure”. Anyway. We would not be leaving Plužine today. I wouldn’t be driving anywhere. We would simply be pottering around the actually very lovely town and applying the lake liberally to our eyeholes.

Lake Piva. Well it’s easy on the eyeholes around here isn’t it?

Actually if we’re being pedantic it’s a reservoir. The Piva Canyon was flooded in 1975 when the Mratinje Dam was built to harness hydroelectric power. The original town of Plužine was flooded, the monastery was relocated, and the modern town of Plužine was built where it is now on the edge of an artificial lake that looks like it’s always belonged here. The Done Thing™ is to take a boat cruise out onto the lake and we did consider it but honestly? We found a little place calling itself the Hook Beach Bar and decided that we had a perfectly good view of the lake from here, thank you very much. We went and had some breakfast at a place called Restoran Sočica, pottered around town for a bit, found one single place selling souvenirs and relieved them of a magnet, then headed to the beach bar to spend the day drinking beer and gawping at Lake Piva.

Today we will mostly be doing this.

I had thought about going for a swim but we put our feet in and to be honest I could quite happily not freeze to death today. The beach itself is a grey gravel affair which is fine but again; there’s a bar. It has tables and chairs and tasty cold motor impairment beverages. If they served food too they’d never get rid of us. We were very happy there just whiling away the hours. There’s not much else to do in the town really. It’s very quiet which was perhaps on account of it being September. There were some new-looking wooden kiosks with signage advertising food and souvenirs but they weren’t open, and they lined an equally new-looking park. That along with the boats lining the water’s edge was the only glaring tourist infrastructure really. Oh, and there’s a zipline at the top of the town because of course there is. Montenegro adores a zipline.

You see the Cyrillic alphabet a lot more up here. The menu in the restaurant we went to was in Cyrillic, and the only Latin script was in English. Montenegrin is basically Serbian, which uses Cyrillic, with a different name. In 2009 they created the Montenegrin alphabet which uses Latin script and that’s what you usually see. Menus in other places listed items in Montenegrin, Cyrillic and English.

We returned to Restoran Sočica for dinner because they had something called ispod sača which means “under the bell”. It’s where they cook some manner of dead thing under a metal dome so it’s slowly baked and stays tender and juicy and delicious. I had my little heart set on trying it. So it was… fine. It was indeed tender and juicy but I don’t know. It lacked something. I will admit that aside from ćevapi I’ve not been super impressed with Montenegrin food and could probably do with eating something that wasn’t meat and/or cheese in the near future before my digestive system rebelled and seized up and I had to be professionally flushed out by a man with a hosepipe.

Teletina ispod sača, which is “veal under the bell.” It was fine, just a bit lacklustre.

I’m actually really pleased that the Fates intervened and we ended up with a full day in this beautiful place. We finished up with a beer in the bar we’d gone to last night, Bar Galija, for fizzy hop water with a view then headed back to the apartment for some of that delicious honey liver-rot and an early night. We planned to be up at stupid o’ clock tomorrow for a very big, long drive south.

Jump to “Useful shit to know…”


Plužine, Plužine, Montenegro

Stayed at: Lake City Apartment, Plužine

Lake City Apartment. Great location, enough space, hot water in the shower and good wifi. The balcony is nice in the morning but gets the full sun all day which is a bit too much to sit out in. Great for drying clothes though. There’s rakija in the fridge. The stove, like all electric stoves in the apartments we’ve stayed at, is painfully slow. The kitchen is otherwise well equipped. The location is brilliant, only a short walk to the lake, bars and restaurants. We communicated with the son over WhatsApp but his mum checked us in. She doesn’t speak English but uses Google Translate, and she took care of registration with the app.

Useful shit to know…

  • Should you feel like going on a boat trip you can ask about them in Hook Beach Bar. It’s €25 per person if there’s two of you and gets cheaper the more humans there are.
  • Or you’ll see signs up advertising boat cruises. You’ll find one, don’t worry.
  • Restoran Sočica does all manner of Montenegrin food. If you wanted something else we walked past Zvono and it looked really good.
  • The only place we could find souvenirs was the tourist information shop at the top of the town near the petrol station.

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