The original plan was to go to Plužine via the northern section of the scenic Durmitor Ring drive and leave via the southern section, but I did a bit of a Google on this road and decided I did not have the necessary nerves for this endeavour. People in forums who described themselves as confident drivers used words like “challenging” and “difficult” and “very narrow” and “cliff edges with no safety barriers”. The general consensus was that the southern section, whilst also having all of the above attributes, was still easier than the northern section so we eventually decided that as lovely as I’m sure the northern section was we’d just avoid it this time. We also figured if we got an early enough start this morning we could get through most of the southern section before people in campervans the size of our lounge started coming through.

Obviously we weren’t leaving Plužine without one last wistful gaze out over the lake so after winding through a series of hairpins and tunnels cut into the rock and pretty much just left like that we pulled over into a layby where people had hung hammocks in the shelter. Mildly jealous of where they got to wake up that morning. Less jealous that they got woken up by two lesbians in a Skoda. Oops. Anyway. A few more hairpins and we came to our most scenic spomenik at Trsa, took a few photos and joined the Durmitor Ring. My, that IS a narrow road. Fortunately there would be plenty of places to stop and recover from The Terror whilst putting various parts of the Durmitor National Park into our eyeholes.

This first section didn’t seem to involve any sheer drops to either side which was incredibly comforting. Sure, the road is tiny but worse case you’d end up with your wheels on some grass rather than spinning on your roof 50 metres lower than where you started. It’s gorgeous. All rolling hills and mountains and low-lying cloud which just added to the majesty. We pulled over a few times to take photos including at a stop with a random basketball hoop, because why the fuck not I guess? Then just around the corner from that was a little hut with a bloke selling Balkan coffee (which is basically Turkish coffee; strong, black, served with the grounds in the bottom so you have to know when to stop drinking to avoid chops full of coffee slop) , souvenirs and local produce. Well it would be rude not to have a coffee with that view wouldn’t it?

That was basically our morning, hopping from viewpoint to viewpoint. There’s one particularly sexy chunk of corrugated earth crust which looks a bit like a massive wave but I couldn’t get great photos with the sun behind it. Pros and cons of an early start I guess. The terrain did start getting more rugged and the corners a bit more bum-clenchy. As more and more people started filing along the roads we had to tuck into the sides a bit more, stop, reverse, all of those fun things.

By the time we got to Sedlo Pass was pretty packed with vehicles. There’s a small car park and places you can cram a vehicle at the side of the road and it was full. It’s clearly a good place to start a hike and the views aren’t exactly awful either. I parked like a bit of a tosser just to jump out and grab some photos before we carried onto another random café at the side of the road. Perfect. I could murder a cuppa. I’d bloody earned it too. We weren’t far from where we’d be re-joining a road of much saner proportions and I wanted to enjoy this vista one last time before I had to concentrate on the road again.

When I first told Tarrant about spomeniks she was apprehensive about my excitement. Like, “We’re not going to go to ALL of them, are we?” level of not impressed. I’m quite sure there was an eye roll. So I’d pin-dropped a few that were basically on routes we’d be driving anyway, focussing on the bigger, more impressive ones. As soon as she saw the first one though she went from reluctant passenger to full on convert. I took her enthusiasm to mean, “Let’s find ALL the spomeniks!” and promptly trawled the database for a few more. She suggested I’d misinterpreted her. I beg to differ. She’s creating a whole album on Facebook just for spomeniks. She has surpassed my spomenik geekery and I couldn’t be prouder. I wiped away a tear of joy and off we fucked via five more abstract Yugoslav war memorials.

The first one wasn’t actually a proper Tito-era monument, having been built in 2005 as a memorial to Vuk Karadžić who, according to Wikipedia, was “one of the most important reformers of the modern Serbian language” and even wrote the first Serbian dictionary in the reformed language. We got our photos and headed to a restaurant back up on the highway before my stomach started digesting the rest of my internal organs. I do like these roadside places, I wish we’d gone to more but it just hadn’t worked out that way. They have all your Montenegrin food-related needs.

There were a couple of breakfast foods I’d been thinking about trying but I’m not going to lie, they do not sound appetising. Kačamak is a maize porridge served with kaymak which is a very soft, creamy cheese that I do love but maybe not in maize porridge. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the most joyous thing in the world and I’m missing out. The other thing is popara which is a way to use up stale bread. It’s a bread mash made with milk. Mushy bread. That’s a hard no from me. We stuck with ćevapi because you know where you are with meat and chips. I like how they serve everything with raw onion here too. Tarrant is less than impressed, she hates raw onion and she hates the smell of it. Fair enough really. I’ve eaten so much raw onion on this trip I’m offending myself with the smell of my own breath.

Next stop was a small, double sided monument in Vidrovan with one side commemorating WWI and the other WWII. There was also a bonus spomenik in front of the church which wasn’t on the database at all. How exciting? Unexpected concrete structures! We bagged one just outside of Nikšić then drove to a park on the other side of the town which was home to an absolute unit of a spomenik. This was built not only for the fallen fighters of WWII, but for the 32 Partisans who were executed by Italian soldiers on this site. There are 32 plaques engraved with their names, and years of birth and death. One of them was only 15 years old. There’s more information on the profile page for this spomenik on the database I’ve been using to find them. There are so many in Montenegro we won’t get to see because there are only a certain amount of hours in a day and as much as I adore collectable concrete structures they’re not solely what we’re here for. This time.

Right! Now for the monastery in the title of this blog post. Ostrog monastery is one of these built-into-the-rock-face type things, high up in the hills. And you know what high up places mean, kids? That’s right! Narrow winding roads on the edge of cliffs to shred a few more of my already tortured nerves. Yay! This was actually one of the scariest roads for me. I do not like heights. All I could see in my peripheral vision as we wound our way up was the vast expanse of nothing to the right of us. The barriers were laughable at best. When we met traffic coming the other way Tarrant had to tell me how much space we had to pull over because I could barely look, then I’d just stop and let the other car do the work. It was utterly terrifying. I think I’d lost enough sweat through my palms to raise sea levels by the time we pulled into the car park.

We’d been waved into the lower car park which meant we had about 350 uneven steps to tackle before our reward so off we fucked, up up up, stopping a few times to generally just die. When you do finally drag your poor carcass which never agreed to any of this to the gates you’re handed things to cover your shoulders and knees, you hussy. It was actually really quite busy. We somehow got swept up in a column of people heading into the monastery where we stepped through a low door into a chapel type thing. We were just shuffling along in a queue, then staff were waving people out of a small door you had to duck to get through and we were waved inside where a monk was reading out loud from a scripture and another monk was getting people to kiss a cross or something and they’d do the sign of the cross then leave. There was nowhere to go. We were involved whether we liked it or not. I could practically see the Catholic Guilt radiating off Tarrant.

She got to the front, did the spectacles testicles wallet and watch thing, and turned to walk past me. I stared at the monk, wide-eyed and sweating. He stared at me, mouth slightly agape. I’m not entirely sure who was more horrified. Then I just turned and left. What the fuck did we just get ourselves into? I only wanted to look at some frescoes! I can’t even remember what any of the inside looked like because we weren’t allowed to take photos. We checked out a few more parts of the monastery that didn’t have chanting monks, gawped at some spectacular views, then bought a magnet. Very spiritual. I think we both agreed that the trauma of actually getting to the monastery wasn’t really worth it but still. It’s pretty.

We swung by one more monastery viewpoint then headed back down the way we came which is much less terrifying when you’re the one that gets to drive next to the wall instead of the edge. We stopped at one last spomenik which was built for a team of Partisans, the 6th Montenegrin Strike Brigade. It’s right on the side of a busy road, this one. The side of a busy Montenegrin road is not where you want to spend any length of time. There’s a place to pull in right next to it but it’s not well cared for at all. We got our photos then headed onwards to Cetinje which is where we’d be spending a couple of nights.

So Cetinje is actually really nice! I’m not sure what we were expecting, I don’t think we’d really thought about it, we were just going to use it as a base to explore Lovčen National Park. We seemed to have stopped cooking for ourselves despite booking apartments with the means to do so, we’d just fallen into Fuck It We’re On Holiday mode and went out in search of food and beers. There’s a whole, vibrant pedestrianised area full of bars, restaurants, souvenir shops and bookies. They do love a bookies here. We found a place for dinner and just chilled there before heading back. That was a long old drive and I was tired. Obviously it didn’t need to be that long but tourists gonna tourist and I do, it seems, have a habit of incorporating at least one Big Drive Day into trips. I didn’t realise I did it until Tarrant asked me at the start of the trip when the Big Drive Day would be. So yeah. Today. It was today.

Jump to “Useful shit to know…”

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Durmitor National Park – Nikšić, Nikšić – Ostrog Monastery, Danilovgrad – Cetinje, Cetinje, Montenegro

Stayed at: Apartments Heaven, Cetinje

Useful shit to know…

• The Trsa spomenik is at 43.187469, 18.934833.
• The monument to Vuk Karadžić is at 42.985556, 19.080778.
• The spomenik in Vidrovan is at 42.856472, 18.942056. There’s another monument not on the database in front of the church.
• The spomenik near the Nikšić airport is at 42.780964, 18.919971.
• The big one at Trebjesa Hill in Nikšić is at 42.763141, 18.959633. There’s plenty of parking right by it. You can find more information on it HERE.
• The final roadside monument we saw, Obadov Brijeg, is at 42.580444, 19.053528. You can find more information on it HERE.

• The first viewpoint driving out of Plužine is at 43.172988, 18.859681.
• The random basketball hoop is at 43.133888, 18.945361.
• The little café with the guy selling coffee is at 43.132822, 18.947566.
• The parking for Sedlo Pass is at 43.098532, 19.050866 but prepare for it to be busy!
• Tea, coffee and booze is available to buy and drink at 43.096656, 19.055568.
• There are loads of viewpoints along this road, I won’t list them all here. Just take your time and stop when you can.

• If you’ve got a good zoom you can get a nice photo of Ostrog Monastery from the viewpoint at 42.671033, 19.027241. There’s a small car park next to the steps that lead up to it.
• It’s free to enter the monastery. They just ask that you cover up, men too, and they’ll provide the things you need to do so.
• I’ve read that you can sleep there but there’s nowhere to get food and you’ll be woken up at 5am. Very much a “for the experience” type thing.