I like to get up early on holiday to go and Do The Things. It took a while for Tarrant to get used to this but, after some initial protesting in the early days of our relationship, I brought her round to it. A little gentle coffee-related coaxing and we’re generally on our way before the locals even start thinking about their morning commute. I wanted to get to the Mausoleum of Njegoš for when it opened at 9am on account of the fact parking is ridiculously limited. Like, a few spots along the side of the road and you have to hope that people don’t park like dickheads and take up enough space for two vehicles kind of limited.

We were stopped along the way to pay the entrance fee for the Lovčen National Park but we’d bought the annual pass so they just scanned our QR codes and let us on our way, and by the time we pulled up at the base of the steps to the mausoleum there were already a few cars. I slotted the Skoda in nicely and off we fucked up the many, many steps to the final resting place of Petar II Petrović-Njegoš. All I know about this bloke is what I read on Wikipedia but he’s a beloved folk hero whose writing is still considered some of the most important. He was a prince-bishop who sought to unify the tribes of Montenegro during his reign but then introduced taxes which, understandably, upset a lot of people. Taxes still upset me and they’ve been around longer than I have.

Anyway. He wanted to be buried atop Mount Lovčen on the Jezerski vrh (peak) in a chapel he designed himself and this is what came to pass, until the Austro-Hungarians had him moved because they wanted to build a statue of Franz Josef there. So he, or what was left of him, was moved to Cetinje until 1925 when the war-damaged chapel was restored and he was shifted back. It was then decided during the Communist era that the chapel should be demolished and replaced with a secular design which obviously meant he had to be moved again. The poor fucker was finally laid to rest, hopefully for the final time, in 1974 in the highest mausoleum in the world. It’s also on the spomenik database so I’m hereby dubbing it the Spomenik King.

We counted about 450 steps up to the monument. My legs had opinions about this. But once you’re up there oh my gosh, the views are worth it. You can actually see the mausoleum from Lake Skadar so it stands to reason you can see a bloody good chunk of Lake Skadar from up here, as well as a fuck tonne of mountisinal beauty. There’s an extra little bit you can walk out to for more panoramic eyehole fodder before your batshit brain decides you’re too high up and you have to follow your wife back to the steps whilst keeping your focus on her heels so you don’t become convinced you’re going to fall off the floor and have to sit down.

The top end of the Kotor cable car isn’t far from here so we thought we might as well have a look. They have a little rollercoaster that we’d been told was really good fun, some walking trails, places to get food and drink and all that good stuff. Plus parking is still free here unlike the station at the bottom. It still feels very new, like it’s not quite finished. The done thing is of course to start at the bottom, take a cable car to the top and marvel at the views but there’s no rules about doing it the other way. But today it turned out we wouldn’t be taking a cable car anywhere. Everything was shut due to the weather conditions they were expecting and they were closing all day tomorrow as well. We’d heard it was set to rain this afternoon, potentially storm too and the weather was to stretch into the following day, but wasn’t really bothering us. We live in Yorkshire, if we let rain stop play we’d never do anything. Hmm. Okay then, if they’re taking the impending weather that seriously perhaps we should too.

Tomorrow’s plan was to drive the Serpentine road into Kotor, drop the car off and hang out in the old town but if it was shitting down that road would be awful. No one drives the Serpentine for fun, it is not a fun road. It is a mess of hairpins and aggressive driving. You drive it for the views and tomorrow there might well be fuck all to look at beyond clouds and the bloke driving 30 centimetres from your rear bumper flashing his lights. It certainly wouldn’t be the most efficient way of doing it but we decided to do the Serpentine today then head back to Cetinje the long way and hang out there until the weather started going to shit.

Can confirm that the Serpentine is wildly stressful. It’s not just a tourist drive, locals who are quite clearly and legitimately frustrated with the tourists also use the road and they will drive very, very close to you. I nearly ended up with a vehicle embedded in my arse more than once when I had to brake to avoid hitting something coming the other way in the middle of the road at speeds I would probably reserve for much larger roads with less blind corners. It’s obviously busy too and tour buses come up this way. The road is only about as wide as a bus in parts. I reiterate; no one drives the Serpentine for fun. It was a slow endeavour with stops for photos and to reassemble whatever nerves I had left, and the views of the bay really are beautiful. Eventually we came to the end of it then the challenge was to get Google Maps to realise that yes, we did wish to return to Cetinje but not up that fucking snake road again, please and thank you. Heavy traffic through Budva? I’ll take it.

Tarrant was feeling a bit ropey by this point which we put down to travel sickness. I think the only reason my stomach contents weren’t vying to make an appearance is because I was concentrating too hard to have time to get travel sick. It really is that kind of road. We got back to the apartment, parked up and wandered into the town via a couple of things such as an attraction called the Eagle’s Rock which has a small mausoleum and a view over the town. What is it with blokes wanting to be buried on top of a fucking hill? This guy, Danilo I, actually succeeded Njegoš but he was just a prince, not a bishop-prince. The first secular leader. The tribes apparently accepted his tax system apart from one so he sent someone to go and murder a bunch of them. So he was THAT kind of leader then.

After the slog back down the hill we visited the monastery, then we went to the Museum of Money which is actually way more interesting than you would think. It basically just documents the currency used in Montenegro during the various occupations throughout the centuries. It talks about the hyperinflation in the 90’s when food prices rose daily thanks to civil war, international sanctions and closed borders. In 1993 inflation was 19810.2%. Bank notes were coming into circulation then becoming obsolete in a matter of days. They ended up with a banknote with a face value of 500,000,000,000 dinar. In 1994 they knocked off a bunch of zeros, introduced the new dinar and pegged it to the Deutsche mark. In 1999 it was decided that the Deutsche mark would be legal tender along with the dinar, then the dinar was scrapped in 2001 and the Deutsche mark became the currency. Montenegro switch to the Euro on the 1st January 2002 at the same time as Germany.

Obviously there’s a wealth of more information but for some reason this is the part I found the most interesting. They also have an old minting machine which they’ll switch on for you if you ask them. The noise of the machine and people’s voices echoing through the museum was getting to Tarrant though, and she had to go and sit outside. She was starting to feel worse. Yeah, I don’t think she was travel sick earlier, she clearly had whatever I’d had last week. The symptoms were the same with the creeping nausea. We grabbed some ćevapi at a nearby restaurant, Tarrant left most of hers so we had it wrapped to take home, then headed back as light rain started to fall. Poor Tarrant threw up pretty much as soon as we got back. She was not a well woman. At least she had a lovely, private bathroom to retch into as opposed to a very public toilet in a national park. Small mercies.

Jump to “Useful shit to know…”

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Mausoleum of of Njegoš, Lovčen National Park – Cetinje, Cetinje, Montengro

Stayed at: Apartments Heaven, Cetinje

Useful shit to know…

• The entry fee for Lovčen National Park is €3 per person. We were stopped at an office at 42.369425, 18.891773.
• We did pass another ticket office on the way out heading towards the cable car but I forgot to make a note of where that is.
• We used our annual pass which costs €13.50 each and gets us unlimited access to all of Montenegro’s national parks until the end of the year. You can buy it HERE. You’ll need to enter your passport number and upload a photo, then you’ll be sent a QR code which you can add to Google Wallet.
• Mausoleum of Njegoš has it’s own entrance fee which was €8 each. You pay a person in a little kiosk just before you enter the archway.

• It’s free to enter the monastery in Cetinje and the usual shawls are provided to cover up. Men too.
• The Museum of Money is also free to enter.

• Parking in Cetinje seems to require an app which I wasn’t allowed to download for some reason, or a Montenegrin phone number you can send an SMS from.
• There is parking by the tourist information centre which is done the normal way by taking a ticket on the way in and paying on the way out.
• There is limited free parking along the road around 42.384458, 18.926637.