Montenegro 2025

Two weeks in Montenegro for our belated honeymoon. An absolute stunner of a country which just keeps stacking mountains upon mountains interspersed with lakes, and just when you think you’ve run out of drool you turn a corner and your jaw hits the floor all over again. Brilliant place. Batshit drivers though.



BUDGET for one person (based on two sharing) for 15 days.
Accommodation (Bricks & Mortar): £297.68
Accommodation (Camping): £32.19
Buses, trains: £3.90
Taxis, private vehicles: £15.12
Vehicle rental: £235.30
Petrol: £35.73
Groceries: £31.22
Eating out: £322.87
Tea, coffee, drinks: £22.15
Booze: £137.82
Tours: £34.50
Entrance fees: £51.88
Activities: £39.05
SIM card, phone credit: £15.60
Souvenirs: £37.70
Everything else: £44.66

GRAND TOTAL: £1357.37
Average per person per day: £90.49

The Stories

Montenegro 1: Budva In The Rain

I do love an uneventful journey. I think I still have a spot of anxiety from when we went to Mallorca and if it could go tits up it absolutely did go tits up with utter malevolent glee culminating in a Segway accident, which Tarrant is still seeing a physio for a year later. Apparently…

Montenegro 2: Obligatory Beach Day

We got a relatively early start on Monday on account of The Chores. Supermarkets don’t open on Sundays in Montenegro (convenience shops do so don’t panic, you can still buy beers) so we wanted to get some grocery shopping done in the morning, plus we needed some camping gas for the few nights we’d planned…

Montenegro 3: Bar & Around

Today we’d be driving to Bar. Or I’d be driving, Tarrant would be sitting in the passenger seat periodically reminding me that we’re meant to be driving on the right and also I have a whole car to the right of me and she’d thank me to remember that when considering my road positioning. We…

Montenegro 4: Bar To Virpazar

The plan this morning was to go for a swim in a nearby river followed by a little jaunt up to a waterfall for more swimming. Possibly the kind of swimming that would cryogenically freeze all of your organs but the days were sticky and hot so we’d probably relish these few minutes of cold.…

Montenegro 5: Lake Skadar

We booked our lake cruise on Get Your Guide before arriving in Montenegro because I wanted to make sure we got one. I needn’t have worried, this place consists entirely of people trying to sell you a boat tour. You’ve got everything from one-man bands who don’t really speak English to full outfits with staff…

Montenegro 6: Heading North To Biogradska Gora

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…

Montenegro 7: Onwards To Tara Canyon

The reason I wanted us to camp here within the Biogradska Gora National Park was because I knew it’d be chaos when the day trippers were here. I wanted us to experience the calm when they left which I’m sure Tarrant did but I was too busy with my head down the toilet. At least…

Montenegro 8: Tara Canyon & Black Lake

We need to talk about burek. I could eat this shit all day. It’s a flaky pastry stuffed with meat, or spinach, or cheese, or whatever. We first had it in Virpazar, little cheese and spinach triangles and tiny cheese spirals. But this morning our host baked a massive cheese spiral for breakfast and it…

Montenegro 9: A Day In Plužine

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…

Montenegro 10: Viewpoints, Spomeniks & A Monastery

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…

Montenegro 11: Lovćen & An Escape From The Weather

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…

Montenegro 12: On To Kotor

We had a bit of time to kill this morning on account of the fact the car didn’t need to be back until 2pm. We’d planned to drive the utterly batshit Serpentine road into Kotor but we’d done that the previous day to beat the weather and fuck me, I am so glad we did.…

Montenegro 13: Bussing To Risan & Perast

I love public buses. No, wait, that’s a complete lie. I love public buses in countries that aren’t the UK. I get a lot of joy out of using public transport whilst travelling but if I’ve got to do it back home I find it overpriced and unreliable. Y’know, all those things I don’t give…

Montenegro 14: The Epic Climb To The Fortress

What better way to spend the last morning of our honeymoon than walking up about 1300 steps to a ruin? Tarrant had opinions about pretty much every aspect of this endeavour as did my leg muscles after yesterday’s impromptu climb up a bell tower. We got up early to start climbing at 8am to beat…

Useful shit to know…

Tourist Registration
  • You’ve got to register everywhere you stay in Montenegro. If you’re staying at a hotel they’re meant to do it for you.
  • We did it ourselves for the apartment in Budva, the campsite in Virpazar and the apartment in Kotor. They were going to do it for us with the app in Kotor but we couldn’t get our schedules to align.
  • The apartments in Cetinje and Plužine, and the bungalow by Tara Bridge did it for us with an app. They just have to scan your passport and fill in the dates you’re staying.
  • The staff at the campsite at Biogradska Gora wrote our details down in a ledger which apparently served as registration.
  • If you’re going to do the tourist registration yourself you need the name of the registered owner and the address of the accommodation.
  • You’ll also need your passport. Not a photo or a copy.
  • You do everything at tourist information. You used to have to pay at the post office but now you pay and register at tourist information.
These are the pink slips you’ll be given two copies of. One is for you and one is for the owner of the property you’re staying at.
  • It costs €1 per person per night, plus a 30c admin fee. I believe it’s cash only.
  • They’ll give you two copies of a pink slip, one for you and one for the owner, which you used to have to keep hold of but I’ve been told it’s all linked to your passport these days. I kept them anyway because I am an anxious mess.
  • A few people we met said you don’t really have to bother with it. One campsite said that “no-one cares about registration” but it’s honestly not a risk I fancy taking. It’s a ballache to work it into your day sometimes but it only takes minutes once you’re there.
  • You could, apparently, face a €200 fine if you don’t register but again, I don’t know how much the border guards really care.
Money
  • The currency is the Euro (€).
  • Cash is king in Montenegro though we found card was widely accepted in restaurants, cafes, and petrol stations. Probably always best to check beforehand though if you don’t have cash.
  • At least one of the apartments we rented was explicitly cash only. We didn’t ask at the others but we always paid cash anyway.
  • We took enough Euros with us but I believe ATMs charge €5 per withdrawal with a foreign card.
Language
  • The language spoken is Montenegrin which is Serbian but in Latin script.
  • You do still see Cyrillic, it’s on menus and we saw a lot of it around Durmitor, but you really don’t need to be able to understand it to survive here.
Plužine is one of the places we saw Montenegrin written in Cyrillic rather than Latin script. English was still on menus and spoken in restaurants so you’ll be fine even there.
  • Google Translate doesn’t have Montenegrin but you can just use Serbian.
  • English is widely spoke in restaurants, cafés and tourist attractions all over the country.
National Park Fees
  • You can buy an annual pass which gives you unlimited access to all of Montenegro’s national parks until the end of the year.
  • You can buy it HERE. It costs €13.50 per person.
  • You’ll need to enter your passport number and upload a photo.
  • You’ll be sent a QR code which you can just access from your emails or add it to Google/Apple Wallet.
  • At the time of writing (September 2025) the entry fees for each national park are:-
    • Skadar Lake, €5.
    • Durmitor, €5.
    • Lovčen, €3.
    • Biogradska Gora, €4.
    • Prokletije, €3.
  • You can just buy tickets when you’re there and the annual pass is obviously only worth it if you’re going to four or more, or plan to visit for multiple days.
  • Kids under 15 go free, but you’ll need to prove their age.
Car Rental & Taxi From Kotor To Tivat Airport
  • We used MTL Rent A Car. They don’t have their own office at Tivat Airport but Europcar let them use theirs. I got a Whatsapp the day before from the bloke who would be meeting us to let us know where to go.
  • For 12 days they charged us €336. We paid for full insurance on top of that at €119.94. On the day we collected it we added wheels and windows which should have been €8 a day but he let us have it for €5 a day, so an extra €60. It cost an extra €30 to drop it in Kotor.
  • No issues with them at all. Communication was great. Would recommend them.
  • A taxi from Kotor to Tivat airport should cost €30 one way.
  • You can easily get a phone number for a taxi from wherever you’re staying. We just asked the owner of the apartment we were staying at.
  • There’s no bus to Tivat airport, at least that I could find, but you can get a bus to Tivat bus station and walk from there but it’s about 25 minutes on foot.
  • If you’ve got your little heart set on catching a bus the timetables are on the Blue Line website.
For Your Facehole
Nikšićko. The beer you’ll see everywhere. After a couple it does start to taste like piss water but it’s just a generic lager. You can get a dark version too. Generally inexpensive and refreshing on a hot day.
The strong drink you’ll get everywhere is rakija which is made from whatever they have handy. Grapes, plums, peaches, you name it. If you can ferment it you can turn it into the 50% alcoholic beast that it rakija. If you add honey to your rakija you get medovača which is absolutely fucking delicious. I feel like the hangovers would be atrocious though.
Ćevapi. Kebabs, basically. They look like turds but taste like they’re conjured from the joy of angels. We ate our body weight in these bad boys and I could continue eating them until I had to be rolled out of the country on the back of a flatbed.
Pita sa mesom. Pie with meat. You can get it sa sir too which is with cheese, or any manner of other filling. Cheap and delicious from bakeries.
Njeguški stek. This is a thin slice of pork with Njeguški pršut (a prosciutto from the village of Njeguši) and Njeguški sir (cheese from the same place) folded into it. Then it’s cooked and they put another slice of Njeguški pršut on top. So meat wrapped in meat and topped with meat. This was from Restaurant Pelikan in Virpazar.
Priganice. Deep fried dough balls you can have sweet with honey or, in this case, covered in icing sugar. You can also have them savoury with cheese. They seem to be popular for breakfast. They are awsome.
Burek. Flaky pastry stuff with cheese, meat, or spinach.
This is also burek, made with cheese. We had it for breakfast where we stayed near Tara Bridge. It’s fucking delicious and filling.
Karađorđeva šnicla. It will not shock you to learn that this is a variation of meat and cheese. It is some manner of dead thing, I think pork in this case, rolled up with kaymak which is a very soft, spreadable cheese that I’m a little bit in love with, breadcrumbed and deep fried. This was at Restaurant Suza Evrope not far from Tara Bridge. In fact you can see the bridge from their terrace.
Kaymak. Very soft, spreadable cheese. I’ve seen it referred to as Balkan cottage cheese but it’s not really like cottage cheese at all. It’s wonderful though. I’m a little bit in love with it.
Teletina ispod sača. Possibly the most anticlimactic dish we had in Montenegro. Teletina is veal but you can also have pork, and the sača is the metal dome it’s cooked under. So it’s kinda steamed for a long time leaving it juicy and tender, and it was, but it was just a pile of meat really. Not sure what I was expecting.
Kotorska Krempita. This is a Kotor thing apparently and if you like custardy things you’re going to want to apply this liberally to your facehole. It’s layers of flaky pastry and vanilla cream. This is from Senso Bakery in Kotor Old Town.