Although I’d done some route double-checking while in Albania, to make sure I didn’t end up stranded on a mountain pass, I normally take a serendipitous approach to navigation, i.e. keying in the destination and letting Google maps do the rest.
It normally works well and means I can get away without a human copilot, but I was in for a shock in Montenegro.
After more interminable crawling in Albanian traffic queues up to the border with Montenegro, I flashed my passport and car registration doc and we were through. Again there was little or no interest in Lottie or her passport.
Montenegro
At first, Montenegro was like a model of orderliness after Albania. The traffic still moved along at a crawl until we got out of Podgorica, but at least the roads were good and the service stations accepted card payments.
In a country that otherwise looks much like Switzerland or Austria, it’s incongruous to see the slender towers of modern mosques dotting the landscape. Mosque design was fairly uniform right through the Balkans.
Soon the road started winding up through beautiful, heavily wooded countryside. It felt like driving through a luxury car advert.
All that started to change as we left the last town behind and signs began to appear for panoramic views and look-out points.
Piva River and Lake
The road was climbing up to the Piva Lake culminating in the dramatic bridge across the Mrantinje dam.
It wasn’t easy to pull over to take photos with other cars behind, but I managed to stop and take these pictures of the beautiful turquoise lake and watch a few people land from a zip wire on the other side.
The road carries on for miles around the rim of the gorge with the lake below.
The endless “falling rocks” road signs are more like an accident foretold than a warning, with clusters of tennis and golf-ball sized rocks on the road surface.
The road goes through endless rough-hewn tunnels seemingly hacked straight out of the gorge side without any linings or other refinements. It’s like driving into a cave without knowing what’s going to detach itself from the roof and fall on the car.
Mratinje dam and bridge
Then we came to the dam at the head of the river, which was definitely one of the scariest things I’ve driven across: you can see a sheer drop of 220 metres from the car.
Shortly after that came another adrenaline rush in the form of the Mratinje bridge. A coach was crossing it before I set off and I thought “if it can take the coach, it can take my little Volvo!”, keeping all my fingers crossed.
After a lot more of the same kind of dramatic driving, I arrived at the border post. It was an easy crossing formality-wise, complicated by the fact that the entrance and exit are on the same single-track rickety wooden bridge.
This meant the border guard kept having to come out and move cars queuing to enter Bosnia back to let others out into Montenegro.
As soon after the border as possible, I stopped for a break. A few of the other drivers did the same and I chatted to a Polish couple who were also still a bit shell-shocked from the road.
The bar was perfectly nice but they wouldn’t let me sit down with Lottie, even at an outside table. So I just went to the loo, which was a squatter. It was a while since I’d seen one of those.
Driving to Sarajevo
After crossing the border, the road quality deteriorated, but thankfully there was usually a car width of decent surface to drive on, and I made my way slowly down off the mountain past dozens of rafting and extreme activity centres.
The road was pretty hairy until I got quite close to Sarajevo, though now I was driving at the bottom of a gorge rather than at the top.
There were lots of hairpin bends and traffic queues caused by everyone having to adapt to the speed of the slowest vehicle.
To be fair, that vehicle was often me. I pulled over a few times to let everyone pass as some of the truck drivers were aggressive and there was a good bit of risky overtaking.
Sarajevo
I started to pass signs for ski resorts and at last we were in Sarajevo, which hosted the Winter Olympics back in 1984.
It’s a very hilly city and my very comfortable guesthouse, when I eventually found it, was at the top of a steep road.
My host has his own cramped private car park that you have to drive into at a sharp angle. He had to wedge in four or five cars that evening, so he fussed over my parking position and then packed me off to find a cash point. No card payments accepted.
It wasn’t really what I needed after all day driving, but Lottie welcomed the chance to stretch her legs and we set off gamely to find some Bosnian Convertible Marks (KM). Actually, the host was extremely nice, he just had his system…
Exploring Sarajevo
Sarajevo turned out to be a modern, attractive, lively, multicultural city. It’s known as the Jerusalem of Europe – or of the Balkans – due to its long history of cultural and religious variety.
I’d decided to go on a whim because it was a name that cropped up endlessly in the news during the Bosnian war and siege of the city in the 1990s. Some of the tourism is still focussed on the atrocities that took place at that time.
I wandered through the centre following the Ferdahija road from west to east. And the city itself gained a more eastern feel going from the Catholic Sacred Heart Cathedral to the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque and the Baščaršija area with its bustling bazaar.
After a few hours’ sightseeing and stopping off for snacks and drinks, the weather got showery as you can see from the black clouds in the photo of the city hall.
After sloshing back up to the guesthouse through the rain and dodging an endless stream of cars on the steep, pavementless roads, I was glad for the chance of an early night before setting off to Croatia next day…
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