Our exhilarating day trip to Kotor in Montenegro!

We have a spare day in Dubrovnik. Do we take a ferry ride to visit some of the charming islands off the coast or spend the day exploring the natural beauty of Montenegro away from the summer crowd?  Kotor is less than 100 km away! We decided to take the quieter option.

Still relatively untouched by mass tourism, this little country has much to offer. It is the ideal place to experience a mix of history and natural beauty.

Rather than rushing from one town to another, we idle away a few hours in the medieval town of Kotor walking along the city walls and then through the labyrinth of streets and alleyways wandering in and out of squares admiring the baroque churches and locals going about their daily life.

We are concerned about our return journey to Dubrovnik. Our Dubrovnik apartment host advised us to leave early in the morning to avoid the long queues that build up at the Croatian border as Montenegrins and Croatians move between the two countries. At times the wait can be two hours or more. The evening wait time can sometimes be longer!

We stop for lunch at a small café in a quiet square in the Kotor’s Old City and were lucky to chance upon an informative café owner. While discussing our apprehension, he suggests we make our return trip through Bosnia and Herzegovina. He often takes this route. He reassures us the journey is scenic. The travel time will be the same so we jump at the opportunity to have a taste of driving through the countryside. Of course, the idea of avoiding languishing in a long queue also helps us make the decision.

With instructions on where to turn off the main road, we set both GPS devices with the details (our lease car’s GPS is more than adequate, however, we also take our trusty TomTom GPS unit with us too when we travel – just in case!).

Both GPS devices instruct us to turn off the road just out of Kotor onto a quiet little backroad which soon turns into a country lane and then into a goat track. We wave down a decrepit ute driving past us in the opposite direction to make sure we were on the right path. He can’t speak English but he waves us on indicating we are going the right way.

We drive on expecting the road to improve and join a major arterial road. To our horror, the road narrows further as climb uphill on this vertiginous track with nowhere to safely turn back. There is no option but to crawl forward at times reaching 20km/hour.  Not to mention the 30 or so hairpin bends we encounter over this hair-raising drive with sheer mountain drops (and stunning views). However, we are intent on staying on the track and don’t dare take our eyes off the road until we reach the top where we came across two hikers taking a relaxed hike along the road. These are the only humans we have seen since the man in the ute. A little further on, join the road we are actually supposed to have been travelling on.

The bypass is so new that it didn’t feature on either GPS units.

We are fortunate.  He is an accomplished driver and contains his racing driver spirit until we arrive on the highway to continue a most enjoyable time through the Bosnia and Herzegovinian countryside surrounded by rolling hills, through green valleys alongside gently flowing streams and creeks and quaint towns arriving back in Dubrovnik without incident.

We are, however, curious. A Google search when we arrive back in Dubrovnik reveals that we have just traversed one of the most dangerous roads in Europe!