Montenegro

Didn’t know exactly what to think of Montenegro. We were just passing through really. Spent about 24 hours there. No more. It wasn’t as touristy as Croatia that seemed to have a campground every 5 minutes.  We only counted 6 campgrounds on the entire coast. It seems a lot of people never seem to venture south of Dubrovnik. Thinking they would fall off the end of the world.

Montenegro was beautiful. The border was more difficult, and expensive, than we ever imagined. He was quite quick at the border to say that we were not in Europe anymore. Funny because they use the euro and have European Union placards everywhere. First we were asked to pay an “ecological fee”. Turned out it was some kind of road tax sticker for your car. They said that would put us back 80 euro.  Cars are only about 10 or 15 but we were no car. We got them down to 50 but that was only the beginning. We needed insurance because “they were not Europe”. They wanted 138 euro for insurance. Cars and “white plastics” cost 10. Andrew pleaded hardship. He showed them the papers that said that our vehicle cost a tenth of the cost of a “white plastic”.  They said no we were a truck. We took out our maps out and calculated the cost of petrol to circle Montenegro. We paid. We spent one night.

Hannah braved out sleeping on the roof in the rain and this was her view in the morning. Not too shabby, eh!

Montenegro still seemed a bit touristy but more geared to tour buses than motorhomes. When we stopped at the campground for the night Andrew and Hannah went in search of food and were really disappointed at the amount and type of food they found. They said, “very touristy”.

The roads were pretty good until you got close to the Albanian border. We were told to stay close to the coast. Forget the look of that big green line (road) on the map – it is a lie. It is just a tiny mountain road. We didn’t stay right on the coastal road all the way. We think we made a mistake at Bar and turned inland. We ended up on another small mountain road.

A big adventure, for our truck, on this road was this “cave/tunnel”. We were no longer on the same road as the trucks and buses, always a concern. The closer we got to Albania, the smaller the road got. Then we saw the cave/tunnel. We weren’t sure if we would fit through the tunnel. We pulled the truck over to the “side” of the road.

Andrew broke off a stick to the right height and walked the distance of the tunnel with it, checking it for our height. He determined that it was passable but not without some “tricky bits”. I walked ahead of the truck to guide it through.

All in all, we didn’t spend much time in Montenegro. Really not enough to discover the wonder of it all but it didn’t grip us and ask us to look closer. The border was quite expensive. The people weren’t the friendliest but it was “nice”.