7 october 2022
The Kotor Serpentine takes you and your vehicle up to a fantastic view of Kotor. It is also the road to Lovcen National Park, although you can detour via Budva if you don’t feel like doing all the cornering, or if you are driving a long or heavy vehicle. The road has about twenty hairpin bends with spectacular viewpoints along the way.
Although it looks scary from the air, it’s not too bad and the hairpin bends are very wide, so a full-fledged mobile home can also reach the top. Local trucks also use the road. The road between the bends is quite narrow, so if you encounter a wide oncoming vehicle, you will have a problem. I would therefore advise against taking this road with a vehicle that is wider than 2.20 meters in high season, because you will not have much fun with it.
Amber had left an hour before us by bike. We caught up with her just before the end of the serpentine. We stopped to wait for her and to let the drone out for a while.
We made further plans with her and then Amber went to Cetinje to save her legs the pain of an other big clime. We didn’t know then that we were going to lose her until Greece…
As you can see above, it is really a touristic coming and going in Kotor. Funny, because the old center is not really that much, after 30 minutes you have seen most of it, unless you want to enter every church. Fortunately, tourism falls again as quickly as it came when you leave Kotor…
Where in most countries it is a ‘big no-no’ to be in a national park, apparently in Montenegro it is no problem at all to bump into a national park with your camper and spend the night there.
So we drove about 100 meters off the road and followed a car track to camp in the middle of the meadow.
After we were installed we took a little walk and discovered a well where we also refreshed ourselves. The rest of the day we enjoyed the sun and the view… We also got to know Esmee & Niels at this place. A couple from the Netherlands on a tour with their super nice Volkswagen T3. We chatted, until the sun hid behind the high mountain flanks and it cooled off . Fortunately, the 4G reception was fine so we were able to use One’s 500 GB inside Nigel to chill Netflix for the evening.
Niagara?
We ran out of food so the next day we stopped in Cetinje to buy some basic food in a small supermarket. We hesitated to explore the small town for a while, but we decided to continue towards Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. We wanted to visit the Niagara Falls, only written differently: Nijagara. If you look up sights in Montenegro, these are invariably included; the country is of course not big. We thought it was ballsy of the Montegrins to borrow the name of famous waterfalls in the US so we went to check it out.
The waterfalls did not disappoint, but we’re pretty sure the real Niagara Falls are a little more impressive.
Those waterfalls made us hungry and there was a restaurant nearby. However, a bus full of tourists had just arrived, so we looked for something else. On the way to the falls we had seen a tiny restaurant that could not be found on Google Maps. So we drove back there and were enthusiastically and received a warm welcome by a man and his entire family. We don’t know about compulsory schooling in Montenegro, but we were spoken to in basic English by a guy of about 10 years old. They didn’t have a menu so we just went by the suggestions. Fresh yogurt, burek, a kind of pastry with honey and two beers. Each one delicious and freshly made.
So this man had built a small restaurant in his front yard. The electricity went through a generator and Babushka sat a little further at the front door, watching things. We paid € 13, tourist prices had not yet been invented here, and continued on our way. Before entering Albania, we first wanted to discover the surroundings of Lake Skadar. Next to the river Moraca we found a place to sleep at a fishing spot. The whole area is swampy and it reminded us of the Louisiana bayou, also because there was a boat with a water wheel on the other side of the river. We wouldn’t have been surprised if an alligator climbed out of the river…
Lake Skadar is also the border with Albania at the same time. Unlike Montenegro, we have heard of Albania, and not always in a positive context. We had often read that Albania is a very cool country to travel through with a van or camper… You can read how that went in the next part!