Montenegro - As pretty as we'd heard - Day 395 (28,348 miles)

We had met a few travellers along the way who said Montenegro had been their favourite part of the former Yugoslavia. As we are only visiting bits of each country it's hard to say whether we agree but it certainly has some stunning scenery and is a great motorbiking country.

We had an overnight stop at Virpazar on Lake Skadar, the lake is half in Montenegro and half in Albania.

Dinner that night was carp from the lake, a first for both of us and better than we thought it would be (lots of garlic). The above isn't some kind of weird ventriloquist act! This is the head of a carp caught by the owner of our hotel in the lake a few years ago, it weighed in at around 70kg.

Our next stop was the very pretty walled city of Kotor which was first settled in by the ancient Romans. Very quaint and although it's August it wasn't horrendeously busy.









The city fortification wall to St John's castle is about 300m high and the path up is a couple of km long, not exactly a mountain but the day I chose to walk up was possibly the most humid during our whole trip. Honestly, it was sweatier than anytime in Asia. This combined with the 35c plus temperature meant that by the time I got down I was a bright red, sweaty, wet haired mess. Before meeting John (who had sensibly decided to not bother and took photos of the town instead) I found a hairdresser and booked a haircut appointment. The receptionist commented that they usually took a deposit but he could see I was desperate and was happy I would turn up! How awful did I feel.



While stopped in a lay-by taking these photos we were chatting to a German biker who had come via the Dolomites which he raved about. Mmmm, we hadn't planned on Italy but perhaps we can fit it in.


We had a couple of nights in the mountain town of Zablijak, this was the view from our apartment. Found a huge apartment for 35 euro a night with a full kitchen so we could cook all our meals and a lounge with a huge sofa, oh the luxury! We've stayed in lots of apartments all through Europe and they've been good but this was the first with a sofa to stretch out on.

Until we came here we were completely unaware that the 2nd deepest canyon in the world, the Tara Canyon is in Montenegro. We splashed out on a white water rafting trip (bad pun, sorry about that) to get a look at the canyon from the inside. It was beautifully lush and green, completely different but lacking the drama of the bare red rock of the Grand Canyon.

John complete with helmet cam ready to capture the rafting action (and any fit young ladies in bikinis) on film.

Although it wasn't cold I wore a wet suit, bouyancy jacket and if they had offered pink armbands and a rubber ring with a ducks head on I'd have taken those too, such is my confidence level in fast flowing water!

I really didn't need to worry, it was basically a couple of hours of gently paddling down the river with a few whooshy bits. At no point was there any chance of falling out or turning over in fact even I (the biggest coward in the world) would have liked it to be a bit more lively. On reflection the fact that helmets were optional, we were not asked if we had done it before and we were given absolutely no instruction should have given us a clue to the difficulty level.

We will probably get about 3 minutes worth of slightly interesting footage out of the hour and a half that John took with the GoPro!




The canyon from above.











A couple of weeks ago we had heard from Mike and Caroline who are riding an Enfield in India, they had recounted how their bike had fallen over the edge of a cliff! Luckily they were not on it and they were able to get it retrieved, how had that happened we had wondered? Well, probably like many others we nearly found out when taking this photo, the ground under the sidestand was softer than we had thought, luckily it wasn't fully loaded and John caught it just in time.

Next stop Croatia.