Montenegro has a north — without the coastal crowds

Anyone who has driven from Herceg Novi to Budva in July or August knows the picture: one lane each way, a column moving at walking pace. The whole Montenegrin coast, from Herceg Novi to Ulcinj, runs to about a hundred kilometres — and that week the entire country plus half the region pours onto it. It looks as though Montenegro has run out of room.

Montenegro is in fact a mountain country that behaves like a coastal one in summer. Three and a half hours inland from Kotor a completely different country begins — with a different temperature, a different price, and mostly nobody in it.

Žabljak, the town at the entrance to Durmitor, sits at about 1,450 metres and is the highest town in the Balkans. You feel that immediately: while the coast holds thirty-three degrees and no moving air, here it's twenty and you want a jacket in the evening. In August that isn't a difference measured in degrees so much as in how many hours a day you can actually be outdoors.

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Durmitor holds eighteen glacial lakes, known here as mountain eyes. The best known is the Black Lake, twenty minutes' walk from the centre of Žabljak; a path runs round the shore and takes an hour and a half, flat, no equipment. That is what makes this corner usable for people who aren't mountaineers — nothing has to be conquered before you can see why you came.

The second reason is the Tara canyon. It is roughly 1,300 metres deep and the deepest river canyon in Europe. The easiest place to take it in is the Đurđevića Tara bridge, built just before the Second World War, standing nearly a hundred and seventy metres above the river. No ticket, no queue: you pull over at the roadside and walk across.

„On the coast you look for somewhere to put a towel. Three hours away you look for a reason to come back.“

— note from the road

The drawbacks are real and better known in advance. The distance isn't the problem, the road is — the way to Žabljak is hairpins where the average works out around forty an hour, so three and a half hours on the map becomes four and a half with one stop. The weather is mountain weather and unpredictable: a sunny morning and rain at five in the afternoon are normal in August too.

The choice of restaurants is modest and mostly comes down to the same domestic cooking, which suits some people and, by day three, doesn't suit others. Rafting is sold as a full-day trip, but a good part of that day goes on a minibus to the put-in and back — worth asking how long the descent itself lasts before paying. And most importantly: there is no beach and no nightlife here. Anyone travelling for those will be disappointed, and fairly so.

But you don't have to choose. If you're going to the Montenegrin coast anyway, three and a half hours of driving turns one holiday into two different trips — and the second is the one that gets retold afterwards, because few people who've “been to Montenegro” get around to seeing it.