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| Durmitor National Park landscape in the rain |
Montenegro is 90% mountains, something you quickly learn
when you enter the country along the coast where the mountains plummet into the
deep coves and bays of the Adriatic.
Likewise, drive north to the heartland of this tiny country, and you’re
spending your entire time navigating hairpin turns amidst high peaks and, at
this time of year, colorful beech forests.
We drove to Zabljak, a ski town and entry point to the
Durmitor National Park. The terrain is
quite unusual. Much of it looks like the
Mongolian steppe—grasslands and hummocky hills in the broad valleys in between
the high mountains. There are scattered
farmhouses and small villages in the valleys and sometimes atop the mountain
passes, with an occasional restaurant, but this is a sparsely populated area.
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| mountains above Zabljak in the rain |
Durmitor National Park is stunning.
We drove up into the Park on a very narrow
road, admiring the limestone pinnacles and steep mountains with their
surprising cover of golden grasses.
This
is above tree line here, at only about 7000 feet, but there is lots of
vegetation in rich autumn color.
Today, the rain that hit us in Kotor continued with driving
force from the high winds. Sometimes,
the windshield wipers couldn’t go fast enough to keep up. Occasionally, we’d have a let up in the density
of the rain as we wound up and down the narrow roads. The rain made it almost impossible to take
any photos, but I am including a couple of scraggly ones since they’re all I
have.
Zabljak is a town of several thousand people, with lots of
hotels, restaurants, condos and ski homes scattered over the landscape. It looks completely unplanned. There is a small center with a supermarket
and the majority of restaurants. There
are probably quite a few shops, but most of the town is closed until ski season
starts.
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| Zabljak ski area |
We drove to the tiny ski area
which has only 3 lifts and, despite the high mountains surrounding it, offers
very little elevation gain from bottom to top.
A server at one of the restaurants said they skied off the second
highest mountain, which would be accessible by the narrow road we took into the
Park, but that would be a long, very steep downhill and a very difficult
struggle back to the top. And a
terrifying drive in the icy winter. If
the winds blowing snow are as strong as the ones we encountered blowing the
rain, driving would be virtually impossible during a storm.
After staying at a pleasant ski hotel in Zabljak, we drove
to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina today.
This is scenery most of the world has never heard about and is
absolutely spectacular.
We drove through
2 deep gorges that make Glenwood Canyon seem small.
Their cliffs tower and sometimes hang over
the road, which is narrow and winding.
Deep in the gorge below is a reservoir.
Once you get below the dam, the canyon is narrow and very deep.
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| reservoir filling a deep gorge |
The slightly less rugged mountainsides are covered in beech
forests, now bright yellow, orange and red.
There are some fir trees and a few pine trees. On these slopes, logging would be
impossible. They are either cliffs or
just too steep. But, the road is an
engineering marvel, cut into the mountainsides and cliffs, passing through
dozens of tunnels, and winding down into deep, dark valleys before heading back
up to narrow passes.
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| Piva Canyon reservoir |
We crossed the border from Montenegro to Republika Srpska,
which is a reluctantly autonomous region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, born out of
the 1995 Dayton peace talks that ended the horrific war between Serbia and the
other former Yugoslav provinces.
I did a
little reading about Srpska since the border very clearly said Welcome to
Republika Srpska, not Bosnia and Herzegovina and learned there is still a very
strong desire for independence in Srpska.
This is not supported by the UN or the EU or US, so is on hold, but, to
me, it’s a bit alarming as the 1991-1995 war was so terrible.
More on that after we visit the sites in
Sarajevo tomorrow, which will include the places where Bosnian Muslim men and
boys were murdered by the thousands by the Yugoslav (mostly Serb) army.
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road through mountains
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