(Kotor, Montenegro)

Eager to see some remote corners of this rugged and mountainous country, I signed up for a group tour of Durmitor National Park.  It is located quite some distance to the north of Kotor, but on the map it looked “do-able” in a day.

It is only appropriate that I cut to the chase:  it wasn’t a crazy road trip because of the extreme scenery (although there was plenty of that)…it was a crazy road trip because of the way we travelled.  Four of us, plus our driver, were crammed into a VW Golf.  As three out of the five were 6’3″ or taller, it was never going to be a comfortable ride.  But I certainly didn’t expect it to be such a terrifying ride.

Basically, the whole day was like a video game:  let’s see how recklessly and dangerously you can drive on narrow mountain roads!  Blind corners, doubling the speed limit, passing transport trucks, tailgating so closely that you could read the newspaper in the car in front of you, racing through unlit tunnels, making and taking phone calls and text messages while driving…bonus points for all!  I’ve never been so exhausted by a vacation day.  I honestly felt like kissing the ground when the tour ended 13 hours later.  It also seemed so unnecessary:  we took long coffee breaks in each direction and still arrived back in Kotor well ahead of schedule.

When we were walking back to the hostel afterwards, I told the other guys (two from England, one from Hong Kong) that I might not quite be myself at dinner, as I was a little shaken up by what I thought was a scary ride.   After all, in addition to having a crazy driver, we had passed an awful lot of roadside memorials to car accident victims.  To my surprise, the other guys didn’t seem to think the day’s driving was particularly noteworthy.  One of them shrugged it off and said that “you get used to bad driving in Europe”.

This really made me think, as my reaction was so markedly different from theirs.  I suppose that it can be explained by personal factors as well as cultural ones.  Personally, I like to be in control of my own destiny.  I once lost control of my vehicle on a remote icy road and , as a lawyer, I’ve often dealt professionally with the aftermath of automobile accidents.  Lawyers are also trained to identify every possible negative outcome of an arrangement, so that risks can be identified and appropriate contracts can be negotiated.

From a cultural perspective, I think that Canadians are (perhaps excessively) polite and tend to follow rules more.  We’re also taught “defensive driving” when we learn how to drive a car:  you always need to be prepared for a mistake that the *other* driver might make.   By contrast, our driver seemed to assume that the car coming the other way would always get out of the way in time.  Canadian roads are also engineered for optimum safety, something that is made possible by (most of) our terrain and the relative abundance of space.  Other countries, especially very mountainous and/or densely populated ones, may not have that luxury.

Anyway, I survived the trip and managed to take some pictures as well.   The bottom line is that northern Montenegro is a beautiful riot of mountain scenery with a lot of sheer drop-offs.  The Tara River Canyon reaches a depth of 1300 metres at one point.

While many of the mountains were folded up and very close together, some of the mountains in Durmitor National Park reminded me somewhat of the Canadian Rockies – they were large, but they also had relatively more space around them than one normally sees in the Alps.  Black Lake felt like Lake Louise, Alberta from certain angles.

It never hurts to consider the cultural and personal factors that may impact your trip.  In this case, I don’t think I was fully prepared for what was going to happen…and my immediate enjoyment probably took a bit of a hit as a result.  But I do have fond memories of the mountains…and the Bečka šnicla at lunch was really good!