A guide to Montenegro in your hands

For several years Bradt has been the only publisher offering a general-purpose guide to Montenegro in English. While browsing recently in the excellent "Algoritam" bookshop on the main street in Dubrovnik I noticed that they now have some welcome competition. "Montenegro In Your Hands" was published in June 2008 by the same team that brought us "Serbia in Your Hands", and follows a similar format.



Books about Montenegro
Books about Serbia

The mountains of Montenegro ... and more

Now that Montenegro airlines fly directly from Gatwick to Tivat, the country has become more accessible for travellers from the UK. Although the spectacular coastline will inevitably be the focus for many visitors, the country's less touristed inland mountains also deserve attention. A recent article in the Times looks at some of those inland attractions, including the primeval forest of Biogradska Gora. (The accompanying photo was apparently taken in Durmitor National Park, which is not mentioned in the text).

Meanwhile in "A touch of the Riviera in Croatia" the Independent looks at the two sides of Croatia's Hvar Island - glitzy Hvar town on the south coast, and the more down-to-earth Stari Grad in the north.

Venturing further off the beaten path, the Sydney Morning Herald carries an article about Albania. The author is very enthusiastic about quirky Tirana, but apparently not enthusiastic enough to explore Albania beyond the capital. Even so, it's nice to see Albania appearing in the Australian travel pages - a rare, perhaps even unique event.

Developing the Balkans' Golden Triangle

In today's Independent Sankha Guha reports on an initiative of the United Nations Development Program to encourage cross-border tourism in the former Yugoslavia. The plan is to promote a so-called "Golden Triangle" of World Heritage sites of Dubrovnik (Croatia), Mostar (Bosnia), and Durmitor (Montenegro).

It's questionable whether Dubrovnik needs any more publicity, but presumably the plan is to use it to entice tourists to visit the less well-known inland destinations. As the article makes clear, the people behind the plan have some serious problems to overcome: as if it's not bad enough dealing with the legacy of political tensions, they also have to worry about the impression made on visitors by terrifyingly kitsch Tito-era hotels.


Dubrovnik

Mostar


Durmitor

Exploring Lake Skadar

An article called "Montenegro: Peace at Last" in today's Independent looks beyond the coastal strip to find a less predictable summer holiday destination. The writer sets off from the village of Virpazar, driving through the isolated villages on the shore of Skadar Lake in search of the Holy Grail: "a beach in Europe that is clean and free from crowds, even in August".

Montenegro introduces "eco tax" on tourist cars

Montenegro has announced that a tax of 10 euro per car will be collected from motorists entering the country from June 15. The money will supposedly be used for environmental protection. A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Tourism is quoted as saying "we hope that tourists will use alternative means of transport, like trains, buses or airplanes". Airplanes? That doesn't sound very eco-friendly. As for buses and trains - the Ministry's own promotional website has hardly any information about public transport, reliable bus timetables are almost impossible to find, and the trains are infamous for delays. If some of the money collected from foreign drivers was invested in tackling those deficiencies, perhaps public transport would become a more attractive alternative.

Cover star debut

Bradt guides recently published the third edition of their guide to Montenegro. It's good to see that Bradt are continuing to keep their strong line-up of Balkan guides up to date. I also have to admit to a more personal reason for welcoming this edition: it is the first guidebook to feature one of my photos on the front cover.

New editions of the guides to Slovenia and Albania are also due from Bradt in the next few months, and will also include some of my pictures, this time in the inside colour sections.

Southeast Europe, motorbiking paradise?

Travel writers listing their top 10 European destinations often overlook the Balkans. Whether the specific theme is the best hotels, favourite hikes, or top spas, the focus tends to be on Western Europe with a couple of places in Central Europe thrown in to give the appearance of balance. So it's good to see Southeast Europe being given in its due in Mike Carter's article in the Guardian, "Europe's top 10 motorbiking roads". The region account for three of his top 10 - four if you count Asian Turkey.

Mike is sufficiently enthusiastic about Romania's Transfagarasan Highway to cover it in a separate, longer article. He describes the road across the Carpathians from Sibiu to Curtea de Arges as "quite simply, one of the greatest buttock-clenching, white-knuckle biking roads in the world".

Also making the list is the route from Bar on the coast of Montenegro to Sarajevo in Bosnia. This inland route passes through Durmitor National Park, where the road becomes a "gravel track, threading its way across a vast treeless, boulder-strewn plateau".

Durmitor

The final Balkan entry is a road well worth following in a bus or car if you don't have a bike: Albania's Ionian Coast road from Saranda to Vlora. The climax comes with the Llogaraja Pass, "taking you from sea level to over 1,000 metres in just a few ear-popping minutes for the best view of the Ionian you'll ever see".

Ionian Coast

Balkans Peace Park nominated for tourism award

The Balkans Peace Park is a project aimed at creating a transnational park in the remote mountain region where the borders of Montenegro, Kosovo, and Albania come together.

The project has recently been nominated for the British Guild of Travel Writers annual Tourism Awards, in the category "best overseas tourism project". One of the criteria for the prize is that the project should "allow for interested travellers to explores landscapes, communities and cultures which might otherwise be off limits" - which seems to be a perfect description of the Peace Park.

A shortlist of three contenders will be chosen on 12 September, with the winner to be announced on 11 November. Best wishes from Balkanology to everyone involved.

More about the nomination (PDF file)
More about the Balkan Peace Park Project

The Balkans in the travel press

There have been quite a few articles about various parts of the Balkans in the last month or so. Croatia now gets so much press coverage that I won't even bother to list the new articles here, but some newspapers have ventured a bit further.

The New York Times takes a look at the Montenegrin coast in an article entitled "An Adriatic Stretch is Awaiting its Riviera Moment". I was a little surprise to read that "hotel staff members speak perfect English", but perhaps this is explained by the list of hotels at the end of the article, most of which are in the 100 euro per night price bracket.

Even more daringly, the NYT checks out the nightlife in Bulgaria's Studenski Grad in "Partying amid Cold War ruins".

Both The Times and The Independent take advantage of direct British Airways flights from Gatwick to write about Sarajevo as a city break destination. Note that although the Times optimistically says that Sarajevo is a two hour flight from London, the scheduled journey time is almost three hours.

Two pieces in The Observer and The Guardian focus on walking holidays in Montenegro, and in particular in the Bjelasica Mountains around Kolašin. I remember Kolašin as a sleepy mountain town where, several years ago, I endured a fruitless search for a place to stay during a torrential rainstorm; apparently it is now an up-and-coming resort. Frustratingly, the Guardian recommends "a half-decent guidebook" for walking in the region, but gives no clues about where such a book might be found.

Finally, today's Sunday Times heads for Romania, specifically the Danube Delta and Transylvania.

There were no articles in the English-language press about Macedonia. Again.

New guide to hiking in Montenegro

Montenegro is potentially a great country for hiking, but up to now it has been frustratingly difficult to get hold of relevant, up to date information in English. So I was very pleased to hear that Cicerone have just published a guide to The Mountains of Montenegro.

The guidebook includes single-day hikes and multi-day treks. Not surprisingly Durmitor National Park features strongly, but the guide also covers ranges that are less well known to foreign visitors, such as Orjen and Prokletije.

The Montenegrin Coast:: 22nd best thing in the world?

Rough Guides are celebrating their 25th anniversary by publishing "25s", a series of 25 books, each of which suggest 25 inspirational travel experiences.

Now they are have chosen the "ultimate" experience from each of the 25 books. The chosen candidate to represent Eastern Europe is the coast of Montenegro - no arguments from me there. Rough Guides are asking for votes for the "ultimate ultimate" experience. At the moment Montenegro is languishing in 22nd place, but I confidently expect the votes of Balkanology's readership to send it surging up the chart to ... well, perhaps to 21st place.

More about Durmitor

I've already mentioned in this blog that my visit last August to northern Montenegro's Durmitor region made a deep impression on me. Not only is there wonderful scenery in the Durmitor Mountains and Tara Canyon, but that scenery is surprisingly accessible on straightforward one-day hikes. You can read more in the latest addition to Balkanology: a new page dedicated to Durmitor National Park.

New photos of Montenegro

I have been busy expanding my Montenegro Galleries with photos taken on my most recent visit in September.

Most of the new photos are from Durmitor National Park in the mountains of northern Montenegro. This is one of the most impressive places I have seen on my travels. The wonderful hiking trails were almost deserted in early September, apart from a few Czech and Polish visitors. Although the mountains appear rather jagged and forbidding at first glance, many of them have relatively smooth slopes on one side. Combined with the high altitude of the resort of Žabljak, this means that it is possible to get to many of the higher peaks in a few hours of surprisingly easy walking. Of course this was in September when there is no snow cover. I had 5 days of clear weather, which apparently is freakishly lucky. (I paid for this luck when I visited Bohinj in Slovenia later in my trip - it rained for three days).

As well as Durmitor, there are also some new photos of Kotor, Ulcinj, and Stari Bar. It was nice to be actually able to get into Stari Bar - on a previous off-season visit I found the place locked.

Montenegro plots a tourist future without little old ladies

In an article called The Next Top Destination?, Transitions Online takes a look at the future of tourism in Montenegro. Whether or not Montenegro opts for independence, its economic future will be heavily dependent on how its tourist industry develops. Apparently one in three people is expected to work in tourism by 2010, which seems like a rather frightening dependence on a highly seasonal industry.

Off season in Budva

An international ecotourism organisation is quoted as suggesting that the state "should work on preserving the current state of the environment". Given that "the environment" currently seems to be regarded as a convenient empty place in which to throw all kinds of waste, that sounds like a shockingly unambitious aim.

The same organisation discourages promotion of inland Montenegro as a destination for foreign tourists, saying that the country should "limit itself to offering daytrips into the mountains for foreign tourists staying on the coast during summer". So we can probably expect endless references to the luxury hotel at Sveti Stefan, combined with a continuing lack of practical information about reputedly beautiful places such as Biogradska Gora National Park.

Finally, the article predicts an increase in the number of hotel rooms with a corresponding fall in the availability of private accommodation. I've read similar predictions about Croatia. Are we witnessing the end of that beloved institution of the Adriatic Coast, the "sobe"-renting granny?

At the time of writing the article is in the free section of the Transitions Online site, but it will probably move to the paid section after a while.

Lonely Planet publishes Western Balkans Guide

The Western Balkans (the former Yugoslavia plus Albania) has received rather patchy coverage from guidebooks. The rapid assimiliation of Croatia and Slovenia into the tourist mainstream has been accompanied by the publication of a wide variety of guides, but the other states in the region have had to be content with brief chapters in larger guides, plus the pioneering but uneven Bradt Guides to individual countries.

Lonely Planet's new Western Balkans guide aims to fill in some of the gaps. It will be convenient for people visiting several countries in the region, but for several of those countries the material is not a huge improvement on the existing Eastern Europe guide. See the Books page for more.