Cycling in the Montenegro clouds
Touring the peaceful mountainous paths of Durmitor national park
It had been a long and mostly urban trek by day seven of a 10-day train trip through Eastern Europe and Will had had enough. At 29, he was a one-time Grand Canyon guide, as well as a regular hiker of trails, cycler of paths and climber-to-the-top-ofthings, and he needed to get away from all the masonry and cobblestones and use his legs for something other than strolling.
So on day eight, we headed down into Montenegro, to the interior, mostly untapped by tourists from farther afield than the former Yugoslavia. It’s got lakes, rivers and tiny mountain villages scattered everywhere, populated partly by villagers and partly by tiny holiday homes with steeply sloped roofs, as architecturally distinct as Swiss chalets.
We got bikes from the first place we found in the town of Zabljak on the edge of Durmitor national park — hybrids, for $15 a day. We loaded my backpack with bread and meat, the local red pepper paste called ajvar that we’d come to love and a bottle of the Bosnian Lozovaca rakia I’d picked up in Sarajevo the day before that we’d come to love a bit more.
In one village, we stumbled upon a small cemetery just below the path and stopped to wander. One site commemorated two young men, one born in 1907 and died in 1920; the other, born in1970, was dead by1994, at the height of the Yugoslavian disintegration, a quiet testament to a region that has never yet gone 50 years without a war, and for whom even those relatively peaceful stretches were marked by the sorts of hardship that tends to kill men before they reach Will’s age. It’s a part of the world where, until very recently, the idea of racing up a mountain for any reason other than to flee was not only impractical, but unimaginable.
The paved path began to steepen as we left the last cabin behind. I’ve spent years cycling around Toronto, avoiding the Davenport-to-Eglinton hill whenever possible and taking the gentler Russell Hill Rd. meander, so I wasn’t sure I could keep up with my Iron-Man friend. Let’s just say I caught up quickly enough on the straightaways to save face.
Two hours in, we reached a hillock by the side of the path that seemed made for picnics. We dropped the bikes, scrambled to the top and spread out our food-light, booze-heavy meal and ate and drank as we watched a shepherd who looked to be in his mid-teens guide his flock to the shore of a small lake several hundred metres below while another shepherd led his away from the same spot. A slightly older cowherd led his two cattle along the slope across the path from us. We waved, he waved, and we lay down, light with rakia, to watch the clouds.
Will decided to soak up the vistas that ranked with mountain ranges in Central Africa and Peru, while I did a final push up to where some snow was visible to make myself a Montenegrin snowball.
When I reached the June snow, I stopped and looked, Will a leisured speck enjoying the hillock. It was hard to imagine war up here, and easy to imagine people coming here to escape it, or climbing these same slopes just for respite, watching the deciduous forests melt into the pastures beyond them and the mountains behind them fade into the pale horizon. Letting everything else fade, too, except a pride in the land and nation that is both the cause of and the solution to the region’s problems.
It was even easier to imagine how much my waxing lyrical had to do with that bottle of rakia.
But there are no cars on this road, and the path-edge slopes are grassy and gentle enough to ensure any inadvertent off-road incident would be more embarrassing than painful. So, the clear spirit’s effects on a slow ebb, Will and I hopped on our bikes and sped off, a smooth, hour-long descent. We did a quick tour around Zabljak, dropped off the bikes, feeling our legs, not feeling our butts, and headed to the bus station for the $7 ride out of town. Bert Archer’s trip was subsidized by Eurail