Plužine - leaving Montenegro
A real quick post on heading out from our 5 nights in Kotor, Montenegro. Our next stop was in Bosnia and Herzegovina, destination Sarajevo, but with the drive time we decided to split it up and spend the night in Pluzine.
Pluzine is in the north of the country, just about 30 minutes from the border crossing and the halfway point between Kotor and Sarajevo, breaking our drive there allowed us to stop and see a few other sights on our drive up and inland from the coastal sights we had been enjoying for the last week.
Leaving Kotor you drive along the bay for a while and then it's a sharp turn into a steep incline that takes you up into the mountains and into the interior of the country. You watch as the Bay of Kotor slowly drops and pulls away from your view. There are plenty of places to pull the car over and get some photos, and you really get a sense of how the bay looks, the small islands outside of Perast, and the narrow straights that separate the inner bay from the larger bay just off the Adriatic Sea.
Eventually the bay disappears behind you and with a pass through a tunnel you're in a different world, from green mountains to stark deforested stone mountains, then as you continue on through another pass and back into green mountains. On of the stops that we made sure to do as we drove north-east into the country - the Ostrog Monastery.
Ostrog Monastery is built into a cliff-side, it's a maddening 30+ minute ride up a basically single lane road that continually switchbacks as it winds higher and higher up into the mountains. We followed a bus up so any cars driving down would have to back up to a point where there was room for two vehicles to pass another - that's a key trick - it would have been horrible had we had to reverse for a bit to allow a car heading down to pass.
It's nice to see, but we managed to get there on a Sunday and it was packed with people. There were lines of people waiting to buy candles to light once inside and we thought about it and decided to skip the line and the change to see what the insides looked like. Hard to say if it was worth it, the drive up and the lines to see anything made us think that has we had another chance we would have skipped it, but it was impressive to see it built into the mountain cliff.
From there we headed on to Pluzine where we had booked an apartment for the night. This was another one where the directions weren't exactly perfect, and this is a wonderfully small town, but we had to call once we arrived so that the host could come down and meet us in the town park and then show us to where we were staying for the night.
The town is situated on a reservoir and seems to be a large outdoor activity center. Our host offered her local guides for hikes, rafting, fishing, zip-lining, a whole list of possible activities. We declined and just asked for a great place to go for a good meal, and as soon as we settled in to our apartment for the night we quickly did a load of laundry and hung that out to dry on the balcony.
As we said, the town is small, and we wandered through it and down to the restaurant recommend to us - Zvono. We sat in their outside patio, had a great local wine and some great fish. If you're ever in the area we would tell you to go here for dinner.
After dinner we headed back to our apartment and it's balcony. We packed out freshly dried laundry up and then sat out with a bottle of wine to enjoy the sunset.
