Tuesday
18th July 2017
We set off from Boge in Albania at around
8.30 am with a plan to do some shopping, spend the last of our lek currency
then head for the border. At the border, the Albania police pulled the van into
a shed and went through almost everything, apparently there is a big drug
trafficking problem with Montenegro and it starts from the Theth valley, so
once they found out we had been there, even more rigorous searching was done!
After almost an
hour we were let out of Albania to go to the Montenegro side of the crossing,
some 50 metres further on. This time we had a sniffer dog through the van, two
police and although we entered the country with no real hassle, (what with the polite
police and customs), again the insurance fees left a real sour taste.
138 euros
for a mandatory minimum of 50 days with the van. Now that is a bugger, especially as the country is a part of Europe and uses the Euro! This has left us wondering whether we’ll bother to go to Bosnia at all as it’ll be
the same there and judging by the rise in the fees so far across two countries,
who knows what it will be the next time. There is no current and reliable info
on the internet so you either get the Green Card before you leave the UK, (which
at the moment is not that easy since the RAC stopped running the scheme), or you
get ripped off at the various borders. We really were not a happy pair of
bunnies driving away from the border entry point!
Anyway, we drove towards Podgoric, taking a
stop at a lovely local market place to pick up some fruit & veg, which also
allowed us our first interaction with the locals, then headed into the capital
city to do internet things and just to take a look really. It’s a very
cosmopolitan place, everyone is dressed well, the cars are all newish, the
buildings generally all shiny glass fronts and all in all it’s a modern western
european style city and as usual no parking! So we drove around, then headed
out to find a cafe with some internet. We found a relaxed place on the main
road, did as much as the bandwidth would allow us and then headed into the
hills to find the start of the TET.
Wow, how beautiful is this country, green
and lush vegetation as you get higher, (away from the plains where the heat and
dryness has started to shrivel everything and fires are burning their way along
several miles of the lowland hillsides). The roads wind their way up and over
the hills, into hidden bowls with pretty little houses tucked away. We wound
our way towards the start of the TET, but found the road too rough for the van
as it deteriorated from old tarmac to dirt track so we had started to look for
somewhere to park up, when the tarmac restarted and took us over a col and into
a place from a picture postcard.
Beautiful limestone rocky tops dominated
the skyline, the blue sky backdrop studded with fluffy white cumulus clouds
drifting by. The bottom of the bowl was filled with sleepy small farmsteads,
big dogs and a picturesque lake. There was no hesitation, we parked up and before
the engine had stopped, the dog was in the lake, Lucy not far behind...
Lucy has opted to go walk up one of the
peaks tomorrow with the dog, so I’ll be solo riding tomorrow on the first
section of the Montenegran TET trail which has been described as ‘possibly the
jewel in the TET crown’.
