drive to Montenegro

From Mostar, Bosnia, we drove to neighboring Montenegro, which is a beautiful and tiny country on the Adriatic Sea that also borders, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, and Croatia. The drive is only about 115 miles, but takes almost 3.5 hours without stops due to some fairly slow and winding roads. The scenery is beautiful, though, so it’s nice to enjoy it at a leisurely pace! About an hour into our drive, it looked like we had reentered Serbia due to driving by an enormous Serbian flag monument, but it was really just the border into Republika Srpska, which is over 80% Serb despite being within Bosnia. As with all of our Balkan driving so far, we passed several groups of police looking for cars to “pull over”, but passed by each time unscathed (the method we’ve seen the most for pulling people over is standing by the road with a paddle that says something we can’t understand, and if they raise the paddle at you, that means you’ve been chosen). We made a couple of unplanned stops at huge waterfalls to get some pictures and marvel at how powerful water can be. Both Bosnia and Montenegro have such rocky, mountainous terrain that there are a lot of fast moving rivers and waterfalls. The more extremely jagged and craggy parts actually reminded us a little bit of Iceland!