Return to Durmitor
Monday 11/23/2009 9:13 PM
This past weekend, Emile got the car from his landlord so we could head back toward Durmitor. We started much earlier in the morning, bypassed Ostrog, and though we didn’t fully intend to wait that long, we didn’t stop for lunch until about 4:00, all of which made for a lot more sightseeing than we managed to get in the previous weekend. Shortly after we turned off the main road heading north from Podgorica, we ran into our first bit of excitement: a tree down in the middle of the road.
Luckily, there were also several guys there to clear the tree, and they told us it would be out of the way in about 10 minutes. While we waited, we realized that the tree hadn’t actually fallen of its own accord: we’re pretty sure they cut it down for firewood. They were very friendly, even offering Emile rakia (potent fruit brandy popular in the Balkans, even at 10:00 on a Sunday morning) and cigarettes while we waited. He declined, and sure enough, they had it out of the way about 10 minutes later.
Then we were headed to “The Road to Duzi,” a drive with spectacular cliffs that Emile had read about and spotted on Google Earth. A few sights before we get there, though. The jag in this mountain was rather disconcerting amid large rocks in the road and “Falling Rocks” signs:
What I came to think of as a “dead tunnel.” We’d passed this the previous weekend, but this time we stopped for a closer look. I think it’s either an abandoned mine or a road tunnel that collapsed.
And here is the entrance to Nevidio Canyon, the last canyon to be explored in Europe. The name translates to “No See” Canyon because it was too remote/treacherous to be traversed until some guys from Niksic did it in 1965. It’s about 4 km long and as narrow as 25 cm in some places. Evidently, one can journey through it on an “extreme adventure trek” with an experienced guide and a lot of gear:
After dropping some rocks into the Canyon from the bridge, we were finally on The Road to Duzi. We didn’t have any reason to go to Duzi, other than to drive on this road, which was reason enough. We’d imagined, when we headed out from Podgorica, that we would find a “mountain market” to buy supplies for a lunch on the road, and since we hadn’t run across such a market in our travels yet, we were hoping to find “Duzi Snacks” there. We even sang, “Duzi Duzi Doo, where are you?” along the road, but there were no snacks to be found once we got there. It certainly wasn’t a wasted trip, though: Emile’s late night research paid off and the views were incredible. Here’s the road heading toward Duzi:
And a view of it on the way back:
This is not a oneway road. If another car approaches from the opposite direction and there isn’t room to pull to the side, one of you will put it in reverse until you get to a section wide enough for both cars. Here’s the dropoff:
Once we’d backtracked from Duzi, we found our way to Komarnica Valley. In an email responding to several of my “where exactly were we when …” questions, Emile says that he’s not sure it’s officially called a “valley,” but the collection of houses we ran across was probably the town of Komarnica, and it looks like the “valley” eventually turns into Nevidio Canyon (right around the spot where my photo of the Canyon was taken). Whether it’s a valley or a town or both, it looks like an ideal place to live:
The mountains slope up on either side, which makes it seem likely that the area would flood when the snow melts in spring, but it feels like the houses and farms there have been around for several generations, so I’m guessing that it probably doesn't.
We eventually made it to the end of the road, which felt like a small victory: we finally knew where a single road in Montenegro began and ended:
Sort of: a hiking trail continues on from there, but the photo above marks the end of the passable-by-car road. We took the opportunity to get out of the car so Alex could throw rocks into the river and Emile could consult his maps again.
Our trusty guide at river’s edge:
On our way out of Komarnica, we finally found the waterfall that we’d been in search of the previous weekend. We actually passed it on our way through the valley but we somehow hadn’t noticed it, not even with the spray-painted-boulder signage next to it:
We might have been in Durmitor National Park proper for most of the afternoon, but our goal was Zabljak, a town on the eastern edge of the park and the largest town in the area. Reaching it meant that we would have been through a good part of the park and that we would likely find food, which we were pretty eager for. So we left the valley, working again on our best educated guess since one of Emile’s maps showed that the road we’d just found the end of continued on through the mountains and another showed that it didn’t.
As we climbed higher into mountains that looked less and less passable, Emile asked out loud several times, “How can we possibly get over those?” And then we rounded a corner to find that the road led into a tunnel. It was a pretty rough tunnel, but it was a tunnel just the same, and it seemed to answer his question. It was gravel and bumpy with lots of puddles from the water dripping from the ceiling. This didn’t seem all that unusual, though … there are loads of tunnels through mountains in Montenegro, and they all drip water on the windshield as you pass. But this was a really long one, and after we were already in it, I noticed that its walls weren’t as finished as the others we’d been in. Alex started suggesting more and more insistently that we turn around, but Emile was reluctant to try turning around in it, so we tried to reassure him even though we truly couldn’t see the end of the tunnel at all. Emile brilliantly started telling Alex a story about exploring subway tunnels in New York that sounded much scarier than the one we were in, and that seemed to distract Alex from his fear a little. I eventually spotted a light at what I thought was the end and pointed it out to Alex just before I realized it was in fact a light bulb.
This realization actually freaked me out more than not seeing any light at all – I was worried that it might mean that the tunnel wasn’t finished yet but just ended someplace in the middle of the mountain. Luckily, it didn’t end at the lightbulb … it kept going around a bit of a curve, and we eventually saw pieces of equipment and cables and then lights along the ceiling and then a smoother road and then finished walls and eventually construction-crewish guys walking through. And they didn’t seem at all concerned about our driving through. At the end, we met the rest of the crew and a couple of big trucks blocking the exit while they poured cement off to the side of the road we’d been driving on. The crew kept on with their work, barely acknowledging us, so we got out of the car to wait while they finished what they were doing. Though we were tempted, we refrained from asking them for snacks.
Before they cleared the way for us to exit, another car pulled up behind us, having also survived the journey through the half-finished tunnel. I was amazed that we were allowed to use it when it wasn’t finished and that doing so didn’t seem to alarm anyone other than me and Alex (and, I think, Emile, though he played it very cool). In his email tonight, Emile says that after consulting his sources, his “best guess is that the tunnel went through the mountains between the peaks of Crepuljni Vrh and Bobutovo.” The road was really bumpy after we exited (all large gravel to build up to the tunnel’s level, I assume), but before long we were on a newly-paved, two lane road to Zabljak. Along which we met this goat (and several other goats, but this was the most photogenic of the lot):
After a couple of failed attempts to find an open restaurant in what looked like a newly-constructed ghost town of a ski resort area, we made it into town and found a place with hot food and coffee. We ate too much and then decided to try hiking to Black Lake, the largest and deepest glacial lake of the park. We trusted that the sign along the road outside the restaurant and pointing to the left, reading “Crno Jezero 35 min,” actually meant that if we walked down the road for 35 minutes, we’d end up at the lake. It didn’t actually mean that. It meant that the lake was a 35 minute hike in that general direction, like the signs at Key West pointing the way to Havana. Once the sun set, we decided to head back to the car. Then we found our way to the official entrance of the park by car, and then to the lake, which was extraordinarily black by that time, by foot. We could see the outline of the mountains opposite the lake against the night sky, and Alex had a fine time throwing rocks (yes, again) into the lake while Emile wandered off to play with his camera and I looked up at the stars wishing, for a few minutes, that we could build a fire and pitch a tent. But the temperature was falling fast and by the time we started our walk back to the car, Alex was able to slide his way there on the frost glazing the road.
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