The Purple Culture Guide to Montenegro

Chapter 1: First Impressions

Your first hour in Montenegro is a masterclass in contradiction. You'll arrive expecting a polished gem, a tiny Adriatic jewel polished smooth by tourism. Instead, you get the Bay of Kotor - a fjord-like inlet so dramatic it makes your brain stutter - but you also get the road to it, which is usually being repaved in a hurry, or not at all, with a man in a ragged hi-vis vest waving a shovel at the resulting one-way chaos. You'll see a gleaming luxury yacht moored in the old town harbor, and directly behind it, an abandoned stone villa with its roof caved in, windows black hollows. This is not a contrast the brochures mention. This is Montenegro's true personality, revealed in the first mile.

The most common wrong assumption is that Montenegro is just a smaller, less-crowded version of its more famous neighbors - a mini-Croatia, a cheaper Greece. It is not. It lacks the manicured, everything-in-its-place polish of a mature tourist economy. It has a wildness that is both its greatest asset and its most persistent source of friction. Get used to a certain kind of chaos. The traffic is chaotic, but rarely aggressive. The paperwork involves long, resigned sighs. The mountains are enormous, and your rental car's brakes will smell like a city bus. The water in the Bay of Kotor is so still it reflects the mountains with terrifying clarity on a calm day, and the people, on a good day, reflect