It’s time for the Balkan Riviera

MONTENEGRO, roughly the size of Northern Ireland gained independence in 2006 and confronted a readymade identity crisis. Few people actually knew where it was, apart from a hazy notion that this obscure place was hidden somewhere within the former Yugoslavia.

The tour bus edges around yet another frightening hairpin bend among some of the Balkans’ most impenetrable mountainous territory on our 500km round day-trip from the coast into the interior, visiting the famous Tara Canyon close to the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This spectacular rip in the earth, bisected by a crashing river, happens to be the second deepest canyon on earth after the Grand Canyon. Yet nobody on the bus had ever heard of it before. Our guide Alexander explained “people used to think Montenegro was a province of Brazil or a country somewhere else in South America, they didn’t seem to know who we were or where we were for a while”.