Montenegro: the Bay of Kotor and the Black Mountains

The road out of Kotor climbs the wall of the bay in about two dozen hairpins, built in the 1880s, and each one is a better view of the water than the last. By the top the bay looks like a map of itself. Keep that picture for day 6.

Petar II Petrović-Njegoš, prince-bishop and poet, asked to be buried on top of Lovćen, and he was. You reach his tomb through a tunnel of 461 steps, the one real climb of the week, and come out at about 1,660 meters with mountains on every side and the sea on one. Lunch is in Njeguši, a village of a few dozen people that produced a royal dynasty and a ham, smoked over beech in the mountain air.

Then Cetinje, the old royal capital, where the same prince-bishop had a billiard table carried up from the coast for his new residence. The building has been called the Biljarda ever since. Dinner tonight by Lake Skadar.

Lake Skadar is the biggest lake in the Balkans, and in the morning it belongs to the birds, about 270 species of them, including some of the last pelicans in Europe if they feel like it. Your boat noses out of Virpazar through the reeds to Grmožur, an Ottoman fortress on a rock that King Nikola turned into a prison. The story goes that he liked his prisoners to be men who could not swim. One got away anyway, on a door or a gate, depending on who tells it.

Then inland to Ostrog, a white monastery set into a cliff face in the 17th century. Pilgrims walk up to it barefoot. You may keep your shoes on.

Day 3 is long, with most of the afternoon on the road north, and we would rather say so now. Žabljak, at 1,456 meters, is where it ends.

The bridge over the Tara canyon opened in 1940: five concrete arches, 365 meters end to end, about 170 meters above the river. Two years later, with an Italian army on the way, Lazar Jauković, one of the engineers who had built it, helped partisans blow up one of its arches. He was caught, and executed on the bridge. It was rebuilt in 1946, and walking across it once you know is a strange, quiet few minutes.

The canyon underneath runs about eighty kilometers and is about 1,300 meters deep at its deepest. A zipline runs alongside for anybody who wants to cross it faster.

The afternoon is easy, on purpose: a flat walk around Black Lake under Durmitor's peaks, and dinner back in Žabljak. Day 4 is the slow one. Enjoy it.

Day 5 is mostly a drive, about three hours down out of the mountains. The good part is at the end, when the road drops off the plateau and the bay turns up underneath you again, from the other side this time.

Perast had more than 2,000 people at the end of the 1700s. In 1991 it had 444. At the last census it had 237, a row of stone palaces and a bell tower. In 1698 Peter the Great's young nobles came here to learn navigation from a local captain, Marko Martinović, and the town museum, in a 17th-century palace, still shows them at their lessons.

Dinner is yours tonight, on a waterfront with two small islands just offshore. One of them was built by hand. You will be out there before breakfast.

Sorry about the alarm. At first light the water off Perast is flat and empty, the boats from Kotor are hours away, and you are already in a kayak, paddling out to the two islands.

One has a monastery and cypress trees. The other was made by hand. The story goes that in 1452 seamen found an icon of the Virgin on a rock here, and after that dropped a stone on the spot after every voyage that brought them home. Old ships went down full of rocks. A church went up on top. Every 22 July at sunset, Perast still rows out and throws more stones in.

After breakfast you go back out to step inside, past hundreds of silver votive plaques, to an embroidery a woman from Perast worked partly in her own hair. Farewell dinner in Kotor tonight. Nobody will admit to being tired.

Last morning in Kotor, with coffee by the water and the walls going up the mountain behind you exactly where they were on day 1.

A week ago this was a table of strangers explaining their jobs. Now there is a group chat named after a prison island, a camera roll that is mostly one small church from every possible angle, and a firm group position that the bay is a ria. You will all call it a fjord at home anyway. Everybody does. Hug everyone, and keep the group chat.