2/7/9 How to blow your mind with beauty - visit Durmitor National Park in Montenegro.

Today we needed to drive from Sarajevo to Savnik.

The drive passed through Durmitor National Park via the most amazing scenery to rivers far below.

I have been unable to find a contour map of the route, but I can say that there are a LOT of hills between the two and we drove it...

This means that  we drove along a lot of winding roads and had a lot of amazing views down to rivers far below and valleys,

We went through more than fifty tunnels today, some of them joined almost entirely by bridges above beautiful flowing rivers.

We stopped for really delicious icecream which we ate from little glass jars.

Lunch was Burek - a filo pastry wrapped around cheese, spinach and cheese or  meat and consumed along with drinking yoghurt (milk like consistency) which we ate at a lookout with a fantastic view while we tried to shelter from the scorching heat

We wound our way up through hairpin bends into the mountains and came out to gently undulating , wildflower covered hills at the top

 .. and then realised that there were yet more mountains to climb ahead of us!

We stopped and looked at amazing mountains - and saw sheep, cows and wild horses.

As we stopped and looked at all these amazing sights  the thunder started grumbling away and the clouds got blacker - a bit worrying since we were planning to go for a walk that we were really looking forward to.

We stopped and saw Shar mountain dogs,

 and for fresh water flowing straight from the ground. (Our bus driver knew about this little gem).  The water was so cold that it felt like it had come straight form the fridge and it tasted great. 

Eventually we decided to stopped at a tea shop hoping for rain to clear for our walk. The rain dropped in volume, so we went ahead with the walk.  Since we had started the day in hot , dry weather , very few of us had our rain coats ready, but they kindly opened up the luggage area and got the bags out for us, so we could retrieve our jackets.

 In the end it rained part way, but not too badly and it certainly didn't dull the enjoyment of the walk, which was a circumnavigation of black lake (small and large). The lake is in Durmitor National Park.

as you can see from the map of our walk, we parked in the parking lot, some distance from the lake, and walked in from there. 

It was only a relatively short drive on to our hotel Djokovich for the night (not the greatest hotel we stayed in) - with lumpy pillows , no air con, limited hot water and no internet access in our room.
As is the case in many hotels, there was no air conditioning in the the room, so we had to have the window open on to the main street to get any air circulating.