Driving in Montenegro

Ulcinj

Something needs to be said about driving in Montenegro. The roads are bad, but perhaps it only seemed so after being spoiled by the long stretch of hundreds of kilometers of new highway that we took through Croatia. The coastal road in Montenegro is full of traffic and all kinds of obstacles so that driving is not very fun. It takes hours to cover distances that seem not too far apart on the map.

I had to laugh so much when I was handed a tourist brochure which had on the back a list of driving recommendations. Among others, there was an item about how drivers should park according to regulations. Marko and I didn’t really know what parking regulations are in place in Montenegro. We didn’t see any designated parking areas and we thought it best to learn parking regulations by observing local custom. From what we saw we were able to deduce that in order to park in Montenegro, drivers should follow this procedure:

Step 1: Stop the car.

Step 2: Turn off the engine.

That’s it. You’re done. The car is parked. If it just so happens that you stopped the car on the road, you shouldn’t be concerned. It is up to the vehicles in traffic behind you to realize that you aren’t stopping just for a traffic incident such as a red traffic light or a dog on the road but that you are parked there and therefore the vehicles, if they want to move along, have to pass you. Apparently you get bonus points if you park diagonally across from a similarly parked car, thus forcing the traffic to snake in between.

After a while we had become so used to this parking regulation that we were both startled in the city of Cetinje where we stopped for a red traffic light. When the light turned green, the entire lane to the right of us started moving. We were both confident that the cars were parked there, assuming that any car that isn’t moving – is parked. So we wound up awkwardly in the middle of the crossing. Oops.