Montenegro - Friday June 8, 2007

This day James and I went river rafting down the Tara River. The Tara is the second largest canyon in the world. The only larger is the Grand Canyon in Colorodo.

The owner of the camp, Davido, was very nice and always made sure that the Americans were being well taken care of, whether it was coffee or beer, he always made sure one of his fellows would take care of any of our questions of needs.

The rest of our rafting group was a bus load of Slovenians. They all work at the same cable manufacturing company up in Lasko, Slovenia. Half the company (no spouses) came on the trip. The company pays for half the cost of the trip. I wish companies in the US would be willing to pay for half of company trips to Montenegro.

The river rafting was beautiful, but we didn't get a chance to paddle because of the English/Serbian language issue. The Slovenians were a ton of fun though. They all sangs songs, especially the Lasko Pivo (beer) song (to the tune of the Beer Barrel Polka). After the rafting trip and we all went back for lunch (fresh fried trout) the Slovenians kept on giving us beer from their tour bus. It turns out that for a three or four day trip for 30 people they brought 500 cans of beer, 20 liters of schnapps, 20 liters of red and 20 liters of white wine. Wow, now I had thought that my last company was pretty generous with the alcohol, but this amount blew my last company away.

After the river rafting James and I were eager to get on the road and head to the ski town in Montenegro. We drove the 26 km stretch that we had driven the day before and this time I counted how many tunnels we went through, 57 tunnels in 26 kilometers! Then we took a turn and headed towards Trsa and went through 11 more tunnels in 6 km.

Then we were driving through the beautiful Durmitor National Park, high up in the mountains. We were stopping so often to take pictures and James was so in awe and driving so slowly that for the first time I had to tell him he was driving to slow. In fact, he couldn't take his eyes off the scenery so I finally drove. Our rented Volkwagon Golf had started to make funny noises since our trip on the gravel roads the day befoe and it started to get worse and worse. One time we even stopped the car because we'd thought some part of the undercarriage of the car had fallen off.

When we reached the ski town it was pouring, pouring rain. James and I were not so excited, but it was too late to drive any further, so we grabbed a hotel and settled down for the night.