A country you can cross in an afternoon, and shouldn't
Montenegro packs a fjord-like bay, a walled medieval port, Adriatic beaches and a 1,300-metre-deep canyon into a country smaller than Connecticut. Buses connect everything for €3–10, guesthouses ('sobe' signs everywhere) charge €15–30, and in a week you can go from swimming in the Adriatic to hiking above 2,000 metres. June and September are ideal — July–August doubles the prices and quadruples the crowds on the coast, while the Durmitor mountains are best from June to early October.
Daily budget: €40–60 on the coast in season, noticeably less inland. Montenegro uses the euro despite not being in the EU, which simplifies things.
Perast: start small
From Kotor's bus station, local buses run up the bay to Perast in twenty minutes (€1.50). It's one street of Venetian palazzos between mountain and water, and the essential move is the €5 boat shuttle to Our Lady of the Rocks — an artificial islet built by five centuries of sailors dropping stones and scuttling ships on a reef, now carrying a small blue-domed church stuffed with votive silver. Go before 10am, when the bay is glass and the tour boats from the cruise ships haven't started their rounds.
Kotor: the walls
Kotor old town sits at the foot of a cliff at the innermost point of the bay, a knot of marble lanes, cats (the unofficial city mascot, with their own museum) and Venetian bell towers. The one non-negotiable: the fortress walls. 1,350 steps zigzag up the cliff to San Giovanni castle (€15 in season, free before the ticket booth opens — sunrise solves two problems at once). From the top the bay looks like a Norwegian fjord that moved somewhere warmer. Dorms in the old town run €18–25; sleep light, the bars echo.
Budva: one honest night
Half an hour south (€3), Budva is Montenegro's party town, and its walled old town — smaller and saltier than Kotor's — deserves an evening stroll along the ramparts to Mogren beach. If the coast is calling louder than the mountains, detour twenty minutes further to gawp at Sveti Stefan, the fortified island-village turned resort, best seen free from the roadside viewpoint above. Otherwise, take the money you'd spend on Budva's beach bars and put it toward the mountains.
Cetinje: the old royal capital
The inland bus climbs to Cetinje (€4), Montenegro's historic capital on a karst plain under Mount Lovćen. It's a low-rise town of former embassies from when this tiny kingdom charmed Europe, plus the monastery that anchors Montenegrin identity. With a shared taxi or tour you can add Lovćen's summit mausoleum — Njegoš, the poet-prince-bishop, buried at 1,657 metres behind two granite giantesses, with a view over the entire country he wrote into being. On a clear day you can see Italy's shadow and most of Montenegro's borders at once.
Žabljak and Durmitor
Buses run north via Podgorica to Žabljak (4–5 hours total, €12–15), the highest town in the Balkans and base camp for Durmitor National Park (entry €5). The gentle option is the lakeside loop around the Black Lake, glacier-fed and ringed by pines under the tusk of Bobotov Kuk. The proper option is climbing Bobotov Kuk itself (2,523 m) — a long day with some cable-assisted scrambling and a summit view of grey limestone waves in every direction. Guesthouses with wood stoves and enormous breakfasts run €25–35.
The Tara Canyon full stop
A short taxi or local bus from Žabljak reaches the Đurđevića Tara Bridge, a 1940 concrete arch thrown 170 metres above the Tara river — Europe's deepest canyon, its water an unreasonable glacial green. Zipline across if you like (€20), raft the rapids below in summer (€40–50 with lunch), or just walk the span slowly. From the middle of the bridge, the week assembles itself: sea, walls, kings, mountains, canyon. From here, buses continue into Bosnia or back to Podgorica — Montenegro is generous like that; every exit is scenic.
