Driving into Montenegro you are immediately struck by the sheer amount of geography that has been crammed into such a small country: the coast is very dramatic, with steep, forest-clad mountains erupting directly from the impossibly blue Adriatic. The other thing that is immediately apparent is the recent history between Croatia and Montenegro; nowhere else in Europe are there border controls with a no man’s land between them, but in the Balkans they take borders seriously.

We drive along the coast to the first of several geological features that have shaped the nation: the Bay of Kotor. It is an enormous fjord, and nestled in its safe haven is the city of Kotor, that once was a wealthy commercial hub and an important part of the Venetian empire.

Much like Dubrovnik it is remarkably intact, but it has a very different feel to it – less polished, more chaotic, and a lot more charming for it! We stroll around its narrow streets, enjoy gelato and the many, many cats that call the city home, and then climb up its half-ruined fortifications that clamber up the cliff face against which the city is cradled. Only half of it is still accessible to the public, as the other half is too crumbled to be safe, but its state of disrepair only adds to its considerable charms, and since its much too steep for the cruise ship crowds we have it largely to ourselves.

Further along the bay is Perast, a one street cluster of old Venetian palazzos where wealthy merchants once summered. Several of them have been restored and turned into B&B’s or hotels, and we spend the night in one of them, enthralled by the surrounding beauty. It’s a testament to the many wars that have ravished this region that the room has gun slits in the walls, but no one mounts an attack during the night, and we even manage to avoid the onslaught of tourists the next morning as we negotiate the hair-raising switchback road that takes us up into Lovćen.

Lovćen is the heartland of Montenegro; it is a National Park centered around Crna Gora, which means black mountain, the name deriving from the way the mountain looked clad in dense forests. Lovćen is also the only place where the Slavs managed to hold off the Ottoman Empire – like an East European real life version of Asterix and his fellow Gauls, the tribes of this area were simply too much for the Turks to conquer, and eventually the latter sued for peace – the only time the Ottomans ever did, something which is a source of pride to all Montenegrins.

Today, this national pride is manifest at the very summit of the mountain, where a mausoleum to Peter II, Prince bishop and the spiritual founding father of modern Montenegro is hewn out of the rock. Many of his countrymen make the pilgrimage here, and even if it is a bizarre thing to find on top of a mountain, it does nothing to detach from the beauty of the National Park. We spend a glorious autumn day hiking up and down the mountain, enjoying the solitude and quiet beauty of it all, before getting back in the car and heading back down to the coast, and the city of Budva, which we reach after dark.

In many ways Budva is a manifestation of Montenegrin society at its worst: corruption is rampant in the country, and organised crime is at least as prevalent here as it ever was in Italy. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in Budva, another old trading town that has reinvented itself as the favorite marina of Russian oligarchs and their super yachts. The once pleasant town is overrun with developers building anything and everything they can think of to lure the rich and the rubberneckers to their shores, and they ride roughshod over any civic or aesthetic considerations in the process. The one part that has remained (outwardly) untouched is the miniature island known as the scene of the poker tournament in the James Bond movie Casino Royal – it is now fully owned by a hotel conglomerate catering to the super rich, who are lining up for the chance to emulate 007 (and never mind that the rest of the movie was filmed in Czechia…).

The only reason I wanted to come here was that there is supposed to be good paragliding off the mountain ridge behind it, but the outfit I contacted to go flying didn’t react in time, and besides, having seen the state of the beach that they proposed to use as a landing area I don’t feel comfortable flying here anyway. It is an experience best left to a different clientele, and so after breakfast we head on to what really makes Montenegro worthwhile: its wild nature.