Žabljak

Žabljak is plain. It grew as a mountain settlement and then as a ski base, and it looks it — low buildings, wide gravelled edges, a main road with the shops and rental places along it, and a scatter of guesthouses and small hotels through the pines around the edge. Visitors who arrive expecting an Alpine village with a picturesque centre are the ones who come away calling the north disappointing, and they are describing the town rather than the region. The accommodation is comfortable and unpretentious, the food is mountain food, and the point of being here is that you can be on a trailhead fifteen minutes after breakfast.

Fifteen hundred metres is not high enough to cause altitude problems and is easily high enough to change the weather. Nights are cold here even in high summer, when the coast three hours away is still warm at midnight, and mountain weather closes in fast enough that a clear morning is not a forecast. Pack for a different country than the one you left on the coast. The walking season runs through the warm months, with the high routes clearing latest; the shoulder months are beautiful and unreliable; winter is a genuine winter with snow on the roads and a working ski area on the slopes above town.

There are two ways in from the south and they are not equivalent. The route through the canyon and over the bridge is the spectacular one and is a piece of the trip in its own right; the inland route is faster in poor weather and considerably duller. The high pass road across the massif is the most dramatic drive in the municipality and is a summer-only proposition — it closes with the snow and stays closed a long time. In winter, whichever way you come, the approach is a mountain drive rather than a transfer, as getting around sets out.

The recurring mistake here is a single night, arriving late and leaving after breakfast, which buys the drive and none of the region. Two nights gives a full day for the river or the mountain and a second for the other; three lets the weather be wrong once without costing the trip. The town has enough beds and enough kinds of them that this is rarely the constraint — the constraint is the itinerary that treated the north as a stopover.