I'm back!

Hello! Sorry for the hiatus. I’m currently posting from our hostel situated in a monastery/nunnery/kindergarten in Split, Croatia. The nuns are all very sweet and it’s a quite a calming, reflective, and peaceful place to spend our last seven days. Yes it’s come to that, just seven more days! I can hardly believe it. Moving right along, here are a bunch of pictures from Biogradska Gora, the national park in Montenegro we volunteered at for ten days.

Montenegro is the 1st ecological state in the world. It’s a small country and we wound up seeing a fair bit through the seats of a van. It’s very mountainous with windy roads like in Hawaii and forests, rivers, waterfalls, and valleys everywhere. We took a few excursions to various villages and towns and though a portion of the drives was spent sleeping it, each trip felt like complete wilderness until we reached our destination with hardly any industrialization between the start and end points.

Biogradska Gora is one of the last three primeval forests in Europe embedded between the Tara and Lim rivers. In 1878 Montenegrin Prince Nikola I established the protection of the lake and surrounding virgin forest. This was the first official time nature was protected in Europe. It has 5,400 hectares extending over three municipalities and at the highest point it’s 2,139 meters above sea level. We must have been near that high point because it was freezing, literally, at times which, I would be persuaded to believe, requires substantial altitude in mid-May.

While we were there we experienced all seasons, no joke. It snowed/hailed for three days and rained for three, and we had four sunny days. Fortunately, as you can see, it’s a beautiful place to be in every condition and there were only a few other people who stopped at the park during our stay.

One of the warm, dry afternoons we made two fires and barbecued.


View from the top of a hike



Fog


Cabins




Cabins in snow


Winter



Summer