I’m blogging this Sunday evening from the home of Aco and Nevenka. Aco is in his early 70s perhaps: it's hard to tell. He's wiry, strong as an ox, and has an easy laugh. He was an engineer (though ‘was’ is probably a little premature: the contents of his garage - tools and machinery - would make any practical man weep). Nevenka restores furniture and paints, and is as lively and as much fun as her old man. Aco speaks little English, but makes up for it with an engineer's ingenuity. We communicate fine. Aco runs his house as a Soba, which here in Montenegro is equivalent to a B&B except that for £11 a night I get a very comfortable bedroom, an en suite shower, and small separate kitchen with all facilities including as much Chai as an Englishman can drink. I also get entertained by this amazing pair. It was very easy decision to install myself in this comfortable little flat for the night; getting Felix, my 2014 DR650, into Aco's garage proved a little more complicated. Aco’s house is just off the main drag in Cetinje, and his street is currently being dug up. The first problem, then, was that the footpath, the only remaining access to his garage was now an obstacle course of rubble mounds. The second problem was that running alongside the main road and therefore across the entrance to the footpath was a large open drain. When I pointed out the drain to him, Aco's response was ‘No problem'. ‘No way’, I thought. I learned later that Aco had been a enthusiastic motorcylist, and his father had been a professional sports rider for the Montenegran team. I, on the other hand am not a confident off-road rider. And although I've ridden on a fair bit of gravel, I've never got used to it. While I was debating how I was going to talk my way out of this, Aco picked up a portable Stop sign in front of the road works, and started examining it. You know the sign: it’s the universal, red, eight-sided sign that tells you to stop and think before you act. It was a second before I realised what he was intending. Carefully, he laid it across the drain in front of the footpath, jumped up and down on it a couple of times and repeated: ‘no problem’. I was still debating with myself whether this was a good idea as I crossed over the road to Felix. Could I trust Aco's judgement on this and more to the point, could I could trust my own nerve? How available was my inner teenager? Very available, as it turned out. I knew that even if the DR's rider sometimes let it down, it would have no problem with this. I fired him up, disengaged my brain, and headed for the drain. No problem. Job done, the sign was returned, now somewhat kinked, to its former use. With sufficient adrenalin in my system, the rubble mounds proved very little problem and I arrived at the garage upright and in one piece. Aco mumbled something in his broken English which took me a moment to decipher. I then realised: ‘Paris-Dakar’. I arrived in Montenegro last night, stayed at a campsite and then headed for the Bay of Kotor. The air in the bay is damp and the land is green. The entire bay is surrounded by high mountains, which plunge down into permanently calm waters, leaving just enough room for the road to skirt the bay. Here and there, where a river has gouged out a little valley for itself in the mountainside, small towns have sprung up. Some, in ancient times were Greek colonies, and the Romans were here too. All the towns I passed looked a little run down, and dismal. Many tourists come here in the summer, but there has been no commercialisation. The one modern-looking hotel complex, when looked at closely, appeared dirty and neglected. This is a poor country with little capital to build infrastructure. Arriving in the town of Kotor, then, gave me something of a surprise. Kotor is a prosperous port with deep harbour, pavement café’s and a booming tourist trade. It has ancient walls that surround the old city at sea level and climb high up the mountain beyond, presumably to prevent an attack from above. I’m already way behind the schedule I set for myself, but I couldn’t help stopping here and having a meal in a pavement café overlooking the bay. Eating at pavement café’s in a hot sun is a temptation I can rarely resist. Beyond Kotor the road charges uphill for fourteen kilometres to one of the highest passes I’ve crossed so far. I was told in advance that it had a total of 27 hairpin bends. It wasn’t told however, that these are only the hairpin bends on the final ascent. None of the other hairpin bends and near hairpin bends in the lower part of the road were mentioned. (And by 'the lower part', I mean the part I managed to ride before my ears popped). The right-handers were nerve racking. I wasn’t concerned so much about getting round, - that was easy enough - it was getting round when there was a car coming the other way. Here as elsewhere in South-East Europe, drivers don’t always stick to their own side of the road. And I sometimes rode wide, too. At the top of the pass I stopped at a restaurant with terraces giving spectacular views of the valleys, the lower mountains, and the entire bay. After the ascent, I decided it was necessary to have another meal. And while eating, I got into a conversation with a group of Italian bikers who were travelling around visiting war memorials in the region. Beyond the pass, the road dips down again into the village of Njegusi which sits in a hollow in the top of the mountain. It’s an idyllic-looking place at this time of the year, but hell in the winter, I imagine. The houses all have very thick walls. After Njegusi, the road continues to twist and turn for another 10 kilometres down into Cetinje. The landscape on this side of the mountain is entirely different. Peaks extend beyond peaks into the distance. The rocks and small trees make this road exquisitely beautiful. There is nothing I know in the Alps that can even begin to compare with it. Cetinje is a big town, located high up in the hills. It once the royal capital of a mountain kingdom. Set away from the lowland areas, no one speaks English here. I picked up a few groceries as I passed through, and carried on, intending to camp wild in the valley beyond. A couple of miles along the main highway to Podgoricia, the capital, I turned down the steep hillsides on a windy, single-track roadsides that drove ever deeper into the mountain forests. After 8 kilometres, though, it became very clear that I would find nowhere to camp here tonight. The road clung to the hillside and nowhere was there any flat land. The only village I saw was a tiny community cut into the slope. I turned back to Cetinje hoping to get back before dark – which is how I met Ato and his daughter, two of the most genial and funny people I have met on the whole trip – and that is saying a great deal.