24 Oct 06
Logic is turned on its head here in Montenegro, one of the furthest flung and least known parts of Europe. Here, the less potentially dependable a car is, the more is demanded of it. It's a great advertisement for the durability of cars from the 1980s onwards, and it's significant that nearly all the oldsters we saw were German.
And many of the old cars we saw on our drive to Montenegro and other parts of the former Yugoslavia wore GB plates. Why? If you're rich, you fly to a far-flung destination; if you're not, you drive. But that stops making sense the moment you compare the costs of a cheap flight with the expense of car fuel. So I think it's more complex than that. If you drive an older car, you're more adventurous, and you want to discover everything between home and destination instead of just arriving at an airport.
That's just what we did, apart from the old-car bit, because we wanted to find out how well the seemingly perfect family-holiday car, the Ford S-Max, would really cope. But why Montenegro?
Montenegro was Serbia's last ally as former Yugoslavia fell apart, but this year it declared itself independent. It was the final chapter in the sad Balkan saga, in which Montenegro's northerly neighbour, Bosnia-Herzegovina, suffered most of all. To drive to Montenegro would involve passing through Bosnia, its misery symbolised by the destruction, in 1993, of the medieval footbridge in Mostar.
