The old road out of Kotor does not waste time. It begins almost at the town walls and starts climbing at once, and the famous count is twenty-five hairpins, numbered on small signs, with the bay shrinking below you at each turn until the cruise ships in the harbour look like toys in a bath. The Austrians built it in the nineteenth century, when this coast belonged to the Habsburgs and they wanted a way up the mountain wall to the Montenegrin capital at Cetinje. The gradient is steady, the corners are tight and well engineered, and the retaining walls are old dry stone that still do their job.
You should know that this is a busy road for what it is. Tour coaches and delivery vans share it with the two-wheelers, and the hairpins are narrow enough that a coach has to swing wide across the whole carriageway. Take it early, before the ten o'clock wave, and the rhythm is lovely: lean in, wait, lean out, a second of gravel under the tyre at a bend, a car park with a view, and then the next. The tarmac is mostly decent. In wet weather the painted lines and the polished stone edges are slick.
The bay beneath you is not a true fjord but a drowned river canyon, one of the deepest inlets on this side of the Adriatic, and the mountains on its far side rise straight out of the water with no beach to speak of. Kotor itself, three kilometres down, sits in the hollow of this wall with a fortress zigzagging up the slope behind the old town. That wall climbs to a chapel on the hill, and legend says the pilgrims made the ascent on their knees.
For fuel, Kotor and Dobrota, in the bay, are your options, and both are a few minutes from the foot of the climb. Fill up before you go, because the top is a pass in a national park, not a services area. Allow time for a coffee in the old town at the end; the lanes get hot and loud by noon, but the squares are a good place to sit, and the grilled fish on the waterfront is dependable.