CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 325 km round trip from Kotor - roughly 8 h 02 in the saddle. The stops in between: Lokrum Island, Boljuni and back through Lokrum Island. It crosses Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina - carry ID and check vignette or toll rules. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
Kotor is a walled medieval town squeezed between a vertical limestone mountain and a deep green bay, and the whole arrangement looks almost too neat to be real. The bay is not a fjord, as people like to say, but a drowned river canyon, a ria, whose channels twist inland in several arms so that the mountains seem to close behind you as you ride around it. Black Mountain, Montenegro itself, takes its name from the dark forest on Mount Lovcen, which rises straight above the town to nearly fifteen hundred metres.
Read the complete Fortified city of Kotor write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Fortified city of Kotor is where the day begins. Next is Lokrum Island.
From the walls of Dubrovnik you look straight across a short stretch of sea to a low, dark green island covered in pines and holm oaks. That is Lokrum, and it is the closest thing the city has to a back garden. No cars or motorbikes are allowed on it, and nobody may stay overnight. You leave the bike on the mainland, catch one of the regular boats from the old harbour, and in about a quarter of an hour you step onto a quay with peacocks strutting about as if they owned the place, which they more or less do.
Read the complete Lokrum Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Lokrum Island comes up about 81 km into the recorded legs. Next is Boljuni.
In the stony hills of eastern Herzegovina, a few kilometres from Stolac, a field of grey limestone blocks lies scattered among oak scrub and dry grass. These are stećci, medieval tombstones carved between roughly the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, and Boljuni has a few hundred of them, many decorated with reliefs: rosettes, crescents, spirals, hunters with spears, dancing figures holding hands, a man raising an oversized hand as if in greeting. Nobody fully agrees on who made them or what all the symbols mean, which makes standing among them oddly moving. Together with other cemeteries across Bosnia and Herzegovina and its neighbours, Boljuni is part of the UNESCO site of Stećci Medieval Tombstone Graveyards, inscribed in 2016.
Read the complete Boljuni write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 164 km into the recorded legs you reach Boljuni. Next is back through Lokrum Island.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Lokrum Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Lokrum Island, late in the day. Next is Fortified city of Kotor.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Fortified city of Kotor write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Fortified city of Kotor. That is the ride.
Fortified city of Kotor → Lokrum Island is 81 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Lokrum Island → Boljuni is 83 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Boljuni → back through Lokrum Island is 82 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Lokrum Island → Fortified city of Kotor is 79 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.