For anyone flying directly into Dubrovnik and spending their first few days wandering the streets of the old city, the culture shock experienced on a trip to Montenegro could best be described as a little like the feeling of leaving England for Scotland - although I see from your blank faces that I may need to expand a little before this simile becomes anything other than the ramblings of a mad man. I don't, of course, mean to suggest for one moment that the Montenegrin people are particularly different from their Croatian neighbours, or that everybody on this side of the border has three heads and speaks in tongues - far from it. No, the thing that really kicks you in the man parts the moment you cross into Montenegro is the sudden and quite unexpected change in the scenery. it's almost as though Montenegro somehow managed to get hold of an advance copy of the schematics for planet Earth, drew a line just to the left of Kotor bay and said to Croatia: "we're having this bit, find your own scenery".

Croatia, of course, does have beauty oozing from every pore, and also happens to be in possession of some of the most incredible lakes in the world - as I will be confirming in a few days when I head north towards Plitvice national park. It's just that anybody flying directly into Dubrovnik and spending their time pottering around the streets of the old city will have become acclimatised to living on a narrow wedge of land between the mountains and the sea - albeit an exceedingly beautiful one - and is likely to be rather taken aback to discover that this is only a fraction of what the former Yugoslavia has to offer. This is the same phenomenon, incidentally, that happens to visitors to Ibiza when somebody forcibly bundles them into the back of a van and shows them that there is more to the island than San Antonio.

For me, the Montenegrin border was, well, weird. Every other country in the world seems quite happy to establish an absolute border line with their neighbours and to slap a building on it in which people can shuffle forward in a neat line trying not to look too much like they need to be investigated internally. Montenegro and Croatia, however, have decided to do things entirely differently - and i can only assume this to be because some of them are still a bit miffed about all the bombs the other side dropped on them 20 years ago and refuse to be seen in the same room together. Driving along the border road, face pressed up against the window in awe at the scenery which is, frankly, now starting to take the piss, you arrive at the first of two border checkpoints. Here, you show your passport and wait while the nice man scrutinises it carefully and gives you a stamp to say that you're leaving Croatia - isn't that quaint, they still do the whole stamp thing here - and then you drive on to another checkpoint where you do the same thing all over again to enter Montenegro. The thing which makes this whole experience seem rather odd is this: these checkpoints are at least ten minutes drive from each other along a twisting road bordered on one side by a sheer cliff face and on the other by lush forests lifted straight from Jurassic park, so for several miles of your journey, you aren't officially in either Croatia or Montenegro. As you drive along this mysterious nowhere road through limbo, it's tempting to wonder what would happen if you just parked up and headed off into the trees to establish your own country. Burfutopia, it's got a nice ring to it don't you think? A bit like Mordor.

The official currency of Montenegro is the Euro, which might seem just a little off the wall because they aren't actually part of the European Union. Oh, they're thinking of joining - but as of the time of writing, the government is still at the stage where they're waiting for the highest proportion of the population to be against it before they take the plunge. That's how it works, you see. Ah, the memories. The logic behind this decision to borrow somebody else's currency has its roots at the end of the Yugoslav war, when Serbia and Montenegro briefly become one and decided to call themselves the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia despite the fact that everybody else just ignored them and kept on calling them Serbia and Montenegro. During their brief time together, the two countries couldn't really agree on anything and generally preferred to sleep in separate bedrooms, run separate lives and avoid each other at all costs. Then, finally, they accepted in 2006 that it just wasn't working out and filed for divorce, finally putting the last remnants of the former Yugoslavia out of its misery. And yes, I realise that I might be over simplifying the politics a little. Anyway, one of the things the two countries hadn't been able to agree about while they were together was which currency to adopt, so Serbia had ended up using the Dinar while Montenegro went for the Deutsche Mark, without really taking much notice of whether Germany was bothered in any way by this. When Germany joined the Eurozone and switched to the Euro in 2002, Montenegro simply followed suit. Again, the small matter of whether anybody cared about this didn't seem to cross their minds. The official line is that Brussels has tolerated the unauthorised use of the Euro up until this point on the basis that making Montenegro give it up would cripple their economy and bring the country to it's knees, so the whole matter has generally been swept under the carpet. It has recently occurred to someone, however, that if Montenegro joins the EU then it will officially be expected to abide by the rules which say that it doesn't meet the criteria for using the Euro, so there is currently a lot of head scratching going on in the corridors of power. Naturally, Montenegro just goes about its business as usual - it's never really been interested in what anybody else has to say.

Our guide on the bus to Kotor was one of those people who is able to effortlessly make anyone else feel ignorant by instantly switching between multiple languages at the drop of a hat. This seems to be a European speciality - somebody has told them that the British simply can't be arsed to learn anybody else's language, so they've each gone out of their way to learn seven just to show us all up. It's not just the words they've got mastered, either - it's also the accent, inflection and that little gurgling thing so many Europeans do which makes them sound as though they're trying to cough up a frog. I swear to god, it doesn't matter how many linguaphone language courses I invest in, I still can't say hello to a Frenchman without him laughing at me. Then again, perhaps that's just because he is French.

I attempted to redress the balance by pointing out to our guide, when we stopped for lunch, that she'd been pronouncing Yugoslavia wrong the whole day - she seemed to be under the impression that it had the word "slave" in the middle of it. She thanked me profusely for pointing this out, and then proceeded to tell the entire bus that I had done so over the tannoy as soon as we were back on board, adding: "Can you imagine, I've been getting it wrong all these years". Never heckle a tour guide. I quickly learned to keep my mouth shut after this, even when she indicated a former Turkish prison on one of the islands in the bay of Kotor and explained that it was now only used for manifestations.

I mentioned briefly at the beginning of this blog that Montenegro has something of an overabundance of scenery. This is particularly noticeable when entering from the direction of Dubrovnik and driving around the bay of Kotor, where the otherwise perfect blue waters suddenly become sparklingly green at the point they lap the shore. Misty mountains rise up all around the bay, and every small town you come to seems to be populated entirely by people fishing or sitting on a makeshift pier with their feet dangling in the water. Life just seems to be too idyllic to actually do anything strenuous. Stopping to take photographs becomes really quite time consuming, because every time you think you've captured the most beautiful photo ever taken, you find a better one thirty seconds further on. The drive takes you as close to the waters edge as you can go without actually getting wet, and there isn't a single moment between the time you enter the country and the time you arrive at the old city of Kotor that you aren't actively holding up the traffic in your eagerness to find somewhere to stop and take a photograph. The bay of Kotor is often referred to as Europe's most southerly fjord, and if you've ever had the good fortune to actually see a fjord close up then you'll know how truly remarkable this part of the world really is. If you want to be really pedantic about it, the truth is that what you're looking at isn't really a fjord at all but a Ria, but to most people the difference is purely academic.

Montenegro considers Kotor bay and the towns around it's coast to be their most important tourist attraction, and for good reason - but be honest, when's the last time you heard the bay mentioned on television or saw a write up in a travel magazine? Never, that's when. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you've probably never even heard of Montenegro - despite the fact that it was the setting for the Bond film "Casino Royale" - not that they actually filmed any of it here, or anything. It is a standing joke with the people of Montenegro that the film depicts their trains as being sleek and modern whereas in fact you'll be lucky to find one that isn't running three hours late because it fell to pieces on the way from the sidings.

If you were to get a time machine and go back to the eighties, you would find Montenegro to be a major player in the exotic tourism game - if you had money to burn, then you'd almost certainly have a yacht moored along the shores of the lake, and if you didn't then you'd be turning up year after year in a coach along with thousands of other sun seekers. Unfortunately for Montenegro, the Yugolav war well and truly put paid to all this and the tourism industry literally dried up overnight. So what you have now, rather pleasingly, is a paradise world of misty mountains and shimmering blue waters that nobody has ever heard of. I'd visit now, before the crowds arrive.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.