25-May-2002 -- I recently arrived to live and work in Podgorica, Montenegro, Yugoslavia. Having spent time on another continent chasing down confluences, I immediately checked out the longitude and latitude intersect situation here upon arrival. It turns out there are two in Montenegro, one seemingly up on a mountain top near the border with Kosovo, and one seemingly more accessible in the central but also mountainous part of this former Yugoslav republic. As another wise confluence chaser once told me, it might not be too wise to be found wandering around the Kosovo border with electronic gear in hand by some gun-toting soldier – not right now anyway – so I decided to go for the seemingly more accessible confluence.

And accessible it was. Trusty travel companion Iwona and I set out from Podgorica to Duži, a little mountain village quite near the confluence according to the not so trusty map. The road led us through Nikšić, a regional center of a town, and on to Šavnik, which was not much of a town at all, or so we were told by the local Podgorica folks before departing.

It turns out that Šavnik has a nice trout farm. It also sits scenically in a valley at the confluence of two modest rivers. The rivers enter and leave the valley by means of what seemed to be rather formidable gorges. Little did we know how formidible - and precipitous – gorges could be, as we drove through Šavnik and continued up the mountain around hairpin curves and over rickety bridges. At one point up on the narrow, winding road literally carved out of the side of the mountain, with the less than remote chance of being crushed to death by a rockslide from above and with the possibility of tumbling a thousand meters to a no less painful and tragic ending below, you could really feel the precipitousness of it all.

In the end, we made our way safely along the road on top of that breathtakingly abrupt and deep gorge to Duži, or so we think – there are no road or other signs up on Montenegrin mountaintops. We then proceeded to drive within 560 meters of the confluence and walk up a gentle hill to take the obligatory photograph. We were thankful that the confluence was not located on the other, utterly inaccessible side of the road…