Montenegro’s lost interior

How many Spectator readers are aware that tiny Montenegro, that silver sixpence of south-east Europe, so long lost in the jumbled purse of geopolitics, has some of the deepest canyons in the world? Not many, I’d bet – we know the luscious Montenegrin Mediterranean coast, if we know anything. And I’d wager even fewer know that one such abyss, the Tara River Canyon, is one of the fastest watercourses on the continent. I’d imagine no one at all, including me until five seconds ago, knows that the longest stretch of rapids on this giddying torrent is called Borovi.

I only know this because I’ve just fallen in. It’s been a while since I have come a cropper canoeing, but this is a proper dunking. I can report that falling in the Borovi rapids on the Tara River in northern Montenegro is like being a terrified sock stuck in an out-of-control tumble dryer, only much colder and wetter.