View of Kotor old town and the Bay of Kotor, Montenegro

Jun 12, 2026 · Greencar.me Taxi

Day Trips from Bar: Exploring Montenegro by Taxi

Bar sits in a genuinely useful spot on the map. It's coastal, so the Bay of Kotor is within reach. It's close to the mountains, so Cetinje, Lovćen, and Ostrog aren't far either. And because Montenegro is such a small, tightly packed country, a single day with a car can realistically cover a lot more ground than most visitors assume when they first look at the map.

This guide is about what's actually possible: the range of trips you can do from Bar in a day, roughly how long each one takes, and what kind of day each one makes for. Some of these are easy half-day outings. A couple of them, honestly, are long days that reward the drive but deserve a clear-eyed look before you commit to them.

One quick note on how this works

We've written a full explainer on this elsewhere, so we'll keep it brief here: Greencar.me Taxi is licensed to pick up passengers inside Opština Bar, meaning Bar itself and the towns around it (Sutomore, Čanj, Dobra Voda, Šušanj, Stari Bar, Virpazar, Utjeha). We can't legally pick someone up in Kotor, Budva, Podgorica, or anywhere else outside that zone. What we can do is drive you from Bar municipality to any of those places and back. Everything in this guide is about that second half, drop-offs and day trips, which is completely unrestricted. If you want the full picture on how the pickup zone works and why, see our airport transfers guide, which covers it in depth. If you're more interested in staying close to home, our guide to getting around Bar municipality itself covers the towns, beaches, and Lake Skadar without any of the driving discussed below.

The shape of what's out there

Montenegro packs an unusual amount of variety into a small footprint, and Bar happens to sit close to most of it. Broadly, day trips from here fall into a few categories.

The coast north of Bar, running up through Budva and around the dramatic inlet of the Bay of Kotor to Kotor itself, Perast, and eventually Herceg Novi. This is the most visited stretch of Montenegro's coastline for good reason: walled Old Towns, a bay that looks more like a fjord than the Adriatic, and a genuinely striking drive the whole way. We cover Kotor, Budva, Perast, and Herceg Novi individually, and if you want to see more than one in a single day, we've also written up the full Bay of Kotor loop.

Inland heritage and monasteries, the older, quieter side of Montenegro that most beach-focused visitors never see. Cetinje, the country's old royal capital, sits in a valley behind the coastal mountains. Ostrog Monastery, built directly into a cliff face, is the most significant Orthodox pilgrimage site in the region regardless of your own faith or lack of one. Nikšić, the country's second city, is a more workaday stop but an honest one, with a brewery, a fortress, and none of the tourist polish of the coast.

Mountains and national parks, where the elevation and the driving time both go up. Lovćen National Park, just behind Kotor and Cetinje, is a manageable half-day trip with one of the best panoramic views in the country. Durmitor National Park and Žabljak, Montenegro's highest and wildest range, is a different proposition entirely, several hours each way, and worth planning around rather than squeezing in.

The south coast, in the other direction from everything above. Ulcinj, with its long sand beaches and the river delta island of Ada Bojana, is close, easy, and a genuinely different landscape from Bar's own coastline.

And because a lot of these trips raise the same practical questions, we've also written a few planning-focused posts: how a full-day taxi hire actually works, a quick guide to matching a trip to the kind of traveler you are, and when to go, season by season.

How far can you realistically go in a day

This is the question most people actually have, so here's the honest version.

Anything on the coast, Budva, Kotor, even Perast a little further round the bay, is comfortably a half-day or full-day trip with time to actually look around, not just sit in the car. These roads are well maintained and heavily used, and the drive itself, hugging the coastline with the mountains dropping straight into the sea, is part of the appeal rather than something to get through.

Inland trips to Cetinje, Ostrog, or Lovćen are a step up in distance but still very doable as a relaxed day out. You're looking at somewhere in the range of an hour to ninety minutes each way, on roads that climb and wind more than the coastal route, which is part of what makes them interesting rather than a downside.

Durmitor is the outlier, and we'd rather be straightforward about it than oversell it: it's a genuinely long way, several hours of driving each way through mountain terrain, and we've written about it separately with that honesty built in, including why treating it as an overnight rather than a single-day dash is often the better call.

A word on the tariff that applies here

We've written in detail elsewhere about how Montenegro's metered taxi tariffs work, so we won't repeat the whole system here. The short version that matters for day trips specifically: longer intercity routes like the ones in this guide run under Tarifa 3, "Van grada" (out of town), which uses a higher rate for the initial city-limits portion of the fare but the same distance-based rate as standard trips once you're out on the open road. In practice, this means the fare you see reflects the actual distance and route, not a flat guess. If you're hiring the car for a full day with multiple stops rather than a straight there-and-back, there's also a waiting-time mechanic worth understanding before you book, since it changes how the day's total cost adds up. We've explained that fully in how a full-day taxi hire actually works.

Picking the right trip

If you're not sure where to start, our quick matching guide sorts these trips by what kind of traveler you are: history, nature and mountains, beaches, or pilgrimage and religious sites. And if timing matters to you, our seasonal guide walks through how coastal and mountain routes behave differently depending on the time of year, including a straightforward look at what winter does to the Durmitor road.

Booking

All of these trips can be booked through the Greencar.me Taxi app on Android or the App Store on iPhone, as long as your pickup point is somewhere inside Bar municipality. For longer trips or anything involving multiple stops, it's worth booking a day ahead so a car and driver are confirmed rather than arranged last minute.