MOTORING THROUGH

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 305, 24 December 1937, Page 7 (Supplement)

MOTORING THROUGH

MONTENEGRO Our next stopping place was to be Cetinje, the capital of the one-time kingdom of Montenegro. Il is twen'iyeight miles from Kotor by one of the most wonderful roads in lhe world. It climbs Mount Lovcen up and up in terrific hairpin loops; ahead it looks as though the mountain was scarred with fortification 1 ' until you realise that it is the embankment of the steep, sharp-turning road by which you will pass. And all ahead arc the grey Karst Mountains of .hi. kingdom of Montenegro. But behind you, or more generally sideways, since even that road does not take you straight over the mountain face, looking more and more like a relief map, the intricate bays and channels of the Boka and the wild sheer mountains are spread. The pass is only 3000 feet high, but the climb is so steep and abrupt to it that it seems far higher. Our driver was splendid, for 1 really think he wasted no time at all over the hairpin angles, and yet he never once frightened the passengers. We didn’t see any other cars at all. We hardly regretted losing at last the glorious panorama of Boka Kotorska, for Montenegro <vas sc wholly fascinating on its own account. We had never been anywhere so barren and so wild. . . . The few scattered houses and villages had funny bright red roofs. We came sometimes on quite large groups of people sitting by the roadside, quite out of sight of all habitation. The waving and the greeting and the cheering went on none of these very, very poor people, living such hard lives, had a surly look for us luxurious tourists roaring through in our car. Tourists and a car were an event, and as such to be smiled at and welcomed. We gave an old man a lift, and were staggered by the miles and miles of barren country we traversed before reaching his destination. . . He produced a purse expecting to pay for his luck in getting a lift, and thanked us all with great courtesy on finding it was free. It was nice of our chauffeur to approve of our picking up wayfarers, for after all he was the , one who had to talk to them. ■ Montenegro is beautiful, moving, in its grey sculptured grandeur. We longed to stay there for a little.— From “The Unambitious Journey,” by the Hon. Theodora Benson. (London: Chapman and Hall).

DENMARK'S DEER PARK Sensitiveness to beauty, which Grundtvig hoped to quicken in Danish hearts, is nowhere more charmingly expressed than in their appreciation of their forests. From early spring when the first leaves cast a lozenged pattern on the carpet of white anenomes below, through the summer when those * same leaves spread into a canopy between earth and sky, to the autumn when the sunlight filters through them as through stained-glass windows upon their grey trunks, smooth and straight and evenly ranged or grouped as pillars in a cathedral, the beech woods are the joy of every Dane. To go on a Sunday in summer to the great Deer Park (Dyrehavent a few miles north of Copenhagen is a revelation not only of a beech-wood forest more extensive and more beautiful than any other in Europe, but of the uses—aesthetic, scientific, and social —of such a forest. The four or five square miles of what were once the Royal Hunting Grounds stretch in grassy glades between the groves of beeches, soften into moss beneath the grey trunks, extend in aisles beneath the groined arches of limbs finely moulded as carved stone. There is apparently no end to these aisles—these superb, grouped clusters of trees, no measurement of meadows blowing with wild flowers, no counting of the deer which, white and black and brown, drift across the patches of white sunlight and dissolve into the black and brown shadows beyond. People stroll along the roadways and footpaths, they stretch under the trees and sleep or read, they spread out picnic luncheons, they pet the deer. In the winter they toboggan, in the autumn they have paper chases. And so vast is this lofty solitude that a hundred thousand people do not crowd it—do not even mar its tranquility. A hundred thousand people are permitted to enter without charge and to go where they wish and to do what they will—to pick wild flowers, to nurse their babies, and court their sweethearts—without a single prohibitory sign or a single policeman. And not one injures a tree, frightens a deer, commits improprieties, or leaves trash behind! Since all observe a rational code of behaviour, all enjoy absolute freedom. —From ''Denmark," by j Agnes Rothery.