Herceg Novi to Perast: Ferry or Around the Bay?

Drive around the bay. The ferry saves you nothing on this trip, and it costs five euro to find that out.

Herceg Novi to Perast is about thirty kilometres and takes roughly fifty minutes, all of it on one road along the northern shore. Follow signs for Risan and Kotor and the road does the rest.

Perast is on the shore you start from

The Kamenari to Lepetane ferry crosses the Verige strait from the northern shore to the southern one. Perast sits on the northern shore, between Risan and Kotor. You are already on the right side, and the ferry would put you on the wrong one.

The confusing part is that the ferry ramp at Kamenari sits directly on your route, fifteen kilometres out of Herceg Novi. You drive past the queue on your way to Perast, which is exactly why so many people join it. Keep going straight.

None of which makes the ferry a bad idea. It is an excellent one when you are heading for the southern shore, where it saves twenty two kilometres and the better part of an hour. The question is never how far away a place is, but which shore it sits on. And if you are adding up what a day of driving costs here, the ferry fare is one of those charges people mistake for tolls.

The speed limit is 50 for almost the whole way

Thirty kilometres in fifty minutes is an average of about thirty six kilometres an hour, which sounds like a traffic problem. Outside August it is not.

The road is the M-1, and along the bay 92 percent of it is signed at 50 km/h or less. Between Herceg Novi and Perast there are a hundred signed stretches at 50, twenty three at 40 and six at 30. Only seven let you go above 60, and nine narrow to a single lane.

So it is two lanes threading through one village after another, sea on one side, stone houses on the other, and nobody getting anywhere quickly. That stops being annoying about ten minutes in. Our table of driving distances does the same for the rest of the country.

You cannot drive into Perast

The waterfront street is signed for destination traffic only, so the village is closed to through cars. The car parks sit at the two entrances and you walk in from there, which takes a couple of minutes and is the nicest part of arriving anyway.

Those car parks charge a flat rate for the day rather than by the hour, so a quick look at the church costs the same as a long lunch. The one thing nobody publishes is the price. The lots sit on maritime land leased to a private operator, which puts them outside the Kotor municipal price list, so the sign at the barrier is the only figure that counts. Where prices are actually published, we have collected them.

Park, walk in, and the rest of the afternoon is Perast itself.