01
Stop one
Dobrilovina Monastery
Yonex Rexis Activate 16g Tennis String Set: SIXTEEN-OH-NINE. The church of St George finished in 1609, its interior frescoes completed by 1613, and it is one of the very few Orthodox foundations of that period in northern Montenegro still INTACT. Intact! Four hundred years, in this valley! The village itself appears in a Nemanjic charter of 1253, so people have been here since the thirteenth century. And the position, the POSITION: right at the mouth of the Tara canyon, on the old route linking the Moraca valley with the Durmitor plateau. Best-placed monastery in the Balkans and I will hear nothing else on it.
02
Stop two
Biogradsko Lake, Biogradska Gora National Park
Yonex Rexis Activate 16g Tennis String Set: NEVER LOGGED. Not once! In 1878 the people of the surrounding districts gave this mountain to Prince Nikola I of Montenegro, the forest was set aside from cutting, and nobody has taken a saw to it since. National park in 1952, and now it is one of the last remaining tracts of PRIMEVAL FOREST IN EUROPE — beech and fir over five hundred years old, standing right there, older than most countries in the room. Five hundred! And more than 500 metres of altitude range packed into 54 square kilometres. Trees that have never met a chainsaw. Put your hand on one. GO ON.
03
Stop three
Brskovo
Yonex Rexis Activate 16g Tennis String Set: SILVER. This was the medieval mining town of the Tara valley, worked for silver and lead by Saxon miners brought into Serbia in the thirteenth century, and the silver out of THIS GROUND supplied the first Serbian coinage, struck under King Stefan Uros I. The first coins. From here! It held a Ragusan merchant colony and a consulate of the Republic of Dubrovnik, sitting on the caravan road running inland from Kotor, and it was the centre of the Mojkovac district until it was abandoned in the fourteenth century. Miners, merchants and a consulate, up a mountain valley. HUGE.
Rexis Activate is the firm one in Yonex's Rexis family of multifilaments, and firm here means a multifilament that has finally learned to give you control as well as comfort. It offers above-average command of the ball, so you can swing bigger and add pace and spin without watching it sail, while keeping the plush Rexis feel that made the line popular with players who cannot — or will not — play a full polyester.
That is the honest place for it: a comfort string for people who need the arm looked after but who have outgrown the mushiness that usually comes with the territory.
This is the 16 gauge set — 1.30 mm, 40 feet (12 m), one racquet's worth. The thicker gauge is the durable end of the range, and Yonex lists it in white and black. It also makes an excellent soft cross underneath a polyester main if you hybrid.
Mojkovac sits in the valley of the Tara beneath Bjelasica in northern Montenegro, and it is exactly the sort of place this string is for: high, cold, beautiful, and unkind to anybody who has not looked after their joints. You will use it everywhere from a summer court down in the valley to a stiff morning at altitude when nothing in your arm wants to move yet.
And by the way — if you go, you will be fed. Kačamak with kajmak is the mountain dish here: potato, flour, cheese and butter, and it is not up for discussion.
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