September 12, 2010
Kotor, Montenegro
For three days I’ve been trying to work out the logistics of a day trip to Albania, but it looks like it won’t be happening. It is a long ways and border crossings are dodgy just now. So…
Up early to this morning for a day trip south to Montenegro. I was to meet a minibus at the pickup point, which was the “Biker’s Cafe,” where all the patrons seems to smell of petrol. About 11 English-speaking tourists, a driver, and a cute English-speaking guide who delightful mispronounced a lot of words.
Montenegro was part of Serbia all through the war and actually helped Serbia to some extent with its attacks on Croatia. Mostly Orthodox, though it’s about 50-50 Orthodox and Catholic on the coast. They stayed as part of Serbia until 2006, when they peacefully split. Originally they used the Deutschmark, but then switched to the Euro when Germany did the same. Lots of Russians and lots of Russian investment on the coast.
About 45 minutes south of Dubrovnik, we passed through Herceg-Novi, a pretty little coastal town. A bit later we entered the Gulf of Kotor, a huge inlet that goes 23km in from the coast. The inlet is rather narrow and defended historically by two small islands, The coast of the bay bay is dotted with numerous tiny villages, and a couple of nice small towns including Perast. The gem of the area, however is Kotor.
The narrows in the entrance to the inner bay where you can’t quite make out Perast. The Islands that guard the bay. Perast.
Kotor is wonderful. It is a walled old city (stari grad) like Dubrovnik, but not as polished, not quite as spotlessly clean, not laid out in perpendicular streets, and not nearly as crowded. By way. Because it gets a little less tourism, there aren’t as many shops selling stupid cheap souvenir stuff and more shops selling things you actually might like to buy: clothes, jewelry, antiques, etc.
The extremely cool thing is that the walls extend up the mountain behind the town. This doesn’t show all that well in the photos and I sadly didn’t have time to climb them. There is a fortress and a couple of kirchen up on top.
