Montenegro and Kotor

From Dubrovnik we caught a bus across the border to the tiny nation of Montenegro.  Montenegro is unique in the fact that it is the only Balkan nation that maintained its independence during the Ottoman Empire's conquest and control of the peninsula.  It's strange to think that such a small country that only had 100,000 citizens at the time, and had no official army until the 20th century, could maintain independence while every nation around it fell to the Turks.  Twice Montenegro seemed on the verge of being consumed by the Ottoman Empire, only to have the Russians step in to defend the only remaining bastion of Orthodox Christianity in the ever-expanding sea of Islam.

On the Ferry Across the Bay of Kotor

The bus ride took us 2.5 hours, but over one hour of that was consumed by border control!  I don't know what was going on, why it took so long, or why we had to go through so many different checkpoints, but we finally made it into the country.  We even got a nice little surprise on the bus trip--we took a ferry.  It was pretty cool.  Our first stop was Kotor, a coastal town in the far north of the country, located on the Bay of Kotor.  The Bay of Kotor is widely recognized as being one of the most beautiful bays in the entire world!  Kotor, like its Croatian coastal-brethren to the north, is a fortified city.  The old town is almost like a miniaturized Dubrovnik in a slightly different setting.

We had heard getting a bus from Dubrovnik can be tough, so we opted not to book the only hostel in the city and just show up.  As luck would have it, the two (obnoxious) girls in front of us took the only remaining free beds in the hostel.  Yet the hostel-owner told us that he would make a call and find us somewhere to stay, along with the two other couples in line behind us.

Enter: the Godfather of Kotor--as we would soon come to call him.  The hostel-owner called a mysterious man to come pick us up and find us lodging.  He was over six feet tall, dark, and thin, yet built.  Everything about him commanded attention.  All six of us walked in-tow behind him as he briskly walked us around the town, constantly making calls as we went.  The Godfather also seemed to know everyone we walked by and anybody we passed would stop him, as it would seem, to present some kind of problem.  First he took us to a house outside the old city walls.  One of the couples with us choose to stay there, but we politely declined seeing as we wished to stay inside the old town as did the remaining couple.

The Godfather seemed a little perplexed by our wishes but got right back on the phone and quickly walked us back into town to an old lady's apartment.  It was here that we dubbed him the Godfather.  He kind of barged into the apartment to begin with.  it had two rooms, we got the outer room because we were staying two nights and the other couple got the inner room because they were only staying one night.  The old woman, at least 65 or 70, was in the apartment when we arrived but the Godfather sternly looked at her and told us that she would "make the beds and then disappear."  I didn't have cash on me at the time and I asked the Godfather if I should pay the lady or him.  He responded, "It does not matter.  You pay me or you pay her and I get it from her."  As we found out the next day, the old lady actually lived in the other room of the apartment and it appears that the Godfather had kicked her out of her own room for the night so the other couple could stay there!  After assuring me that he could find me a motorcycle to tour around the country, we parted ways.

While everyone else we've met has loved Kotor, we were less than impressed.  The town itself is great.  It's like a smaller Dubrovnik and is an even more manageable size--even better, it lacks the outrageous number of steps present in Dubrovnik's old town.  However, the few shops in Kotor sell complete garbage--even when compared to the tourist-centric tacky souvenier shops of most cities.  But what's worse, we couldn't find a good restaurant in the city!  First we had a somewhat disappointing lunch before walking around the town and spending the afternoon at the beach.  Then, we went to the Hotel Astoria, which is renowned for its location in Budva, Montenegro.  The menu looked great and the place itself was very "new-age chic"--definitely my kind of place.  Sadly, the food was more than disappointing.  Even the gelato, which is fresh and unique in every city we've been to, was completely pre-packaged, not fresh, and just plain not good.  I believe that, had it not been for the crummy food, we would have loved Kotor.  Alas, it was not meant to be.

While we spent the first half of our second day in the area in nearby Perast (Which I will discuss in a forthcoming entry), we climbed the Kotor fortress in the afternoon.  The fortress was pretty neat.  To reach the top we had to ascend over 1300 meters by climbing over 1200 steps!  It was exhausting, but the view was well worth it.  Kati and I agreed that, while the food in Kotor is uniformly awful, our experience climbing the fortress partially redeemed the town in our eyes.