Kotor, Montenegro

Posted on July 23, 2022 by borysSNORC

We had a gorgeous drive from Trebinje to Kotor today – the scenery is gorgeous around here… it would be a lovely area to explore without being on a tight schedule, I think! Gorgeous! The colour of the water here is just stunning. And here we are at Kotor again. When I was here in 2016, I was kinda disappointed that we weren’t going to Dubrovnik that trip, but now I’ve been there and am back here – I think I prefer Kotor. It’s like a mini-Dubrovnik, similar feel, winding little streets packed with delightful cafes and kooky little shops – but less overtly touristy (I mean, still plenty touristy but less ‘in your fucking GoT loving face!’, touristy).

I remember trying to take a photo of this when I was here last time, but there was always so many people streaming in (this is the main entrance to town under the fortress walls) that I didn’t manage it. I love the old stone work and the carving… I like to think of the hands that crafted these hundreds of years ago, not ever knowing they would stand the test of time the way they have. Oh, and the weird little permanent Christmas shop that I noticed last time I was here, seems to have survived the pandemic! Seriously would not have expected that… was tempted to buy one of these hand painted wooden Santas to take home to show them some support, but I remembered myself and how much I fucking hate Christmas and resisted the temptation admirably. 😛 So after a little wander around, I found myself an out of the way cafe in one of the back windy streets and treated myself to some bruschetta and a spritz so I could just watch the people going by. Kotor is definitely a fun place to be, I’m not sure I’d suggest staying here for a few days, unless you were using it as a base to explore the region, but it is quaint and lovely. Some of our group were mad enough to go for a walk up the fortress walls in 36C heat… there’s quite a bit I’ll do for a photo op, but that ain’t one of them! Have to say, the cruise ships really kinda spoil the view. They should make them anchor around the corner and tender in to port… (like we did when we were on the enormous Regal Princess!) .You can make out the walk that goes around the walls and then up to the mountain to get the views over the city… there’s a small church up the top and apparently it’s not particularly noteworthy, but fuck that walk in this heat!

Usually Simon was full of useful information about the towns we were visiting and the local history etc. On the way into Montenegro, he told us the one thing he said the Montenegrins are s truly proud of was how lazy they were held to be! He said it’s a reputation they revel in, and are absolutely proud to be as lazy as humanly possible. He read us these Montenegrin Commandments (which were on postcards everywhere) and said people here are will do just about anything to get out of doing work…

So in the spirit of embracing my inner Montenegrin, I decided to spend the remainder of our time in town relaxing with more spritzes for the people watching! Having raced around like a mad chook last time I was here, it was nice to be able to just chill and enjoy the scenery.

After our visit to Montenegro, we were back on the bus – poor Kris was stuck in traffic for ages – 50 mins to move 4kms – so we were a bit behind schedule. And it was off to Budva once he managed to get to us.

The drive there was equally beautiful as we wound our way down the coast. Still in Montenegro so no time wasted in border checkpoints.

Budva is a completely unknown quantity to me, having never been there before and knowing very little about the place… but this is what the ‘Budva brochure’ looks like:

There’s a gorgeous old town happily situated on the mouth of the bay, but unfortunately due to our late arrival, we weren’t going to have time to go explore that. The hotel we were staying in was right down on the beach in the ‘Budva Riviera’ which sounds super exotic…. until you realised it’s full of cashed up Russian bogans and it’s fucking Spring Break out there! Our hotel was the dodgiest one on our entire itinerary… when we checked in, we were given a key, remotes for the AC and a television and strict instructions to check everything was working before everyone head out for dinner. When we stepped into the room, it was obvious that people had been smoking in there and there was a super strong smell of bleach – never a good sign! (Undiluted bleach I late found out because my PJ pants fell from a towel rail to the bathroom floor and it stripped all the colour from them – not happy, Jan!).

Anyway, ‘outside’ there was party sounds in every direction. Turns out that Russians own 80% of the real estate in Budva, so that is the primary language spoken here, they are noticeable everywhere with their shaved heads, shiny tracksuit pants, white singlet tops and big gold chains and ubiquitous cigarettes. Though it turns out due to the war in Ukraine, there are not as many Russians travelling here this year as normal, so a lot of the hotels and resorts have had to market really cheap holiday packages aimed at young people all over Europe to put bums on beds this season… so it is kinda chaotic out there.

I had low expectations of a good nights sleep – and those were met admirably by music from several parties reverberating through the hotel until the wee hours.

Budva… oh fuck.

Posted on July 20, 2022 by borysSNORC

We get up this morning and I can’t wait to get the fuck out of Budva. Had an awful night’s sleep between the music and the rattling air con. Go down to have some breakfast and Angus is feeling a bit under the weather – I assumed it was just the ‘sniffles’ that was going through the bus; one of our travel companions, Josh had been sniffling for a couple of days and had tested for Covid twice, but was thankfully negative.

Angus tells me that he’s not feeling great and I ask him what he wants to do and he decides to go off and ask Holly for a RAT test. Every tour bus seems to have at least one Holly – she’s an ICU nurse from Victoria and she’s been a wealth of information for the various aches and pains that people crop up with when they’re travelling. Our Holly is amazing, she’s been dealing with Covid patients in the ICU since the pandemic began and she’s just the most caring and wonderful young woman I think I’ve ever met.

Anyway, Holly gives Angus a test and well fuck wouldn’t you know it, it’s positive. So Josh goes back and tests again – he’s now positive too. Turns out a third young man, Darren is also positive, and then we get to watch the paranoia ensue…

Company policy is that they can’t continue on the tour. And I understand that entirely the company and the guides have a responsibility to the entire group and can’t knowingly have sick people travelling with the healthy ones… but there are at least another 6-8 people with he same sniffles and cough on the bus, but if they don’t test and don’t tell the leader, then they get to stay. Damn, but I wish we hadn’t tested him until Tirana or Skopje, because now we are off the bus and if fucking Russian bogan-land, Budva!

(*Oh why was he wearing this t-shirt today!)

Poor Simon then has to call his director and find out what to do with us – there’s no way I’m leaving Angus sick in fucking Budva on his own, so I’m off the bus too even though I have no symptoms and am feeling fine. They said they will find us rapid accommodation in a nicer hotel than the one we stayed in last night! Thank fuck for that! So Simon sets off on foot making phone calls and racing into reception areas.

It takes him about an hour before he finds a place that can give us two rooms and we say some quick goodbyes, but are sadly and unceremoniously dropped off at the new hotel to wait and see what is going to happen from there and the tour leaves without us.

So we find ourselves, me and these three Covid positive young men, sitting around a hotel reception area from 0900 until a possible check in time of 1200. :/ Mostly they’re just sitting there sweating and enjoying the decent wifi, while I’m already plotting how to to get the fuck out of Budva! My reasons for wanting to flee were multiple, but the biggest ones were – we are stuck in a small party town that (from quick googling) has limited covid facilities in their local hospital, has a population with some of the lowest vax rates in Europe and if Angus got sicker or I was already sick with it just not symptomatic yet – the last thing we need is to be stuck in a town where the primary language is Russian, the second, Croatian and all the English speakers we’d met spoke worse English than my French or German! Yikes.

While waiting for the hotel rooms, we discover that insurance claims will need PCR tests before they’ll cover any covid related healthcare of travel changes… so the boys all trot off to go get a test which thankfully was just over the forecourt at the front of this enormous resort hotel we’d been taken to. Eventually the rooms are ready and everyone is kinda exhausted, the boys are in various states of illness, a bit feverish, very fatigued and coughing a little here and there. The resort is so huge, we have to be taken to our ‘villa’ (and I use the term loosely) by golf buggy. So we load all onto this thing and get there only to find out we are on the third floor and there’s no lifts!

Shit, fuckity, shit, shit!

My feet and knees have been giving me loads of extreme pain for days (the fibromyalgia was super stirred up, I think a combination of cobblestones and sitting on the buses for hours) so the idea of having to traverse six flights of stairs to ‘pop out for food, water or supplies’ was just a dirty big ‘NOPE!’… so my determination to get us the hell out of Budva asap was now seriously accelerated.

The guys all get into the rooms around midday and all immediately crash and sleep for about six hours – time I put to good use planning our escape. It’s a Friday and the weekend is looking bleak. But I figure I have an internet connection and a credit card and I can make this work… until it turns out the internet in the rooms is for shite and I can’t get things to load after I left the reception area!

While they were sleeping – we had received a message from TT saying they had managed to secure the rooms until Monday for them, and would work out what happens after that. I had asked the guys if they were planning to stay until Monday or did they want to transfer the fuck out of there with us? They were both pretty noncommittal and seemed happy to take the free accommodation on offer, but there was no way I was hanging around to see how things panned out.

So onwards with the planning and… Poo, bum, piss, fart, bugger and fuck – right when I really needed it the most, there’s no fucking internet. I have two SIM cards – one from the UK, which mostly works in EU countries, so not Montenegro, and one from AUS which is supposed to have coverage in Montenegro, but the reception in this resort was barely 1 bar of 3G and the hotel wifi was so slow and was dropping out so much as to be nonexistent. I ended up waking Mr K at 0400 in Brisbane to help make some bookings for me.

Plan B involved:
– Booking a driver to get us from Budva to Cilipa (near the Dubrovnik airport) after check out tomorrow morning.
– Finding an airport hotel to stay for Saturday night.
– Take the most affordable flights I could find to Athens.
– Convince Travel Talk that seeing we had paid for accom up until the end of the tour, and were not using the hotel in the party hard town of Budva, could they please cover the hotel in Athens.

Simple right? We managed to book a driver to take us to Cilipa which cost AUD$220, then booked an Airbnb place which was €130 for the night near the Dubrovnik airport, and then flights from Dubrovnik to Athens on Sunday morning with Aegean at completely arse-rape, last minute prices of €349 each! Ouch! But Plan finally in place I managed to calm my tits and get ready to go to sleep.

At some point while I was dealing with all these logistics, poor Angus had gotten up and his appetite had overcome his symptoms and he decided to head out (six flights of stairs!) to find some food. He found local Italian restaurant that did take always about 400m from the room and when he walked in, the waiter insisted he take his mask off! No shit, they do not want anyone reminded that there might be a deadly virus circulating still.

And it was on this note and we eventually crashed for the night… thankfully from this enormous resort, the party noises seemed much further away, and bless it’s cotton socks, the air con was working better than most but we had been in masks all day and because of the proximity, (we had pushed the beds apart as much as possible in the small space), we were sleeping in them too.

Tomorrow – we will see how tomorrow pans out… because it has to be better than today’s clusterfuck.

Kotor, Montenegro

Posted on July 13, 2016 by borysSNORC

Kotor was first settled by the Ancient romans as early at the 5th century BC, and apparently was later turned into a fortified city but the Emperor Justinian in the 6th AD. It’s a big tri-angular fortress right on the port of the city, nestled in among the Montenegrin mountains and a picturesque inlet of the Adriatic sea. Since I was investigating this itinerary this time last year, I have been a bit puzzled as to why the ship calls at Kotor in Montenegro, rather than Dubrovnik in Croatia which is just an hour or so north by car… but after visiting today, I think we can happily say it is a very beautiful town with lots to offer than hardly anyone has ever heard of. Kotor is a maze of cobblestone streets, and simple buildings with terracotta toned roofs. There are a number of Romanesque churches and well preserved and restored buildings in the Old Town. I’m sure I’ll be back in the region again one day and will get to see Dubrovnik, but until today I had been lamenting that we weren’t going to Dubrovnik instead.

Right off the ship, the medieval Old Town is a just a short walk from the port. Passing through the enormous fortress walls is quite impressive in itself, and entering the square, visitors are greeted by a beautiful square with a beautiful clocktower.

Kotor was another Mediterranean kingdom that was conquered and conquered and conquered again – originally founded by Greeks in the 10th century BC, then the Illyrians, and then the Romans who ruled for 650 years,. After that the Visigoths stroke on in from Germania and demolished Kotor in the 5th century and then it became of part of the Byzantine Emptier in 476AD until c.800AD. Then when the Venetians were expanding their dynastic trade routes into the Adriatic, Kotor became and important artistic centre through the Middle Ages. There is plenty of evidence of medieval handiwork in the Old Town, in particular, in the massive defensive walls that protect the city, and in the medieval architecture inside the town. Kotor’s modern history is just as convoluted, but well… I’m less interested in all that. And if you think I remembered all this, you’re mad. I had to look it all up!
Some of our group decided to walk the fortress walls – got up there early before the heat (wise move it was seriously hot today), and they took the 1200 uneven cobbled steps involved to do the 4.5km walk around the fortress walls. More power to them, I would have loved to do it, but even take 800 steps off that and I’d have to have re-thought that plan the way my back is feeling at the moment. The views from the fortress are impressive… Kotor Inlet… the entire inlet is surrounded by the Montenegrian mountain range which rings the bay. It very effectively stifles any sea breezes from making it into the town. Add to that, the fact that the town is entirely walled, and you have one big hot box. The place if gorgeous, but it was almost unanimously agreed, that it would be twice as beautiful in shoulder season when you weren’t walking around in 35C heat without so much as a whiff of breeze to refresh you. View over the rooftops from the top of the fortress.

The St Tryphon Cathedral – dedicated to the city’s patron saint and protector; built in 1166, the interior has a lavish gilded altar, some medieval frescoes, and a museum collection of Venetian art, as well as many interesting and unusual medieval reliquaries.

There was no English guide or plaques telling us what we were looking at, but most of the artefacts are 12th-16th century… so we had to wing it a little. Medieval saintly reliquaries of God-Knows-Who from God-Knows-Where. :/ Very cool plaque belt/girdle? Loved the work in it so photographed the lot. Rough guess 1300s-1500s… though my jeweller friends might have a better stab at that.

Enormous chunky crown – though no idea whose it was or what time period we are talking here. Frustrating!

View from the top of the Cathedral down to the Square. Lots of meandering little back alleys.We found ourselves delayed leaving port due to a medical emergency, which we later found out was the result of a passenger falling between the ship and a tender boat when embarking the ship. Apparently the poor guy fell and was crushed, resulting in a broken leg and possibly some broken ribs. I hope he’s okay, and I hope Princess look after him and his family.

From the ship as we left port.