Kotor, Montenegro

Traffic here is insane.  It took us an hour by bus to come here from Herceg Novi and an hour to get from the entrance to Kotor to the bus station.  There are 5 cruise ships in the harbour now.  Locals must hate tourists.

We check into the Kotor apartment with the help of our host Nesko who meets us at the bus station.

Nesko is a seaman who works on freighters from November to March/April.  He has literally travelled the world and is interesting to talk to.

The apartment is lovely.  It's across from Old Town with a view overlooking the bay of Kotor.

 In the evening we like to watch the lights come on at the fortress and to watch the boats cruise by.  We spend the evenings after dinner finishing our bottle of wine there.

We start our first day out with a climb of 1,350 stairs up to the Kotor fortress above Old Town.  The ascent is 1,200 meters and the distance, 4.3 km straight up. 

An artist who brings his paint supplies to work at the top also brings a cooler with drinks to sell to folks.  It is the most expensive beer in town, but worth every Euro.  Hard to believe he gets it up there.

I think that it's not the Mediterranean diet here that keeps people healthy, but all the stairs they climb every day.  To get back to the apartment we have an additional 275 stairs to climb.

Kotor, now a UNESCO World Heritage site was settled in ancient Roman times, then was fortified in the early middle ages.

This photo attempts to show the climb to the fort but doesn't actually get to the top:

The views of Old Town and the bay are spectacular, with a bit more revealed with each landing reached.

Partway up to the fort:

At the top:

There are 13 churches in Old Town.  At noon the bells in one church start ringing, then others chime in.  From above you can track them.  The ringing continues for about half an hour and its wonderful to hear.

This gal sits at one of the entrance gates to Old Town:

This is part of the wall of the fortress that you can't climb, but it is illuminated at night:

Outside the main gate:

This is the prettiest Old Town we've seen.  Random photos:

Serbian Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas:

Walking Old Town in this heat is thirsty work.  Here is Paul both quenching his thirst and apparently helping the environment:

We are having a rest in an alley and talk with a lovely man who just moved his family from the dangers of Turkey to Montenegro.  They run a shop in Old Town.  The shoes and boots from Turkey are works of art:

These are made from Turkish rugs:

The shoes above and boots below are hand-embroidered.

These dress-up boots are made from a real silver thread:

One day we decide to do a boat tour of Kotor Bay for a few hours.  It turns out to be a bit of a tourist rip off, but its cool on this sweltering day and we see a few interesting places.  

First, stop...we are taken right into a submarine bay ... part of the Yugoslavian war.

Next, we head into the Blue Cave.  Some folks dive into the water but so many tour boats are coming and going in this small space we consider it too dangerous, and frankly ridiculous:

Then we head to Our Lady of the Rocks Church on a man-made island, a UNESCO Heritage site.

The story is that on July 22, 1452, two brothers were fishing in front of Perast and found a picture of the Madonna and child stuck on a rock.  They took it home and overnight one of the brothers who had been ill for a long time was healed, so they vowed to build a church.  The town began the tradition of throwing a rock on this spot whenever they returned safely from a voyage and old ships were filled with rocks and scuttled here to build the island up.  By 1484 a church was built.

The church was plundered and robbed by pirates in 1624, destroyed by an earthquake in 1667.  It was rebuilt.

We are supposed to stop at the uninhabited Island Mamula, but our pilot passes it by.  It was built in 1853 as an Austro-Hungarian military fort; then used by Benito Mussolini as a Concentration camp in WW II.  130 deaths are associated with Mamula from this period.  Apparently, the government of Montenegro is now looking to turn it into an upscale resort.

An aerial view from the web:

Our final stop is the old town of Perast.  This is a beautiful place and we're wishing we could have more than twenty minutes to explore it.

Like other ancient places in Montenegro, Perast had many rulers; but it flourished in the 18th. century under Venetian rule, when it had four working shipyards.  Many citizens became wealthy by buying, selling and trading with visiting ships.

This Mazarovic Palace built in the 18th century:

Random photos from the boat:

An obvious shipwreck:

Its time to move on to Petrovac and once again our Airbnb superhost comes to the apartment, gets us a taxi, follows us on his scooter to the bus station to make sure we know where we are headed.  Amazing.

Hope you saw the post on the Kats of Kotor: