Montenegro
After three amazing days in Dubrovnik, we picked up a car and made the short drive to the Montenegrin border. Montenegro is not much bigger than the US state of Connecticut but offers more than you’d think for its size, with a rugged, mountainous interior, a stunning coast as good as any on the Adriatic, and the majestic Bay of Kotor, a T-shaped fjord-like inlet peppered with pretty little historical towns and villages. The last of the former Yugoslav republics to claim—and be recognized for—independence, Montenegro in its current form is less than 10 years old.
We broke up the drive around the bay with a stop in Herceg Novi (“New Castle”) and we were immediately aware of the difference in level of tourist infrastructure and sophistication between Montenegro and Croatia—the parking system was beyond archaic, requiring a hike up to a small café where the restaurant had to write up one ticket per hour of parking I was requesting. This meant that, as we requested four hours of parking time, we had to bring back to the car and display on the dashboard four separate tickets for each hour. While we found this frustrating, we couldn’t help but find the charm in such a silly system!
Herceg Novi’s Old Town is quaint and offers views of the bay from above almost everywhere you go. We wandered around, slowly making our way to the Kanli Kula Fortress where we took in some more vistas of the surrounding mountains and waterfront. Back down in the Old Town we stumbled on a small local market with vendors selling fresh produce and flowers, and even in cases where we don’t plan on buying anything, we always enjoy taking a look. We took a rest at the main square (Trg Herceg Stjepana) and quickly realized another difference from Croatia: everything is so inexpensive! We stopped in Crkva Svetog Arhangela Mihaila, an Orthodox church that serves as the central point of the main square. While Croatia is primarily Catholic, Montenegro, along with neighboring Serbia, is primarily Orthodox.
We finished our visit to Herceg Novi with some time at Forte Mare and then got back in the car with our sights set on the small bayside village of Orahovac where we would be staying for 5 nights. Our Airbnb was a small but comfortable apartment in the basement of our host’s house with a sizable stone patio right on the bay. Our host and his family were very friendly (even bringing down chocolate muffins and cheese pastries on different occasions!) and our location on the bay made it easy to get to all the points we wanted to hit on our trip. We took advantage of the patio, spending some afternoons laying out in the sun and swimming and enjoying sunsets every evening.
The town of Perast is one of the bay’s hot spots and for good reason. It’s a sleepy little village, but it’s for that very reason that many come to take in the slow pace of life and the beautiful scenery. On our first visit to the town we visited the Orthodox Church of the Nativity of the Virgin, walked along the harbor and enjoyed ćevapi and mussels at Konoba Skolji. On our second visit we took a boat out to Our Lady of the Rocks, a Catholic church built on a manmade island—as the legend goes, fishermen discovered an icon of Madonna on a rock in the sea in the 15th century and they worked tireless sinking ships and throwing rocks in one spot until an island formed. This tradition is still celebrated today and every year on July 22nd, residents go out to the island and add rocks to the ever-growing pile. What we found most interesting about our visit is looking around the edge of the island—you can see how many rocks it’s taken to form this island!
The bay’s starring town (and namesake) is Kotor, located in the deepest and most secluded portion of the inlet. We were struck right away by the beauty and architecture of the Old Town and its tangled mess of streets and alleyways which were a pleasure to wander. Even with the warmest and most humid weather of our trip, we hiked the 1,300 steps up to the Fortress (with a rest about halfway at Cskva Gospa od Zdravlja) and were handsomely rewarded with commanding views of the bay and its environs. We were so warm and tired (and out of water) that we found it fitting to celebrate with a Sprite from one of the vendors selling overpriced cold drinks at the top—never had the fizz of a soda felt so refreshing!
We visited Kotor a second time and spent more time at sea level exploring the streets of the Old Town, visiting St. Nicholas Orthodox Church and the Church of St. Luke and finding our souvenir (a small, framed hand-painted piece of wood depicting the two islands in the bay) at Gallery Nives. After a delicious dinner at Astoria Restaurant (Rico had the pork gyros and Britt had the chicken skewers), we sat down to enjoy some gelato from Il Gelato di Salvatore in Trg od Oružja (“Square of Arms”) and people watch. Our drive back to Orahovac that night featured a surprise, sunset drive along the coast in Dobrota where we got of the car to appreciate the view by a collection of row boats. Moments like this is, for us, what traveling is all about.
Up next, our visit to Lovcen National Park, a hairy ride down from the mountains to the coast, swimming at secluded beaches, the ritzy town of Budva, the fairytale islet of Sveti Stefan and, of course, paragliding high above the Montenegrin coast!
Though most would consider the Bay of Kotor the jewel in Montenegro’s tourism crown (partially because it’s a popular day trip from Dubrovnik), the country’s coast on the Adriatic is worthy of a visit. Similarly, the rugged interior offers a serene escape from the crowds and a view of rural Montenegrin life.
Lovćen National Park is an easy trip from the Bay of Kotor, only an hour and a half’s drive east, and well worth it if at least for the views of the bay from above. We opted to take the “back way” (Old Kotor Road, route P1) which includes a seemingly never ending series of hairpin turns with commanding views of the surrounding mountains at every curve. Once at the car park near the summit, we took the many stairs up to the Njegoš Mausoleum, the burial place of 19th century national hero and poet Petar II Petrović-Njegoš. The most noteworthy part of our visit to the mausoleum was sitting on the platform on the backside of the building which allows for a 360-degree view of the surrounding mountains!
Our drive down from the mountains toward the coast was a bit of a hairy one. The main road between Lovćen and Budva was unexpectedly closed for construction, so we had to instead navigate tiny unsigned mountain roads that were not even showing up on our GPS half the time! On two occasions we ended up on local farms where we had to awkwardly apologize and turn our car around. The first time, the two gentlemen we saw did not speak any English and did not seem to want to help anyway, but the second time we stumbled on a friendly husband and wife that were very willing to help. They did not speak a lick of English either, but the husband was animatedly adamant that we take a right at the fork in the road farther down, repeatedly shouting “desna!” (which we picked up only because of its similarity to the Italian “destra” for “right”) and grabbing and shaking Rico’s right arm to get his point across. With his help we ended up at the coast and stopped at Drobni Pijesak for lunch and a swim. The beach is beautiful, tucked away and sparkles with clear blue-green water. After relaxing and swimming for a few hours, we grabbed bruschetta from Smokov Vigenac and started our journey back to Orahovac, but not before hitting a terrible traffic jam near Budva—apparently the country had hoped construction to update and widen its primary coastal highway would be complete by the tourist season, but alas…
It wasn’t long before we were back in the Budva area, this time to have a go at paragliding for the first time! We met our instructors in a parking lot and crammed into their old, non-air conditioned Mercedes for the ride up to the launching point. After many hairpin turns up the mountainside, we pulled over in Brajići and started to set things up. It was a bit chaotic as our instructors spoke varying levels of limited English and we were trying to feel them out on whether or not the thick clouds in which we were enveloped and even distant rumbles of thunder were things to be concerned about. Rico got geared up first and we sat and waited for a clearing. Once the clouds broke just enough to see half a mile down to the coast, we were off! The views from up in the air were incredible and we had a good 15 minutes to take it all in. Once we got closer to the coast, our instructors separately asked us whether we wanted to do “acrobatics.” Sure, why not? We started to swing wildly in the air, in some cases hanging almost upside down. After a minute or two of this, we tried to tell them that we were “good,” meaning we were all set with acrobatics and happy to continue floating down, but our “good” was interpreted as “keep going!” The joys of language barriers.
We landed right by the parking lot where we left the car and quickly fell to our knees to kiss the ground! One of the coolest features of the coastline from high above is the unique islet of Sveti Stefan, so we decided to head in that direction. Pictures of Sveti Stefan, with its stacks of neat houses with uniform orange terracotta roofs and its strip of beach connecting it to the mainland, were the first inspirations we had years ago to visit Montenegro in the first place. Unfortunately the island is now a resort and does not allow visitors, but we grabbed lunch right by the beach with the island in our view. Feeling refreshed, we made our way to Budva, one of the richer party centers in Montenegro. The Old Town is very pretty, almost like a mini Dubrovnik (but much cheaper!). We walked around the Citadela at the town’s extreme southern point and then wandered our way through the streets, stopping at Katedrala Svetog Ivana and the Catholic Church of St. John. After some gelato in the shade of one of the Old Town’s many little squares, we hopped in the car back to the bay.
Our trip to Croatia and Montenegro was full of the things that make trips so fun and memorable—beautiful towns, stunning beaches and scenery, friendly and interesting people, good food, and a little adventure. We loved our second visit to this part of the Balkans so much that we already have a third trip to Croatia tentatively penciled in for 2017! And we have a feeling that won’t be our last.
