Montenegro June 10-12

The bus trip from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik was scenic.  Our route paralleled a river for the first couple hours.

Then we hit the Adriatic.

Arrived at Montenegran hotel in late afternoon.   After the strong senses of place in Ljubljana (calm, elegant, prosperous) and Sarajevo (brave, tragic, struggling), the generic feeling of the beach resort was a little jarring.   Like a nice Waikiki hotel.  But getting here a couple days before my group tour started gave me a chance to do laundry and recharge.

The hotel is on Boka Bay, which I repeatedly heard is one of the top 25 bays in the world, without further explanation.  But whoever was making the list knew what they were doing.  The bay is actually a winding series of bays.  My hotel was at Igalo, in the lower left corner of the map.

The first day of the tour – our only day in Montenegro- we drove three quarters of the way around, to Kotar, on the upper right of the map.  As you drive the perspective on the water, bays and islands constantly changes. I have a feeling I’m going to have a lot of pictures over the next week of beautiful bays, secluded islands, balmy beaches, blah blah blah.  The pictures aren’t going to do anything of them justice, but here you go.

During our drive our guide provided kind of a blur of facts about sites along the way that we weren’t stopping at – mosaics, monasteries, museums, fortresses, churches, parks.  Also about the peoples and empires that have swept back and forth over the last three millenia – Illyrians, Romans, Slavs, Venetians, Ottomans, Habsburgs, Napoleon.  In everything I’ve read a crucial fault line in the Balkans is between areas that were occupied by the Ottomans and those that were not.  Montenegro apparently was partly occupied, but I couldn’t get a good sense of where the line was from our guide.

We visited Kotar, a well preserved walled city that withstood a siege by the Ottomans.  It was far too crowded to really enjoy, although  there was only one huge cruise ship in the bay; there can be as many as four. These were taken of the city walls where the crowds weren’t so bad.

On the way back the bus dropped us in Herceg Novi, the historic area a couple miles from the hotel.  We hiked to a fortress with another fine view, but I forgot to take pictures.  That’s OK, plenty more fortresses to come.

I’m not going to write much about my tour mates, but they seem a congenial and curious group.