I know I've been a bit blog-delinquent, but I do have partial excuses: getting busy at work, and sorting out this very post. (I had to cull 200 photos down to 20 and whip those into semi-publishable shape. ;-)
As you know, I was supposed to go to Dubrovnik. I bailed because while I understand the principle of driving a manual shift transmission, I couldn't get my rental car to behave smoothly while practicing in Podgorica. Not wanting to aggravate further the lawless and impatient drivers around Podgorica by stalling every hundred feet, or to plunge off steep mountain passes in my best imitation of a driver's ed student, I thought it better to save that venture for another day.
Boy, was I bummed. I had my heart set on seeing Dubrovnik while over here.
But not one to surrender easily, I had a fallback. That was to hop on a bus and return to a favorite haunt of mine from nine years ago, and part of the treasure of Montenegro: Kotor Bay and the bayside town of Herceg-Novi.
Buses in Montenegro are an experience in themselves. They vary from Greyhound-size buses to little vans of the type that normally run you from an airport to an urban hotel. They also apparently pay no attention to something as obvious as stations. Passengers hop on and off, apparently where they damn well please, with the connivance of the driver.
When you climb on said bus, you notice there are plastic bags of recent purchases taking up almost every seat, despite no one being on the bus. You discover very quickly that this is the Montenegrin way of saving seats while the owner smokes and drinks at the nearest bus station cafe. No one is apparently worried about losing whatever they have in the bag.
In between random passenger hops on the four hours to Herceg-Novi, I had the particular joy of being half-sat on by a middle-aged German woman who climbed on with her husband at a pseudo-stop and couldn't put her ample butt anywhere else in the aisle for 20 minutes. I had to wonder if this was a symptom of the post-2000 fall in America's reputation in Europe, but I swear, I didn't utter a word.
Fortunately, Mrs. Deutschebutt got off of me and out of the bus at Tivat. A short while later, we sat on a line of cars for about ten minutes while the driver bought tickets for our van-bus to hop on the Tivat ferry. Here's one of the three operating ferries headed the other way:
Once at Herceg-Novi, I managed, with the help of the nice people at the tourist office next to the bus station, to locate a relatively inexpensive but decent hotel (Alexander) with a good, but strangely pricey restaurant, and hurried out to take a walk on the really long promenade down by the water.
Herceg-Novi has undergone a massive transformation from what I remember - but then, almost all of Montenegro's coast is effectively under construction. Nor is the massive development apparently regulated worth beans, but I digress.
After a nice fish dinner and a bit too much Chardonnay, I figured I should capture a few views of the Stari Grad (old city) in Herceg-Novi for my loyal blog audience. All sorts of sidewalk cafes tucked into corners lurk here as well as the town of Kotor, but I figured you wouldn't mind if I skipped pictures of cafes. :-)
Getting up the next day, I was foiled once again with cloudy skies and a threat of rain. So much for lazing about in a chair and swim trunks with a steady supply of vacation food and drinks. I took a gamble and decided to check out the boat ride to Kotor that departs at 10:10 AM from the main pier a bit down from Herceg Novi:
Eventually, the tourist boat "Pajo" shows up, you hop on amid tourists who somehow got on earlier (perhaps from the town of Igalo), and pay your 15 euros on the way to picking up tourists at a couple more piers up the bay.
Now, don't worry, I'm only going to abuse you with my family slide show of the highlights, instead of every last photo of the bay. It's gorgeous, so stop sliding down to nap on the couch.
One of the first few sights that I chose not to omit is the late dictator Tito's bayside dacha:
Frankly, I've always wondered about Tito's tastes in architecture. His kitsch has got nothing on his colleague Nicolae Ceauşescu, so I cut him a little slack. Not much, however.
As the Pajo chugs up the bay with its gorgeous mountains, you find out that the first of several un-advertised secrets that you just bought with 15 euros is a shot of loza, the national moonshine of Montenegro, served at 10:45 AM. It tastes almost exactly like Romanian palinca to me, but it's made from distilled grapes, not plums. Good stuff, although I'm sure there's swill on the bottom shelves of grocery stores if you really have a hankering for methanol.
About halfway up the bay, you get to see and stop off at a small town by the name of Perast, where, I was told nine years ago, they were renowned for producing ship captains of high enough caliber to impress those marauding Venetians of yester-century.
As our ship captain pointed out, the clock tower there is permanently stuck at 4:00. "Time stops in Perast," he quipped.
Speaking of our captain, here's the loony, loza-serving crew of the Pajo:
That's Captain Dušan on the right. Every few minutes he's cracking jokes around his Serbian (excuse me, crnogorski) and English translations, and he's got Donald Duck hanging from a rod in front of his cabin window. When that's not enough, he squeezes his rubber ducky in the microphone, in and around playing anything from Frank Sinatra to James Brown over the loudspeakers. Not too loud - but Dušan insists that everyone take it easy and relax, with little room for argument. That's before he compares the tankers being serviced in the dry dock at Bijela as just a little larger than his beloved Pajo.
He's also prompt to point out at each stop that you should be back on the boat by [insert time here], or they will be happy to see you next Sunday.
While stopped at Perast, you meet with secret #2 behind your 15 euros, which is a light lunch of anything from grilled sausages to peppers, bread, cheese, ham, salami, wine, juice, and if I remember correctly, perhaps some leftover loza.
You also can see nice views. Close by Perast are two small islands with churches on them:
More on the church to the right in a bit.
Down at the far end of the bay is the lovely old town of Kotor itself. Be back at the boat by 3:30 PM, or you will have the opportunity to greet the Pajo crew next
Sunday.
That's the old town of Kotor, assuming you paid two euros to clamber up the hillside in the direction of the old fortress above Kotor for about ten minutes.
That is, as seen from this chapel / crypt:
But wait. Think you're on top of the hillside? Think again...
That would be the church about halfway up on the left side of the above photo. It's actually less than halfway up. The path is longer and steeper than you might expect from the switchbacks you can see there. Not bad, just enough to get you huffing and puffing when you're on deadline.
See the little flagpole on top of the rightmost hump? Remember it. (Click the photos to enlarge them...the pole's pretty tiny...)
Here's a clue. No way was I going be denied a trip to Dubrovik and a day on the (rocky) beach, without getting at least a little sight-seeing revenge.
So here's your flag, complete with great view from atop the old fortress ruins above Kotor:
Yeah, it's a bit of a hoof up broken steps and flagstones to get there, especially if you want to see the Pajo before next Sunday. I also discovered U.S. Ambassador to Serbia Michael Polt is dipping into some special "ambassador's fund" to help fund restoration of the lower part of the fortress (and where someone has helpfully scrawled "fascists" on the bottom of the plaque announcing it...).
Why you don't see the ubiquitous USAID "We're fixing this!" sign for the upper fortress, as you do almost everywhere else in Montenegro, is not clear to me yet. Maybe the Russians bought it.
One scramble back down (who should be charging whom two euros for the privilege, when one is wearing Nikes with no soles to speak of?) and a much needed ice cream later, you're back on the beloved Pajo, enjoying nice mountain views:
Remember those small islands with churches on them, near Perast? Well, one of those islands is completely man-made, as it took over 100 years for sailors to come drop rocks on the spot where they had some kind of divine sighting. They built a lovely church, Our Lady of the Rock, on that spot:
And the interior is the best part about it:
That's Italian, Egyptian, and Greek marble up on the altar. Apparently the really expensive green (Greek) marble (the two columns in the centerpiece) no longer exists from any known source.
If you note the silver bits in frames underneath the painting on the left wall, those frames of silver bits cover the same layer on that wall and the wall opposite. Each of the hundreds of "bits" is actually a silver engraving donated by different sailors for being rescued from some difficult moment at sea, as a way of thanking Our Lady of the Rock, protector of mariners.
So Pajo chugged back to Herceg-Novi, they fed us fruit as the last secret of our 15 euros, and I had to take my leave of the good, zany Captain Dušan and his crew.
And now, from the sacred to the profane:
The bus the next morning was thankfully not so crowded as the first bus. I was thus happy to travel unburdened by Teutonic tushes. However, this bus opted not to take the ferry to shorten the trip around the bay. Instead, it followed the coastline all the way back to Kotor, complete with the driver's grouchy sidekick, whose sole purpose as a twenty-something is to take up another (often badly needed) seat, wear too much mousse in his hair, collect money, and ensure that his cell phone beeps loudly with an SMS message every three minutes.
From Kotor, we headed back down to stop off in Budva. There, in transit to the station, your intrepid traveler remembered to whip out his camera just in time for the best piece of trademark infringement yet in such an otherwise beautiful country:
And that, friends, capped off my four-day Montenegrin vacation, courtesy of Parliament's eleventh hour passing of laws.
P.S. I'll have you know that I will not be denied. My former adviser and I are cooking up plans to go to Dubrovnik this weekend. Beats the hell out of me who's going to drive...
Tags:
humor, travel, Montenegro, Crna Gora, Herceg-Novi, Kotor, Kotor Bay, Boka Kotorska, buses, Pajo, Budva, loza
