I was going to include Kotor, Montenegro in the Dubrovnik blog, but it's just so scenic and cool it deserved its own. Kotor is only about an hours drive from Dubrovnik. It is an amazing place with a medieval walked city purched on the mountainside and on the Bay. The wall itself runs its way up steep cliffs and the mountainside.
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| Main wall from outside. |
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| Main square |
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| Walls up the mountainside |
The nice thing about Kotor, Montenegro is that it feels like no one knows about it yet... Well maybe less know about it. The streets and alleys in Kotor aren't very busy. There are some shops, but not everywhere and it seems like there are actually people living within the walled city and going about their business. Something you don't see very much of in other world heritage sites. I guess it's only been a sovern country since 2006 having been part of Serbia (or Serbia-Montenegro) before then, and with the turbulent history they have a bit of a stigma to shake off.
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| Within the walls |
The drive itself is also the main attraction in my opinion. The drive around the Bay of Kotor is killer. (Yes motorcycles everywhere..
.le sigh!...) The road basically winds its way shore side all the way around the bay. You've got huge steep mountains on one side of you and the bay to the other. If you find yourself driving here make sure NOT to take the ferry, or at least drive around one way and take the ferry back. That's what we did!
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| Here is our route around the Bay of Kotor. |
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| Typical scenery along the way. |
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| Dy and our car on the ferry back. (The short way back) |
Lost in Bosnia
We left our home base just out of Dubrovnik for the long drive back to Zagreb to return our rental car. Rather than retrace our route I thought I'd try a different one. I entered the coordinates into my trusty GPS app to see what it might suggest. We don't normally go with GPS and prefer to get lost old school most of the time, but what the heck! It had us going through a good little piece of Bosnia. We wanted to make our way to Mostar Bosnia at one point, but with the disastrous flooding they've had we decided not to. Our little detour would have to do. Well all I can say is that the GPS literally placed us in some of the most remote places we've been so far! The roads in Bosnia aren't near as good as Croatia, but this was pretty extreme. It had us going through some seemingly abandoned villages and at one point we were on a steep loose gravel road going up a mountain with not a thing in sight for miles in all directions! Maybe I should look at the settings in my GPS app a little closer next time! We made it back to Zagreb in about 11 hours (from an anticipated 7.5)...
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| Abandoned town in Bosnia |
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| Loose gravel road... Bosnia |
I hope the car rental company doesn't read this blog! If so, then ...uhhhh...the above paragraph is fictional. All characters in this blog are also fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental...
