Tuesday 12 September 2017 – Porto Montenegro

Well, we are still here in the marina, but at least today we did something other than shelter from the storm.  When we woke up the sun was out, but the clouds soon built up.  Nonetheless we set out to go to Kotor.  We found the bus stop and caught the 11am bus.  It is an hour’s drive around the coast.  It would only be two hours by boat.  In fact there is a quicker route over the mountains because they have now built a tunnel, but we didn’t see that.

The journey was another eye opener for Balkan bus travel.  Again the bus was crammed to the gills.  Because we got on at the first stop luckily we got seats.  Otherwise it would have been very uncomfortable.  I am also glad we didn’t hire a car and try to drive.  Basically the road was wide enough to be comfortable for traffic in two directions as long as they were cars.  The bus had other problems and there was a lot of backing up and hooting involved it getting it to Kotor.

But we made it there without undue incident.  We really wanted to take the boat to Kotor and being there we regretted not doing so.  But in the bad weather there was no way of knowing if we could get a safe mooring, so we didn’t take the chance.  Kotor is the first ancient town we have seen.  Everything to date has been newly built seaside towns.  This is a fortified walled city with many churches and palaces built between the 15th and 17th century.  Just walking around was great fun.  Of course it was solid with tourists.  There was even a cruise liner in, which didn’t help with their groups being escorted around.  On the way in we found a great market.  I was tempted to buy a lot, but it wasn’t practical, so we just bought some local cheese (which we tasted first and found very good) and some dried porcini to make risotto on the boat at some stage.

We had lunch at the far end of the town away from the most obvious tourist spots and ate very well.  Then it was time to find the bus home.  By now it was starting to rain again, so we were glad to be in a bus shelter.  The bus was due at 3pm, but arrived 20 minutes late.  Again it was packed and we were lucky to get the last two seats in the reserved for sick and oldies section.  We think we qualify!  But worse was to come.  At about halfway back the first set of rear doors jammed open.  Obviously the bus driver couldn’t continue with it like that.  It took half an hour of the driver taking instructions over the phone before the problem got solved.  So we didn’t arrive back until 5pm, an hour late.  Even then we missed our bus stop thinking the bus would go to the stop we got on at, but it didn’t and we had to walk back to the town.


So we are preparing to leave tomorrow.  The weather report is better and it is time to go.  We have to check out of the country, so that will be interesting.  It will also be a challenge checking in to Croatia as we are not sure we can get to the port when the necessary offices are open!  All a challenge. 

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