Montenegro: Wild Beauty Indeed
Thursday, June 10th, 2010I watch more than enough CNN in Geneva to know the Balkans tourism ads and their slogans by heart. Croatia’s claim to be ‘The Mediterranean as it once was’ (implying that it’s unspoilt and tourist-free compared with Greece or Italy) is pretty hard to justify, and must have been for at least the last 10 years. On the other hand, Montenegro’s slogan is spot on: ‘Wild Beauty’.
Leaving the perfectness of Dubrovnik and the Croatian Adriatic coast, I have spent the past four days on the Montenegrin coast, where rugged mountains rise up virtually from the shores of the Adriatic, where city walls are weathered and have plants growing out of them, and where nature has overtaken ancient castles in a manner reminiscent of Southeast Asia or Central America – wild beauty indeed.
I spent most of my time in the country in the charming walled city of Kotor and the surrounding Bay of Kotor. Kotor itself is not as pretty as Dubrovnik (naturally), but it is a charming old town nevertheless and, at least in June, is free of the tourist madness of further north, a surprising bonus (I did see one cruise ship docked for a couple of hours one afternoon, but that was it). The small city begins at the shoreline and butts up against a steep mountain, and 1500 steps up are the overgrown ruins of a fortress that, as I discovered a couple of mornings ago, offers a beautiful view over the town and the entire bay. It was well worth the climb up, but even in the early morning before the sun had risen above the mountains, it was a hot and sweaty climb up, and it would have been murder in the afternoon with the searing Montenegrin sun beating down on you. (You get what you wish for, I guess. After the rain of Bosnia & Hercegovina, it has been boiling ever since.)
While in Kotor I also made short trips to Perast, Herceg Novi and to see the Roman mosaics (not that good) at Risan. Yesterday I took a bus further south to the port city of Bar, from where I will take my ferry to the Italian port of Bari tonight. Bar itself is a modern town of little interest and with hardly any places to sleep – after walking around the town centre fruitlessly with my pack on in the afternoon heat, I finally found a travel agency who rang some lady who rents out her living room for €10 a night. I was beginning to regret spending the night here but a visit this morning to the enchanting and evocative ruins of Stari Bar (Old Bar) made it completely worth it.
I arrived at about 7:45am to find the walled city closed, but at 8am someone opened the city gate with a large key and for €1, I scrambled about the ruins for the next hour and had the site completely to myself. The site is a microcosm of the history of the region over the past 3000 years: it dates back as far as 800 BC, but was abandoned by the Romans before being refortified by Justinian. Most of what remains dates (I think) from the Ottoman era, but there are some churches there as well which I suppose date from after the Montenegrin takeover in 1878. In any case, what you see today is the very personification of wild beauty: the ruins and towers are completely overgrown with ivy and I even saw a pretty big snake slithering only a foot or two away from me. It (the site, not the snake) was quite magical and an unexpected highlight of my little trip.
Now, I’m killing time for the rest of the day until I have to be at the ferry terminal at 8pm. The ferry leaves Bar at 10pm and arrives in Bari, Italy at 8am tomorrow. Then I’ll travel by train to Rome, where Wendy will join me tomorrow night.
Nick