Wanderings: A Travel Journal

“You’ve got the post-Lamu blues,” Wendy told me as we arrived, grumpily, in Malindi. And it was true. After a five-hour bus ride (which we discovered was much bumpier for the first three hours on an unpaved road when you’re sitting near the back of the bus), and then having to endure the touts upon arrival, we were naturally asking ourselves why in the world we had left our beautiful quasi-secret island town for this. But such is life when you’re an ambitious traveller and you have an $800 booking to see mountain gorillas 1800km away in less than two weeks – you always need to move on, sometimes earlier than you’d hoped.

We had only two more places we wanted to see on the Kenyan coast – the Marafa Depression and the Swahili ruins at Gede. To visit both places, we needed to stay at the beach resorts of Malindi and Watamu, the type of towns we would normally avoid like the plague. Watamu was at least somewhat pleasant (touts aside); we didn’t at all see the attraction of Malindi.

Meanwhile, Marafa was not as great as we had hoped. It was OK, but we’ve seen similar but immensely more impressive landscapes in places like Cappadocia and northwest Argentina, and, in Wendy’s case, the Grand Canyon. Given that it took us all day to get there and back from Malindi, including waiting for transport etc, it wasn’t worth the effort. In fact, the highlight of the day was being mistaken for Italians by all the local kids in the village near the Depression, as Malindi is extremely popular with Italians; having a five-year-old African kid in a one-street village in the middle of nowhere come up to you and say, “Ciao! Tutto bene?” is pretty surreal.

Our next stop was Gede, the most celebrated of the ruins on the Swahili coast. It was very atmospherically situated in a jungle landscape, with monkeys clambering on the ruins and in the nearby trees, but it again revealed a bit of jadedness on our part and the continuation of the post-Lamu blues, as it was certainly no Angkor or Tikal. The structures themselves were not particularly impressive and if it were not for the location, it would have been a disappointment.

To cure the post-Lamu blues, we knew we needed to get ourselves to the one place that could match up to Lamu: Zanzibar. After visiting Gede on Thursday morning, we travelled back to Mombasa in a matatu (a ubiquitous Kenyan minibus) and then hopped on a bus over the border to Tanga in Tanzania, which took 7.5 hours (LP had said 2). We arrived wearily in Tanga at 11:30pm and by 8:45am the next morning we were sitting on another bus bound for the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam. We arrived at 3:30pm at the bus station 8km from the town centre, and with 30 minutes left until the last ferry of the day, we went into Amazing Race mode. With the help of a taxi driver who fully invested himself in our ‘race’ – honking and screaming at other drivers who slowed us down, and getting rid of all the fake-ticket touts who descended on the taxi as we parked at the ticket office – we just made it. Two-and-a-half hours later, we arrived in Zanzibar after sundown on Friday, and the post-Lamu blues were over.

According to Lonely Planet, Lamu makes Zanzibar ‘blush with envy,’ which is pretty high praise. And while I will reserve judgement on Zanzibar until we see it for ourselves in the next few days, I am happy to report that Lamu is indeed fabulous, surely one of the great highlights of Africa.

Picture a small, old town on an island off the East African coast with dhows in its bay, donkeys wandering lanes narrower than a human wingspan and absolutely no cars. Imagine veiled Muslim women buying and selling fruit and vegetables in the markets, old men playing traditional board games in front of thatched-roof houses with walls built of coral, and kids excitedly greeting you every time you walk past them. Throw in sunset dhow trips, a Swahili cooking course, delicious seafood and heavenly fresh fruit juice, and that’s Lamu. It’s a rare combination of a very relaxing place and also a culturally important one. Despite all this, it hasn’t (yet) suffered from overdevelopment or over-tourism and there’s less hassle than further down the coast at places like Malindi, making Lamu even more precious.

We spent most of our time wandering the old town’s alleys and generally enjoying the unhurried pace after two long bus rides in three days to get there from Nairobi. Aside from this, highlights were:

– A sunset dhow cruise between the islands of Lamu and Manda, and through mangrove forests, finishing with grilled fish on a beach under a blanket of stars;
– Going ‘behind the bui-bui’ (the Swahili word for the abbaya, the black loose-fitting robe worn by many Muslim women over the top of their clothes) and taking a cooking class with a local woman in her home;
– Walking the ramparts of Lamu fort and using our vantage point to look down on the markets and all the other activity below.

On a continent that’s short on places so pleasant and agreeable, it was a wonderful break from the real Africa, and even from the rest of the Swahili coast with its noisy rickshaws/tuk-tuks and endless lines of tourist shops. Some may find its dirtiness (there are open sewers running along most of the lanes) and lack of modern amenities off-putting, but for us this just added to the atmosphere and the charm.

We intended to stay three nights and ended up staying five, and as soon as we left we wanted to go back – that’s what Lamu does to you. Instead, we got on a bus, held our breath, and plunged back into Africa.

Mombasa, the second-largest city in Kenya and East Africa’s largest port, is the kind of place I would have really loved five or six years ago – the streets are constantly bustling and bursting with colour, there are impromptu fruit markets all over the place (including on median strips of main roads), and the Muslim men and women are often beautifully dressed. Throw in the rickshaws, the dirtiness and the general disorder, and voila, you have a place that feels just like India – or at least as much as a place can feel like India when it’s in Africa. Certainly, it’s a world away from the largely Christian areas of Kenya that we had visited earlier.

These days, I still find a place like Mombasa very interesting, but I prefer to watch the goings-on from the safety of a hotel window rather than launching myself into the thick of it, where it’s blisteringly hot and at every turn there’s lots of hassle, noise, pollution and filthiness (and danger at night). This revelation, and our aversion to our dodgy €6 hotel room – the same kind that we stayed in for months on end during our first trip to India – shows us that we’re changing as travellers as we get older and reaffirmed that we’ve made the right choice by giving up our eight years of journeying for the stable Geneva life that awaits us in October.

After two nights in Mombasa, we took a six-hour bus north to what seemed like the ends of the earth. For the last three hours on a dirt road we passed two one-street towns and no other signs of life except a handful of tiny thatched-roofed villages. When we finally got off the bus, a small motor boat awaited us, and 10 minutes later we were docking at one of the greatest Swahili civilisations and an island town that almost instantly became my favourite place in sub-Saharan Africa: the donkey-laden old Muslim kingdom of Lamu.

For our last few days in central Kenya, we headed to Lake Naivasha to test out our new camping gear and experience African wildlife from a different perspective in nearby Hell’s Gate National Park, where you can walk or cycle past animals instead of looking at them from a jeep window.

The lake itself was somewhat of a disappointment. We only went in the first place because our friend Lockie had recommended a nearby ‘secret’ lake about 4km away from the shores of Naivasha that nobody knows about and that is teeming with animals. Well, it turned out that, really, nobody knows about it – or at least not the staff at Top Camp (the closest camp to the secret lake), who had no idea what I was talking about when I asked about the lake. We followed Lockie’s vague directions for about an hour but then, getting nowhere and wandering around aimlessly in the African bush, we decided to turn back.

That afternoon we walked about 10km with all of our gear from Top Camp to the campsite within Hell’s Gate NP, which was tiring to say the least but not without its moments. Walking on the main road adjacent to the lake shore, we passed a school only for dozens of delighted kids to run en masse from the playground to the fence, all screaming ‘How are you?’ at the same time. (‘How are you?’ is Kenya’s answer to the Indonesian ‘Hello Mister’ – kids say it to you every time they pass you, and if you answer back, they sometimes become so shy and frightened that they squeal and run off in the other direction.) Later, at a local market, we bought seven small bananas, three avocados and four tomatoes for a total of 70 shillings, or less than a dollar. In fact, at five shillings per avocado, you could literally buy 25 of them for the price of one at the supermarket in Geneva, and they taste better, too. This caused Wendy to invoke a ‘Let’s eat avocados every day in Africa’ rule, but we’ve already broken it.

Having reached the campsite inside the park at about 4pm, we were utterly exhausted and set up our tent without putting the roof on, lay down on our brilliant new inflatable sleeping mats, and watched eagles soar overhead and a group of 13 zebras come within about 40m of our tent. Later that night (with the roof on now), we heard zebras neighing five or 10 metres away, and Wendy heard a panting noise. In the morning, we saw footprints not far from the campsite that looked like those of a big cat – we think it was a leopard or a cheetah. It was a bit frightening camping among the animals, but it was also quite exhilarating and uniquely African – an unforgettable experience. And since the anticipated baboon raid on our food supply didn’t materialise, we retained all our avocados and ate one before every meal.

We woke up at 6am the next morning and (leaving our tent and most of our stuff behind) continued on foot to the gorge at the southern edge of the park, about 6.5km away. It was a brilliant walk as we passed many zebras, about 20 warthogs, a few types of antelope and a couple of giraffes as we made our way through a valley with dramatic escarpments on both sides. Unfortunately, the gorge itself was not as interesting as it’s made out to be, or perhaps we’ve just seen our share of similar but better gorges over the years – the scenery of Petra comes to mind – and weren’t as impressed as we might have been.

We then walked back to our camp, picked up our stuff and walked all the way out of the park to the nearest camp at Lake Naivasha, Crayfish Camp – about 20km in all for the day. We arrived at Crayfish utterly exhausted but, as it was a Saturday, we had to contend with weekending middle-class 20-somethings from Nairobi and their all-night disco.

On Sunday we headed back to Nairobi to watch the World Cup final and on Monday took a reasonable-by-African-standards nine-hour bus ride to Mombasa and the Swahili Coast.

It turned out, whether we were ready for it or not, that barely 36 hours after we’d returned from the Masai Mara, we were being picked up at 6:30am from our hotel in Nakuru for a half-day safari into Lake Nakuru National Park. We had to-ed and fro-ed a bit the afternoon before about whether to go or not because the $60 per person entry fee combined with the price for a guide/driver and jeep made it nearly a $200 morning. But in the end we had another fabulous safari day and so were happy with the decision that we made, making us 2/2 so far. Besides, this is our last big trip, so we might as well make the most of it.

The main reason to go into the park was to see the only one of the Big Five that eluded us in Masai Mara – the rhino, and this alone was worth the fees. We saw one black rhino very far away (perhaps 75m) early in the morning, but the real highlight came later: seeing 10 white rhinos in four different groups, seven of them within about 25m, within less than an hour. We’d seen Asian rhinos before in Nepal but these white rhinos were much larger and had far more impressive horns. At one point, a mother and baby came to within about 7m of our jeep and then calmly crossed the road behind us. And since Nakuru is not as popular as Masai Mara, we were the only vehicle around the rhinos for all four viewings, which made it so much better.

Aside from rhinos, other animals we saw at Nakuru that we hadn’t seen in Masai Mara were the dik-dik (the smallest type of antelope), a couple of troupes of vervet monkeys, and thousands of flamingos (as well as some storks and pelicans) in the lake that gives the national park its name. We’ve seen plenty of flamingos before in Mexico and Chile (and even in the Botanical Gardens in Geneva!) but never this many at once. Additionally, we had better viewings of some animals we had seen in Masai Mara, notably the waterbuck and the olive baboon. Throw in the ever-present zebras, gazelles, impalas and buffalos and the plain next to the lake was teeming with animals at a concentration equal to or greater than Masai Mara.

After an Ethiopian lunch back in Nakuru town, we crossed the equator into the Northern Hemisphere and headed past tea plantations (which were unexpected, and felt unusual in Africa) into Kenya’s Central Highlands to the small town of Nyahururu at 2360m above sea level. The main attraction here is Thomson’s Falls, which we hiked to this morning. At 72m high and surrounded by jungley cliffs, it was quite an impressive waterfall – one of the better ones we’ve seen on our travels and certainly the best in Africa (though of course we’ve not been to Victoria Falls).

This afternoon we head back south into the Rift Valley to spend a few days on the shores of Lake Navaisha and in Hell’s Gate NP, where we can test out our new camping gear and further enjoy the nature of East Africa.

Our first act in East Africa after acclimatising in Nairobi was to set off to Masai Mara National Reserve for our main safari of this East Africa trip. We chose Masai Mara ahead of some other parks, like Serengeti or Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, because it seemed to have all the major animals, and because it was precisely the right time for the 1.5 million migrating wildebeest to arrive in Masai Mara. And in any case, even though Serengeti is more famous because it has a cool name, it is in fact part of the same ecosystem as Masai Mara – just on the other side of the Kenya-Tanzania border.

We had anticipated joining a group to keep the costs down but we weren’t terribly impressed with the safari vans most companies offered. It seemed like we’d be jostling for position with the other people in the group to peer out of the roof, and that if you were on the wrong side of the van you’d miss out on the best views. So instead we sucked it up, paid more, and went by ourselves in a jeep for a three-day safari with our guide/driver Jackson and our cook Nicholas. In hindsight, we think this was a good decision, as besides giving us the best viewings possible, it also allowed us to determine exactly what we wanted to do each day, and to go to certain places inside the park that the vans don’t go to because of the poor conditions of the paths. That last point was critical because for most of our key sightings there weren’t many other vehicles around (and sometimes none).

In summary, the safari was fantastic and was a brilliant way to begin our East African adventure. Overall we saw more than 20 different animals not including birds, some in enormous quantities and some only once. The breakdown went something like this:

More than 1000: wildebeest, zebras.
In the hundreds: Thomson’s gazelles, impalas, buffalos, topis
Dozens: elephants (including a herd of 40), giraffes, grand gazelles, hippos
Around 10: baboons, crocodiles, warthogs, banded mongoose
The rest: hyenas (2), waterbucks (4), elands (3), hartebeests (4) and jackal (1)
And as for the three big cats: lions (10), cheetahs (6) and leopard (1)

The main highlights were:

Feasting Cheetahs: Cheetahs aren’t a guaranteed sighting at Masai Mara, so when we saw three of them together on the second morning, we were pretty happy even though they were quite a distance away. By this point, we’d ‘ticked’ all the boxes and were satisfied. But about half an hour later in another area of the park came the biggest highlight of the trip: seeing three cheetahs, no more than 15 metres away from the jeep, devouring some poor animal, probably a gazelle. We missed the actual kill but still, we were the first on the scene (only two other jeeps came later in any case) and we watched the cheetahs for about half an hour as they finished their meal, licked each other clean (and they needed to, as their faces were bloody) and then found a tree to rest under. What was almost as interesting was to see, as soon as the cheetahs had walked away from the remnants of their breakfast, a dozen or more vultures descend on the carcass and rip apart what was left. (Apparently seventy percent of what’s left by the hunting animals in the park is subsequently eaten by vultures.)

Impala breakfast in a tree: On the first afternoon we spotted a leopard (also not a guaranteed sighting, and rarer than a cheetah; Jackson said he hadn’t seen one in his three previous trips) who had set up camp among some trees near a river. Because the leopard had cubs, it wasn’t likely to move far over the coming days, and the next morning we saw it again. This time, it was halfway up a tree but clearly visible – as was the dead impala that it was gnawing on. We watched it eat everything off the bone and then disappear deeper into the bushes.

The Lion King: On the second morning, we got our first taste of lions when Wendy spotted two lionesses relaxing on the grass in a far-flung corner of the park (we watched them for a few minutes at very close range until they got up and walked away, and no other vehicles arrived during that time). Later that morning, we saw a mother with four cubs, and in the afternoon, two more lionesses and our first male adult, for a total of 10 lions in one day. On all three occasions we were able to get extremely close and really observe them, which was wonderful.

The Mara River: Late on the second morning (given all the detours to see the big cats) we arrived at the Mara River hoping that a herd of wildebeest would be crossing. Unfortunately, a few hundred of them had already crossed that morning and were now relaxing with a near-equal number of zebras (who also migrate from the Serengeti). The toll of the morning’s crossing was evident: we saw six wildebeest carcasses in the river, felled by the many resident crocodiles and hippos (who we could easily see in the river as well). Three brave zebras who had been left alone on the southern bank decided to make a run for it, and we watched them wade to the other side unharmed as the crocs, already full after their morning feast, let them pass. Meanwhile the vultures lurked nearby, waiting for approval from the crocs, it seemed, to go after the wildebeest corpses. Even though we didn’t see any wildebeest crossing, it was still a brilliant show of the animal kingdom in full form.

On Monday afternoon we returned to Nairobi completely satisfied and ready to tackle our next target: the famous Rift Valley, which stretches all the way from the Dead Sea to Mozambique.

After all the horror stories we’ve heard over the years about Nairobi – ‘Nai-robbery’ – and its cockroach-infested hotels (even at 4-star level), we weren’t exactly excited about our arrival on Thursday. In fact, when we first started planning this trip we tried to see if we could do it by excluding Nairobi altogether. Eventually we realised that Nairobi was unavoidable and it subsequently became the crux of the whole trip as the main air hub for East Africa.

So far, 24 hours in, we’ve been pleasantly surprised. Sure, the shuttle bus from the airport mentioned on various websites (including Ihatetaxis.com!) doesn’t seem to exist after all, but we took a cab without too much trouble or hassle (compared with, say, the airport at Kathmandu, or the bus station at Siam Reap etc). And less than a 1km from the airport, we were already seeing giraffes out the window.

The budget hotels in Nairobi are much-maligned if web reviews are anything to go by, but we found the Downtown Hotel to be pretty decent – it’s clean, there’s hot water (sometimes), and so far, not a cockroach to be found. (On a related point, there was a cicada on our plane from Doha that flew onto our seats and was mistaken for a cockroach by one of the flight attendants…) Meanwhile, there are plenty of restaurants on our street and a well-stocked supermarket across the road, 10 times better than any we saw in three months in West Africa.

After sleeping through most of yesterday afternoon and evening after the long flight from London, we took a short walk around the city this morning to run some errands and, apart from the odd beggar and safari tout, got everything done pretty easily. It hasn’t felt scary on the streets (though we haven’t gone beyond the downstairs restaurant at night) and no one has tried to pick-pocket us (a far cry from the Senegalese capital Dakar, where multiple attempts per day are the norm). So far we can conclude that either a) we have been pretty lucky, or b) most of the people who come to Nairobi are first-time Africa visitors and haven’t had as much third-world experience as we have, or a bit of both.

So, while there’s nothing particularly interesting in Nairobi, it’s proven to be a far more pleasant place than what we expected, and we’re off to a good start. After two nights here sorting out some things, we’re off to the Masai Mara National Park tomorrow for the wildebeest migration and hopefully many other highly anticipated animal sightings.

It’s a tough life.

As soon as I got back to Geneva from the Balkans via Italy last week, we had to start preparing for our next voyage, which is the going to be the eighth and, as it turns out, last, major trip of three months or more that we’ll have taken together since 2003.

So, before we return to Geneva to begin a settled life in October, we are embarking on one final journey – three months in sub-Saharan Africa, beginning only five days from now as I type this. To sketch a rough outline of our plan, we fly to Nairobi (with a brief stop en route in London to see my brother Tim) on Monday, and we’re planning to do what more-or-less amounts to a two-month, clockwise circle through Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and back to Nairobi, from where we fly to Madagascar for the third month.

Having to do all our preparation for this trip in less than two weeks was a bit daunting at first, but since we once planned an entire wedding in 12 days, we knew we could do it. By now, we’ve had the shots we needed (just typhoid fever as it turned out), got the malaria tablets we needed (which cost literally one-third of the price a bus ride away across the border in France than they do here in Geneva), got one visa (Kenya) with another (Madagascar) on the way, and booked a (probably dodgy) hotel in Nairobi. Now we just need to pack up our stuff this weekend and we’ll be ready to leave on Monday.

Now, you may recall that the only other time we were in sub-Saharan Africa, we didn’t think too much of it. But that was mainly due to 81-hour bus rides like this one, and 7-day boat trips like this one (the disastrous nature of which I deliberately understated at the time so my parents wouldn’t worry). And also: that West Africa is the poorest and least developed region in the world and lacks the animals that make East Africa so famous.

Indeed, almost all the things we’re looking forward to the most are animal related – we’ve already booked our silver-backed gorilla tracking trip for early August, are about to book a safari (for next week!) in Kenya’s Masai Mara NP during the annual wildebeest migration, and we can’t wait to get to Madagascar to see lemurs, chameleons, and everything else it has to offer. (A funny thing that’s recently occurred to me: there are pretty much two places on earth with unique flora and fauna by virtue of them being islands and having been separated from the mainland millions of years ago. If you’re Australian like me – and as such you think of kangaroos and koalas as being common and not extraordinary – then Madagascar is to you what Australia is to everyone else.)

Of course, there should be plenty of other highlights as well – people, landscapes, old Arab coastal trading towns, and probably many other things that I don’t even know about yet. As always, you never know what Africa will throw at you…

I 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.

I think I probably heard of Dubrovnik for the first time in late 2001 as I sat in the Feltrinelli international bookstore in Rome and began reading guidebooks to places I’d never considered visiting before. Ever since then I’ve been desperate to visit what is regularly described as the finest walled medieval city in the world. Finally, I got my chance.

Leaving the rain of Bosnia & Hercegovina behind (I’d been absolutely soaked walking from the bus station to the old town of Mostar the day before, an episode from which my shoes still haven’t recovered), I arrived in Dubrovnik at lunchtime on Friday. What I found was a glorious, stunningly beautiful, almost perfect old town inside the famous walls, one that I roamed around with great pleasure for the next three days. It’s dreadfully touristy, of course, especially when the enormous cruise liners dump passengers by their hundreds into the harbour and they descend en masse into the city, but it comes with the territory, I suppose.

I stayed in a lovely little studio apartment in the heart of the old city and my strategy to beat the crowds was to rise before 7am when everyone else was sleeping and have the old town virtually to myself in the early morning, then read my book and watch the French Open on TV during the middle of the day before embarking on another walking session in the late afternoon – and I found that this worked pretty well.

The highlight, of course, was a walk on top of the city walls, which I did as soon as they opened at 8am on Sunday morning and which I, entering at the eastern end and not the western end, had pretty much to myself for the next hour. From the walls you get an amazing panorama of the old city and the Adriatic Sea beyond, and I found it especially interesting to see which buildings had new orange tiles installed on their rooftops after the city was shelled in 1991, and which buildings were lucky enough not to have been hit.

After three days of contented sighs and many photos, it was time to move on yesterday morning and I continued south across the border to Montenegro. While the travel has been great over the past 10 days, unfortunately the actual visa-run part of this visa-run isn’t going so well, and my ingenious plan to visit three countries in very quick succession and acquire loads of stamps to confuse the Italian immigration officials when I re-enter the Shengen zone has been somewhat thwarted. I did actually get passport stamps yesterday (unlike entering and exiting Bosnia & Hercegovina), but the Croatian exit stamp is on the observations page at the front of the passport and the barely legible Montenegrin stamp is on top of the Antartic penguin somewhere in the middle (“On top of the penguin? That’s blasphemous!” texted Wendy). Apart from a random and wrongly dated Canadian stamp, that leaves the Swiss entry and exit stamps side-by-side as the most recent ones. But my prior experience with the Italians leads me to believe that they’ll just stamp some random page without looking at any of the other stamps anyway.

For now I’m in Kotor and I’ll spend the next few days in coastal Montenegro before taking the ferry to Bari on Thursday night.