Sapphire Waters, Grand City Walls
Kotor, Montenegro

Thursday, July 18, 2019
Highlights of Montenegro

I would guess that for many people on this cruise, Dubrovnik held more interest than any other port on the Dalmatian coast. But for us, this stop in Montenegro held a special attraction that raised our expectations far above the others. You see, many years ago we had both enjoyed reading Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe detective novels. In fact, not only did we read them all, we still have some hardback copies on a bookshelf. They’re sort of like old friends that are good to return to from time to time. In anticipation of this stop in Kotor, we read a little about the city, the bay, and the mountains. We also remembered Archie Goodwin’s comments about the mountains in the stories, so we were prepared for the scenery. Or so we thought. The ones around Kotor might not be Everests, but they’re high enough. when we docked at Kotor It was like the ship was floating on a lake at the bottom of a mountain bowl.

When I first woke up and looked through the drapes, we were in the short narrow strait between the outer bay and the smaller inner one where Kotor is located. This part of the landscape was described in a lot of literature as “Europe’s southernmost fjord,” but the slopes are a bit too gentle—and short—to fit my inner image of a fjord. It was still a pretty sight early in the morning. Before long the boat started a turn to the right, and I saw the little man-made island with a chapel on it. The light was perfect, and though we didn’t get close enough for a good look at details, it was still a brilliant little gem against the dark mountainside behind it. That sounds cheaply poetic, doesn’t it? Even so, it was still quite a sight early the AM.

The ship did some more turning and backing around before it docked at a spot that was about as close to the old city as could be hoped for! Kotor’s old city walls are intact, though it was easy to spot places where repairs had been made. The cool thing here was seeing the extent of those walls. Thick and forbidding on the somewhat vulnerable waterside and along the little bit of level ground that was there, the walls on the side that faced the mountain looked sort of thin. That could have been an illusion, because they went all the way up the mountain! They were made of the same grey limestone that showed everywhere on the mountainside, so it took a close look to see them at all. But there they were. At the top of the mountain there appeared to be a sort of fortress, where the two long arms of the walls meet. About halfway up there’s a pretty little chapel or church, and maybe at some point in the past I would have walked up there.

But this was not the time to do that. We had signed up for another small group excursion, and after the experience of the previous day, we were a little apprehensive. We needn’t have worried, though, because as it turned out we had a great time. The trip started out sort of hum-drum. We boarded the van—maybe 14 of us—and drove through the town only a few minutes before we started up hill. After a couple of switchback turns, Viera, our guide, said we would be climbing the mountain along an older, unrepaired road. This was a narrow two-lane road that appeared to be barely maintained, called by the locals the 25-curve or 25-serpent road. OK. After a couple of OK switchbacks I relaxed a bit. Then Viera told us we hadn’t really started on that road. Really! Help me! Twenty-five crazy 180-degree turns, one after the other. Flatlanders don’t do roads like that, you know?Just look at the screen shot of Google’s map of this road. All I did was color the white don’t-drive-here-if-your-insurance-has-lapsed minor road so it would at least show up. Our vertical movement was much faster than our horizontal movement, believe me. 

The driver was fabulous. Never made a wrong move, and earned more respect from me every curve, every bicyclist he passed, and every avoided head-on collision. May his tribe increase.

Through hundreds of vertical meters, I never saw a level spot of ground. Unbelievable that this road has been around for centuries. We stopped at one point, I think around hairpin #22 (they were actually numbered on the flimsy rock wall rails) for a photo op. Crazy. Along a section of steel rail with posts, someone had in the past crashed into the rail and left a break. Then some crazies had walked down the side of the mountain a few feet! This was no gentle slope, either. Enough people had done the walk-down-a-mountain thing there that they had made a trail! I can only assume they survived to tell the tale. Clearly Nero Wolfe is a fictional character, and I suspect that Rex Stout never saw these mountains.

After two or three more uphill curves, finally, we stopped at a tavern on the side of the mountain. Really. It was built with one level projecting out from the level of the road, and it would have just been hanging there if it hadn’t been for the other floors below it, sticking successively farther out and down. These little excursions were beginning to develop a pattern: stop for a snack somewhere and have some ham and cheese, a little smoked ham, sort of like prosciutto, and a shot of something nice to drink.I think for this one a glass of the local red was almost a necessity. Oh, yes, we had our photo made standing there with nothing behind us but a lot of down and a distant view of the bay. Want to know the crazy part? We were only part way up the mountain. There was more to go.

After that stop, though, things did get better right away. We had a modern two-lane road. There were still curves, but the road was wider, in better shape, and we no longer went swinging through one switchback after another. We passed through a village that actually had a fair amount of level ground. After even more twists and turns we reached the city of Cetinje, which had once been the royal capital of Montenegro. At least it had been for a few years around 1900 or so. The town is way up in the mountains without any industry, its only attraction being its history and its appeal to tourists. It’s pleasant enough, but you kinda have to have a reason to go there. For us, that was to visit the former palace of the former King. It was his palace before he became king and remained so until he was ousted and had to flee the country. 

The building is an interesting place, with parts of the complex now included in a public park. It’s just a plain wooden structure, two stories tall, painted a deep scarlet with thick walls and white wooden shutters. Sadly, I didn’t get a photo of the place, but I did get a nice one of the chapel. From the wrong side, but you take what you can get sometimes. Indoors, where we were not allowed to take photographs, I was surprised by the access we had to some of the private rooms in addition to the public rooms on the main floor. We walked through the King’s bed chamber, Mrs. King’s bed chamber, and even the bedroom of one of the daughters. There were very well-done parquet floors everywhere, but each and every one of those private rooms, even a couple of private salons, was decorated in a distinctively different style. The furnishings were original because the Royals had to flee with only an hour or so’s notice.The place has been a museum since 1925, the windows standing wide open in nice weather (meaning no protection for the original paintings and fabrics), and everything is still there. Probably the pure mountain air, right?

After that visit, we sped downhill on the new road, rounded more curves, went through Buvda, took back roads to avoid a traffic jam, and got back to the ship for a leisurely afternoon. Our balcony was on the Old Town side of the boat, and we had a great view of the dock. That meant spending time napping in our chairs, watching people (guests and crew) come and go, trying to follow the lines of the city walls all the way up the mountain, and marveling at the sight of all sorts of people walking up the steep pathway of the city walls. We saw many people make it to the church, and I talked to people later who went all the way up to the fortress. Alas, youth, I remember you fondly.

The ship left the dock around 5:00, and we went up to the observation lounge to watch the pass through the narrows. I spent most of the time actually up another level trying to get some videos. It was really sort of dramatic, because initially you couldn’t see any opening in the wall of mountains around us. After we rounded a corner from the dock, you still couldn’t see the entry to the narrow channel, and it took another turn of the boat to get us lined up to leave. 

After that we heard a lecture about the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Sicily. The latter part included a lot of slides of beautiful places and buildings in parts of Sicily we won’t visit on this trip. That just means we’ll have to come back, of course. Eventually we checked in at the Compass Rose for dinner, followed by a little more time watching islands go by in the dying light. For a change we had a small task to do: we had to set our clocks ahead an hour. We’d been on Central European Time since we arrived in Venice, but we would wake the next morning in Greece, and that’s a whole different time zone. That gave us something to look forward to.