Streets and sights

Kotor is a truly wonderful place - although it exhibits many of the attractions of similar towns such as nearby Dubrovnik, it is by no means as self-aware, thanks largely to the tourist crowd being an order of magnitude smaller. That's not to say it isn't well-prepared for the arrival of busloads of package tourists in bright jackets - the streets are immaculately and almost unrealistically clean, and the streets sport a rather high ratio of souvenir and designer boutiques - but all-in-all it retains much of the feel of the sleepy fishing town it no doubt has been for many centuries.

Getting up early and wandering around in these places always seems to reap a reward. In this case, it was stumbling across the farmers market in full swing as people started their weekend with a good old shop. Lots of delicious things were on display - however for breakfast I can definitely recommend not trying garlic olives, no matter how enthusiastically thrust under your nose.

It's strikes me coming to places like this, in a spot of incredible natural beauty with evidently happy locals going about their business - makes you wonder whether the city life is all it's cracked up to be. But I always come back to the same thing - would you go and visit all these wonderful places if you lived in one??

Kotor Contours

Day two saw us up early (well...) to tackle the heights of Kotor. It was a brilliant morning for the wander up, weather which seems to be typical for this part of the world. This was a fantastic way to get into the swing of the trip - nothing like climbing a mountain above a stunning medieval town to help hit home the realisation that you're not in modus operandi!

We pretty much had the mountain to ourselves, with the notable exception of a herd of goats (firmly installed on the path - I know they're not all that fearsome, but you just never know what's going on behind those eyes...) and the workmen at the castle on the very top, running what appeared to be an oil pump on a noisy diesel engine - yes, in the surrounds of a gorgeous ruined castle, as anachronistic as it sounds.

Even that couldn't ruin the charm of the place, with its tumbled walls, crumbling stairs, old stone chapels and the huge switchback path (top photo) taking us back to the foot of the mountain.

Fjord to Kotor!

The tendency for human beings to regard incredible natural environments as an architectural challenge never ceases to amaze me. Thanks to the tried and true method of fortification involving the construction of settlements in the most ridiculously inaccessible positions possible, the world is dotted with some of the most stunning collisions of natural beauty and human ingenuity.

Kotor is one such example - it lies at the very bottom of southern Europe's biggest fjord, crouched in the shadow of towering cliffs, upon which it's fortifications lie, it's walls seeming to leap up almost vertically from the town to the heights above to form a rough circle, dramatically lit as we approached on that first night.

Having installed ourselves almost guiltily in about the poshest hotel in the town (nothing like a bit of haggling in the off-season), it was out to enjoy our first night and contemplate our next moves over a platter of cevapcici and a few glasses of the local wine (alright, and a few glasses of the local almond-flavoured digestif).

The conclusion: bed, then climb the wall!