June 2, 2018

     As we ate an early breakfast, the ship was maneuvering through the shallow waters of the bays leading to Kotor, Montenegro, before 7 a.m. The depth is about 30 meters so ships do not speed. It was only 80 nautical miles from Dubrovnik.  The temperature was about 20°C, a sunny sky with a small breeze.

     Passengers needed to be tendered to shore to go on excursions or explore Kotor.  Also tendering its passengers was the ship MSC Musica. Our excursion group was on the tender boat by 7:20. On shore we met our guide, Caroline, who was distributing audio sets to the 46 members of our group.  The first item on the program was a walking tour through Kotor’s Old Town. Kotor is pronounced Caw-tahr. As we waited for everyone to assemble, we watched the smaller cruise ship Silver Whisper dock.  She told us the Hwala is Thank you and Chow is Hello or Bye, a remnant from the rule of the Venetians.

    On the brief walking tour of Kotor’s Old Town, we were told that in 2006, Montenegro gained independence from the former Yugoslavia’s and the majority Serbia’s 88 years of ruling the country.  At the end of 1991, Montenegro’s top politician withdrew the Montenegrin soldiers from the bombing of Dubrovnik and from serving in the Serbian/Yugoslavian army. Since Caroline is interested in Montenegrin history, she found out from a man who fought in the war that the simple reason for bombing of Dubrovnik in the war was that Serbia wanted access to the sea.  Serbia took revenge on Montenegro for withdrawing from the war by destroying the country’s economy.  However, Germany and other western countries came to Montenegro’s aid and the German Marc became the currency of Montenegro and now the currency is the Euro, even though Montenegro is not a member of the EU.  It is a new member of NATO due to the threats from Muslim Serbia and Turkey.

    During the 15^thcentury when the Venetians ruled, they built the palaces and squares of old town Kotor.  The palace are easy to distinguish because of the better building material of the mansions, controis stone.  There are just 500 people living in the Old Town and another 20,000 in newer Kotor. The Roman Catholic Cathedral of Tryphon was founded in 1166 behind the city walls. It is 69 years older than Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. There is a long wall climbing the slopes behind the old town to protect against attacks by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire who tried 200 times to conquer Montenegro over several centuries.  From the top of the city wall that runs along the mountain peak you can see the border between the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Turks.

    When Napoléon Bonaparte invaded in 1807 one of the first things he did, in most places, was to add house numbers to the buildings, for accuracy in taxation. Montenegro is made up of 21 districts, each with their own unique histories.  We came to a square with two churches, St. Luka is an Orthodox Christian church and St. Nicola is a Russian Orthodox church. The St. Luka church steeple has three bells at the top recognizing the Holy Trinity. The St. Nicola church had the double cross, where one of the horizonal bars is at an angle. There was a 12 minute wait for our bus, after a 9 minute wait for a bathroom break for two or three people when we had only left the ship an hour ago!

     The bus climbed up Lovcen mountain on the road originally surveyed & built by the Austrians over 130 years ago.  It has 25 hairpin turns since the emperor at the time’s lucky number was 25. It rises to a height of about 1000 meters at the top. George Bernard Shaw called the road “the most beautiful in the world”.

 There is enough room for the width of one bus and ¾ of a car in most places on the two way road on the way to Njeguši.  It was an edge of your seat drive, but the view of the harbour below and another bay next to it was breathtaking.  The highway is gradually being widened. Caroline pointed out the foot path on the other side of the valley that her great grandfather used monthly to walk down from his village to Kotor for supplies.  It took three days to walk down and five days to go back up. In Njeguši, our bus and at least five other Celebrity buses stopped at Konoba Njeguši Syila for a snack.  Plates were available with two pieces of homemade bread, prosciutto, cheese and a drink. The local beer was Nikšičko.  We left 15 late minutes due to long lines for the women’s and men’s toilets.   Travelling down the mountain on the newer wider road, we saw vineyards and some cattle. There is a Montenegrin red wine – Vranutz, not sure of the spelling.  At top a mountain was the mausoleum of the philosopher and prince, Peter the Second, who ruled from 1830 to 1831. From that location all of Montenegro can be seen.

    By noon the temperature was 26°C and there were big light gray clouds forming along the mountain tops. We journeyed through the former royal capital of Cetinje, where King Nikola ruled from 1760 to 1816.  As we descended toward the coast to the resort town of Budva and its medieval old town, the clouds lowered and the fog caused visibility to drop to about one kilometer. As we approached the old town, the 5 star Splendid Hotel was visible.  It is the hotel used in the remake of James Bond’s Casino Royal movie. Once at the seashore it was sunny and hot. It is quite obvious that old town Budva is a Venetian built town, without canals. We walked through the small old town stopping at a few squares and noted that there is a cat population, then walked along the marina to the Restoran Porto Budva for lunch.  The lunch consisted of coleslaw, then a plate of Spek ham, vegetable rice and roasted potato wedges. In greater Budva there is a population of 20,000 locals and the summer residents raise the population to 100,000. There was an hour of free time so we returned to the old town and wandered the streets and found a gelato cart on the waterfront selling gelato for €1 ($1.60 Canadian)

  Steps 10,600 for 7.89 km. 

  Once in the bus, it was a five minute drive to a leather store for a 10 minute “fashion show” at the leather store.  Fortunately it was located beside a grocery store so we opted to explore the grocery store. As the bus neared Kotor, we noticed a three level Jysk retail store.  There was no line to take the tender back to the ship. When we returned to Kotor, we were surprised to see that the MSC Musica had already left the harbour. We sat beside a woman from southern England who is taking a Canada New England cruise in early September, who may be on the same ship as we are.

   We again sat by ourselves at our table of six, we have not even seen Lynn and Mike since the second evening’s dinner.  We asked Edy, our waiter, to order the courses quickly because we wanted to watch the sail away back out to the Adriatic Sea which takes about 90 minutes from Kotor. While we ate dinner, a heavy rain engulfed the ship for about 10 minutes. The pool deck and the walking track deck were soaked, even the railings were wet.  As the ship was almost at the exit to the sea, we saw the submarine caves that our guide had told us about during our tour.  She said that the caves had been excavated by the Austrian navy in the 1930s.

   The evening show was Rob Lewis singing Phil Collins hit songs.

     Final steps 16,467 or 12,25 km