Kotor
Lower Kotor was first built around the 12th century. It’s well-worth a visit, first of all because it’s a world listed heritage site. Second, because you get to enjoy the beauty of the ancient castle ruins and city walls, looming over you on the mountain above, while enjoying extremely cheap accommodation, food and hospitality from the friendly locals.
The city walls and castle on the mountains, however, were built around the year 530 AD.
Lorna and I weren’t sure if we were going to visit Montenegro at all. We had just had an amazing time in Italy and Croatia, and wanted to make our way to Greece. We could have flown straight to Greece from Dubrovnik, but decided to bus-it to Montenegro and give it a go. And although it wasn’t the best thing we did on our trip, we still got a lot out of it.
From Dubrovnik, we caught a bus that took about an hour to get us to Kotor.
We didn’t pre-book accommodation because it was off-season. We have found that when it’s off season, it’s best not to book transport and accommodation on the internet. There are always openings and this way you get to see the room for yourself and ask for a discount. And that’s exactly what we did this time. Lorna sat in a cafe for an hour while looking after the bags, while I sprinted around bargaining with the locals.
I eventually scammed us a nice little place that resided on the other side of the moat, literally two-minutes outside the city walls. For $60 AU per night, we got an apartment, instead of staying inside the walls for $80 AU per night for a small studio room.
That night we enjoyed food and $8 AU cocktails from an awesome hotel/club called Hotel Astoria. We sat on a black leather couch and ordered all kinds of colorful numbers. There were like, four standard shots in each cocktail, for eight bucks. We couldn’t lose. And we didn’t.
The next day was officially dubbed, Hangover Day. Still, we splashed water all over our bodies and air-dried. That seemed to help. Then we put clothes on, shoes and all, grabbed our cameras and decided to hike up the mountain to view the castle and the city walls. Many battles were held up here on these walls, defending Kotor, especially in the years 840, 1002 and 1184.
It takes about an hour and is a decent hike up the crumbling stairs to reach the castle, but you really get a feel for how the soldiers would have felt as they sent arrows and swords flying down onto horrible enemies that were trying to mess with them. It was so worth it, in fact, that I decided to make a little video.
[coming soon]
We stayed another day, just to recover, and then took the twenty minute walk to the local bus station, headed for the secret celebrity hang-out of Sveti Stefan, Montenegro.
Rob Kaay is an Australian author & musician.