What better way to spend the last morning of our honeymoon than walking up about 1300 steps to a ruin? Tarrant had opinions about pretty much every aspect of this endeavour as did my leg muscles after yesterday’s impromptu climb up a bell tower. We got up early to start climbing at 8am to beat the heat. It’s one thing to walk up a big bastard hill, it’s quite another to do it in an oven. It’s a proper slog, at least we thought it was, other tourists glided past us with ease like 1300 steps is how they get to work every morning. I mean, stopping to admire the view and/or nearly die a little bit is more or less mandatory so that helped. The sun was making its way over the very hill we were walking up, the shadow slowly creeping over the bay.

Nearly an hour later we gasped our way up to St John’s Fortress, or what was left of it anyway. There’d been some manner of fortification on this site since BC times but it was the Venetians that built it to more or less what it is today. The whole thing was abandoned after WWI and left to crumble and there’s not really much left of it these days. The views, of course, are predictably stunning stretching out over the bay. A lot of it was still in shade but that’s the trade off isn’t it? You can have the old town bathed in sunlight or you can not melt to death. Your choice. Well we can’t stay up here all day can we. After poking around the ruins for a bit and gawping out over the Bay of Kotor we began the ascent much to the chagrin of our knees. I feel like all of this would be so much easier if I didn’t consider large quantities of cake a viable breakfast source.

We decided not to do very much for the rest of the day. We did stroll into Dobrota where we found a particularly fancy restaurant called Moments. Like, it’s fancy fancy. Though it’s worth noting at this point that we once considered McDonald’s a romantic lunch date so maybe don’t take our word for the level of fanciness. We booked a table for dinner then realised we should probably go and shower or something. Can’t show up to a place that charges €45 for beef filet mignon all red and sweaty, sporting flip flops and a singlet. I even bought a cheap shirt for the occasion.

Just outside of our accommodation was the Baccus Wine Bar which is a silly place to put a wine bar really because it meant we had to drink all the wine. It’s run by a woman who we never saw without a glass of wine in her hand and she certainly knows her shit. We went here a couple of times and drank plenty of wine. You can have a taster for €3 per tiny glass if you’re not sure what you want, and after that wine ranges from a few Euros a glass to prices that’ll make you choke on your fermented grape juice. I have no idea what we drank or how much it cost, we were in full on honeymoon mode by this point. Shut up and take my money, perpetually tipsy lady. We had a couple of wines here before heading back to Moments.

What a spectacular way to round off the celebration of our marriage. It’s the kind of place where the waitstaff will stand there and explain exactly what you’re about to shovel into your facehole. When she brought the wine to our table she asked if we wanted to know about the vineyard it came from. When the bread arrived with green butter pressed into a cuboid embossed with the restaurant’s logo she explained it was a homemade herb butter. My starter, popcorn shrimp, was a taste explosion. It was a bowl of utter, utter joy. Obviously not for the shrimp, I don’t think they would have had a very good time. Neither would the cow that our beef filet mignon was sliced off but it died a worthy death, served with a young potato purée and black garlic. Dear sweet lord, it was melt in the mouth deliciousness. I might be a scruffy little shit but I would absolutely dine like this all the time if we had the money for it.

Well then, Montenegro. You were a bit of alright weren’t you? It’s probably one of the most consistently beautiful places we’ve been to. Whilst you’re coming into land at Tivat you’re like, look at those stunning mountains! Then as you travel north you realise that no, these are the mountains! Then you get to Durmitor National Park and realise what you thought were mountains were mere bumps. We didn’t even venture to the regions bordering Albania and Kosovo, home to the Prokletije National Park which, just going off photos a mate took recently, makes Durmitor look like small hills. Then there are the lakes! Biogradska, Piva and Black Lakes, even with the low water levels they’re just gorgeous places to be. You want beaches? Montenegro has beaches! You want history? It’s got that too in spades. Large spades. It’s been a banging two weeks. We’ve really enjoyed it. We’d even consider coming back to Kotor for a long weekend, it really is that lovely.

Jump to “Useful shit to know…”

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Kotor, Kotor, Montenegro

Stayed at: Apartment Sofija, Kotor Stari Grad

Useful shit to know…

• It costs €15 each to climb up to St John’s Fortress.
• I thought it opened at 8am but we got there about that time and there were already people coming down as we were climbing up.
• They’re shit hot on making sure you’ve paid and we had to surrender our tickets on the way out.
• There is, apparently, a free way in up a winding path called the Ladder of Kotor but if you do find this then don’t try and get out the official way because they’ll want to see your tickets.
• The cathedral costs €4 each. They have signs up asking you to cover knees and shoulders but looking at other tourists they don’t seem to enforce this at all.