Kotor

I'd been promised by other travelers that the Adriatic coast only got better as you went north. My final stop in Montenegro, the town of Kotor, kept their word.

Budva had been nice, but it was my hostel that really made my time there. It was quiet, laid back and uncrowded - just what I needed after frantic Istanbul. An Italian from Venice named Giacomo ran the place along with his girl who was from Mexico City. They'd met when he checked her into a hostel he was working at in London. The night I arrived she and the other Mexican girl from Elgin made quesadillas and all the guests ate together in the garden.

36 hours after this dinner I was on my way to Kotor. I'd heard rave reviews about this town but when I got off the bus it looked unassuming. I followed the main road down into the old town and immediately grew happy. It was what I dreamt of when I pictured Europe. Narrow streets cutting through ancient buildings, locals outside cafes nursing little porcelain cups of espresso, and not a car in sight - there was no room for them. I saw what that Aussie in Istanbul meant when he said that Montenegro remained unpillaged, if not undiscovered.

Kotor is situated at the end of a bay carved 5 miles inland from the broader Adriatic. As protection against hostiles its medieval occupants had raised a fortress high into the mountains that define this coast, the ruins of which you can still climb up. After settling in at my accommodation (I had another great hostel in Kotor, in a building dating from the 14th century. Heavy wooden doors with handles and braces of black iron and candlelanterns and stone vaulting for a ceiling), I set out to storm these ramparts. It was a thousand steps and I was winded as hell by the time I reached the top, but I'd say it was worth it. This was what I saw:




After that climb and a debauch my last night in Budva I was ready to chill. I dined alone and went to bed early. I slept in the next day and then found a shaded seat at a cafe in a white-floored plaza. I spent the day drinking 7Up from green glass bottles, reading my book and making translations from the Spanish of Pablo Neruda's poems.

At the end of my last day in Kotor I decided to walk out along the bay as the sun was going down. At the last point where I could see the town before the continuing path put it out of sight I found a little pier. I sat down. I looked back at the town. The fortress walls crisscrossing the mountain whose sepia-colored brush was turning gold in the draining light. Above the ridge huge clouds billowed high into the sky, colored cream and pink by the light of the setting sun, like flower blossoms of outrageous scale. Like the chemistry experiment of some adolescent god gone terribly and beautifully awry.

On the pier I had noticed a towel and a pair of flip flops seemingly unattended. Sure enough there then rose from the surface of the water a tall, beautiful girl - a mermaid, the fantastical creature that was the final missing piece to this fairy-tale place.

So far in this blog I've basically written only about the good stuff. I've left out the shitty sleep from sharing a dorm with seven other people; the exhaustion of traveling too quickly, trying to squeeze too much in and knowing you're shortchanging a place; the disappointment in finding that not every other traveler is fun and warm and eager to be friends - that traveling is not some magic filter that sifts through only amazing people. But in moments like I had sitting on that pier, beholding that scene with the only sound the light splashing of the beautiful swimmer, I experienced that special kind of euphoria that travel promises, that only travel can provide. A few more pictures below.