Juicy Kotor

Did you know I have never been to the Bay of Kotor before?  I have a really weird relationship with Montenegro.  I spent a considerable amount of time in Podgorica before realizing that I didn't want to sleep the night there. (all it took was a 3 hour walk that confirmed no good pizza to be had and I'm sorry but what exactly do you expect to offer me if your pizza game is so weak?)  But aside from that, and aside from the arduous katabasis I had taken from the Kosovo border a year and a half prior, I didn't have a lot of experience with Montenegro. 

Oh, wait, that's not true at all.  I also drove through Montenegro in May of 2010 with GDN, and the border guards made us pay 10 euro for a "Green Tax" or something for our car and we were also hassled in Podgorica by a cop who stopped us and claimed we went through a red light when several other cars followed us (sans Albanian plates) and were not stopped.  We felt the cold sting of racial profiling in that moment but we countered with the sting of Western privilege which ultimately won the day.*

Anyway, the Bay of Kotor was really pretty but it really made you realize why the Montengrins and the Balkan littoral was never really taken seriously as a place for port development.  The mountains are so sharp and there are no major waterways flowing into the Adriatic that things just sort of ended there.  We had a nice house right on the water and could see several cruise ships passing through into bay which were hideously ugly but there was little I could do about it.  I was actually really sick by this point and spent most of my time in agony hoping I would get over the flu or whatever I picked up in Latvia.  

Tell me about it!  My entire time in Montenegro was a constant reminder of what a constant struggle life is.

We made routine pilgrimages to Kotor the city and other areas around the bay, which were really beautiful.  We also went to Cetinje and did the embassy tour of the city, which was pretty fun but I can only imagine being a young diplomat in the late 1800s and being totally pissed off that I was sent to a tiny principality.  Still, they probably had pretty bumpin' parties. 

After this, I took the bus to Podgorica where I decided to walk to the airport because I had nothing but time, and on my way there I saw a family drag an enormous squealing pig out of a barn and then slaughter it.  That was pretty real.  

*I'm no stranger to getting stopped by cops in Montenegro at other times, as well.  When we drove to Podgorica to drop my brother off for his flight back to wherever (probably Istanbul or whatever hub services Baku at the most reasonable rate) my dad was apparently taking the speed limit as a suggestion.  This is something I think is a totally reasonable assumption to make, considering my experiences with motoring in the Balkans, but that's neither here nor there in this story.  We were stopped by some policeman and told that we had to pay 300 euros, at the local police station the next business day.  My brother, who is no stranger to corruption, suggested asking the driver "if there was another way to resolve this" because we were tourists and passing through the country.  For some reason the cop just let us go because he probably didn't want to do the paperwork.