Montenegro!

Let me start by mentioning that I am writing this while sitting on a rooftop overlooking the city of Kotor and its eponymous bay.

We saw Dubrovnik yesterday.  Very pretty, but felt very much like an amusement park - it's a walled city and it felt like I should be wearing an admission bracelet on the inside.  Our guidebook strongly recommended walking the city walls, which we did - you can walk around the entire perimeter up on the walls.  It costs a bit, but it's totally worth it.

Afterwards we had a little crisis in planning, as I was suddenly concerned about the road into Montenegro.  We were told not to bike the road from Split to Dubrovnik, and this was just an extension of that road.  A few bloggers also mentioned taking a bus through Montenegro.  On the other hand, we did see a few touring cyclists on town, and several of them were on their way to Montenegro, or had just come through there, and had few concerns about the safety of the road.

So we went for it, and thank goodness for that.

Today may have been the nicest day of the trip so far.  There was an old side road that got us out of Dubrovnik with no traffic.  The highway itself wasn't great, but really not that bad - if you're accustomed to riding in traffic (say, Mass Ave in Cambridge), it's not so much worse than that.  I can certainly see it spooking you if you're not used to cars, perhaps that led the bloggers to their conclusions.  We were only on the highway for a few miles until we could turn off and take a tiny road through a quiet valley for a bunch of miles.  Once we rejoined the highway we were past the Dubrovnik airport and traffic was mostly gone (one blog did mention the drop-off after the airport).

We breezed through the Montenegro border and the descended down to the water.  The rest of our ride was a road along the shore of a huge bay that takes up much of this part of Montenegro - the Bay or Kotor (who will be opening for the Port of Ist on our upcoming tour, the Road to Pag).

The bay might be the most stunning thing I've ever seen.  Find it on the map - it's shaped like two wings and it surrounded on all sides by towering cliffs.  It feels like Lake Tahoe, but much smaller so everything feels closer and more imposing.  We took a ferry across the narrow point and cycled a quiet road along the shore to Kotor.

Kotor is like a mini Dubrovnik (well, lots of these towns are like mini Dubrovniks).  They have walls here, but they go right up the sides of the mountains - I guess that's where the invaders would come from.

The campground is 7km back the way we came (we passed it near the ferry).  Rather than go there, we thought it was time to find a room for rent.  All these towns have tons of rooms for rent in private houses - it's a legitimate business here and how many people spend the night.  Leaving town I saw an "apartments" sign.  They were full but he called his friend who we met down the street.  We have a room at his house, a short walk from the old city and with the aforementioned rooftop where I now sit. 

It's funny how things work out sometimes.  We were perilously close to skipping this by heading directly to the ferry to Bari or taking a bus across Montenegro (we even made the decision to do that but the bus last night was sold out).  So we ventured on with trepidation, ready to turn around as soon as we were enveloped by crazy speeding Montenegrins.  Instead we find moderate traffic, a delightful side road, and stumble upon this spectacular bay - Alicia and I were joking about how devastated I would be to instead have seen this through the window of bus. 

So, tell your friends - be smart and be careful, but do ride your bike in Montenegro.