Budva - 16th October

Our day begins with a trip back to Kotor to return our car.  It has done a good job, almost 600km, about 100 tunnels, and 500 hairpins.  This final trip is only about 40 minutes, and the bus back is not much longer. 

Our main goal today is to walk to the island of Sveti Stefan, which is a tiny island about 8km south of Budva, on which is built a little fishing village.  It is said to be incredibly picturesque.  The walk there is not as nice though, as we have to walk past some ugly big resort hotels, which we can’t really fault the Montenegrins for building, they have to get some tourist money from somewhere, and they are better here on a fairly nondescript part of the coast than on the real beauty spots. 

When we get to Sveti Stefan however we find that it is closed for the winter, only 2 days previously.  For this we can fault the Montenegrins.  The whole island had been leased to a large international hotel chain, and it was now effectively private property which we would have to pay to get into.  We knew this before setting out though, but didn’t expect it to be closed.  I assumed if they had paid to lease such a place they would be charging customers all year around.  Still this is no way to treat a national heritage site.

After an expensive lunch in the only open restaurant with a sight of the hotel (still I’m with my travel hero, Karl Pilkington from An Idiot Abroad, sometimes is it better to live across the road from these places and look at them, than live in them and look back at a crap view), we begin to walk back.  However when we turn a corner all we can see is the entire mountainside between us and Budva on fire.  Despite our best efforts to get past this, we have to endure a 3 hour wait, some of which ironically is in one of the big ugly hotels, before we can walk through the fire (literally, some bushes within 5 metres of us were still on fire) back to Budva old town.  Our eventful day finishes with some photo taking in this mini-Dubrovnik, and a drink at the Irish bar in town (one of the worst ones I’ve ever been to).