Kotor - 11th October

Kotor, like other places along the Adriatic, has an old walled city, thanks to the Venetians and their shall we say aggressive forms of commerce in the past.  What makes Kotor’s walls different though are the way the snake up the side of the mountain to a point over 260m above the town.  And of course you can go up to the top (for a small fee).  So after a late breakfast we set off.

The walk up itself does not take too long, about 50 minutes, over 1350 steps up, most of which are in fairly decent condition, although there are a few tricky spots.  However it isn’t as hard as we had been led to believe (from the Lonely Planet) and we reach the top just after midday.  Although it is quite hot, our packed lunch which we had, planned as a picnic for the top, stays put.  Instead we just have a cold drink as we take in the views which are, as always, impressive.

However from the description of the walls in various guides, we had expected it to take a bit longer and be a bit more of a challenge.  So instead we head back down and go for a trek up the canyon behind the fortifications to see if we can reach a church we could see from up there.  This trek turns out to be more of a challenge but we get to eat our lunch at the church.

However two things confuse us about this trek.  We see a couple of the people we saw coming up to the walls, coming down from the church.  It turns out there is a way to get from one of the walls to the church, which we actually saw but didn’t think was navigable.  So we did the climb twice, which wasn’t really necessary but was better for our waistlines.  The other confusing thing is that we keep seeing signs for Mt Lovcen.  This is the so called “Black Mountain” that gives Montenegro its name.  We wanted to hike in the national park, but all the information points kept saying it wasn’t possible from Kotor.  Well it was, and maybe we shouldn’t always believe what the tourist information people tell us.  Had we known we might have organised our trekking day slightly differently.