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Kotor
Wednesday, July 8 2026
location: room 115, M.S. Monet near Kotor, Montenegro
Another day on the cruise ship, another gorgeous little wall medieval city pressed against the Dalmation escarpment. This morning we'd steamed (or whatever the word is for moving a diesel-powered boat) up something of a fjord to the Montenegrin city of Kodor. Again, after breakfast Gretchen was eager to get off the boat so as to beat the rush of tourists arriving on towering cruise ships. First, though, our boat had to clear customs and perhaps other bueaurocratic hurdles, as Montenegro is not part of either the European Union or the Schengen Area. (Europeans on our boat were urged to turn off roaming on their phones in order to avoid exorbitant roaming charges from communication over non-EU cell networks.)
Our little boat had the advantage of being small enough to use the Kotor pier; people leaving larger cruise ships were slowed by being forced to take tenders, the little orange boats we'd become accustomed to in the Caribbean. Once Gretchen and I made it to the Kotor gate, Gretchen got a map from the tourist kiosk and proceeded to obsess about a little-known path up the escarpment behind the walled city called "the Ladder Trail." It was so little-known that it was not on the map. The alternative was a well-marked path where a toll had to be paid and that was likely to be mobbed by sweating, wattling, decidedly non-vegan tourists.
Kotor is famous for its many cats, and we encountered them in various places, though they were even more plentiful on knick knacks being sold in gift shops. In one area there were a bunch of kittens, some of which were so underfoot that I was concerned about them being crushed by tourists. Most of what we saw could be appreciated in the narrow streets, though we ducked into a tiny church where guy made me take off my Vegan Travel baseball cap. (Since Gretchen has a vagina — if not a uterus — she could leave hers on.)
We eventually found our way to the south end of the walled city, where we exited the wall near a round pond. We hadn't encountered any paths leading up the escarpment, so we tried finding one uphill from the pond to its east. We did find a path, but it was rough, like something trampled by pedestrians off-trail through a park. It had the switchbacks that Gretchen had mentioned was characteristic of the Ladder Trail, and for a time it seemed like it was taking us somewhere. We got fairly high above the old city before running into a closed steel gate marked with a sign. The sign was partly in English and mentioned some sort of fund for cultural preservation being paid for by the Embassy of the United State of America in Montenegro. All we could do was turn around and try some other branch in the trail lower down the slope. The second path we tried quickly faded to nothing as we climbed up a very steep slope using small trees as handholds. (I was wearing flip-flops of course!) The "trail" dead-ended against a cliff or unclimbable wall, and we were forced to turn around. We ended up re-entering the bustling main axis of Kotor via someone's back garden, which was an interconnected series of terraces.
From there, we somehow made it to the top of the southwest wall of the city, the one farthest from the escarpment and closest to the harbor. We followed it northwestward until we found a way down, which put us back near where we'd started in the Kotor. We tried a few more alleys leading up to the escarpment, and eventually found the one where one pays a toll. (There were signs there strictly forbidding the tossing of stones down upon the houses below, indicating that this has been a problem.) But we didn't really feel like doing much walking at that point. Somewhere back in Kotor, we randomly ran across Kelly and Brian in a place where standing still to chat meant being jostled by passing tourists. So we soon went our separate ways.
By this point Gretchen had decided the best way to experience Kotor's montane scenery was to take the cable car up to the top of the mountain. To do that, we had to walk to a bus station about fifteen minutes away by foot to the south. By this point I was having to poop again. There were bathrooms, but they all charged a euro to use them and we didn't have any. (Also, there was a grumpy woman working in the bathrooms who yelled at Gretchen in a way that seemed to confirm a theory she was developing about the niceness of people in Montenegro.) Both Gretchen and I managed to find a place in the bushes behind the bus station to piss, and, with my bladder empty, I felt I could postpone my next bowel movement indefinitely.
Eventually we boarded a bus that took us to the bottom of the cable car contraption. It used technology similar to that of a ski lift to get people into fully-enclosed glass pods capable of holding up to eight people each, though ours only contained us and a random British couple who were perfectly nice if a bit slack-jawed. The views from the cable car were amazing, with the harbor disappearing into a small blue gash below and a view of an airstrip coming into view to the west. After crossing over one ridge, our cable car zoomed up to a tower located impossibly high on the next ridge beyond. We passed into a cloud somewhere on the way to that and it remained foggy and decidedly cooler for most of the rest of the time we were up there.
There was a small amusement park at the top of the cable ride featuring a restaurant and other food concessions, some partially-built amusement rides, and a kind of track-based luge ride. Fortunately, the bathrooms at the amusement park can be used for free, so I not longer had to be anally retentive in the most literal way possible. Gretchen wanted to ride on the luge ride, but suddenly she was sure she'd lost a pair of glasses, in this case the progressives she uses for reading in conditions were she is also doing things that do not involve reading. She was thinking she'd left the glasses in the cable car, though I'd checked that as we were leaving and saw nothing. And those cars are so quiet that if the glasses had fallen onto the floor, we would've heard the sound and taken action.
While I waited in line for the luge ride, Gretchen went off to get tickets. She'd had enough of waiting in line, so the tickets she bought were more expensive and were for a special fast-lane line that dispensed with most of the waiting. (That's for the young, the folks with more time than money!)
The luge-like ride featured one-person cars powered by cable-car-like technology allowing cars to race around a curving track under cable power. The cars gave a small amount of control (to go fast or slow) to each rider. But, of course, since there was no way to pass other cars on a fixed track, the system automatically decelerated a car approaching another car too closely from behind. The ride was a fun little diversion, though it wasn't as frightening as I'd thought it would be. Something about being able to control my speed made it feel a lot safer as I zipped around above a fairly barren montane landscape in the cool fog.
Just before boarding a cable car for a ride back down the mountain, Gretchen happened to reach around to the part of her bra covering what is now referred to as her "side-boob," and there she found her progressive glasses, tucked in a place she doesn't normally check.
When we went out to the buses to catch a ride back to Kotor, we learned that there was some sort of delay due to a problem in a tunnel (there's a very long tunnel between Kotor and the bottom of the cable car installation). Supposedly we were now going to have to wait something like 45 minutes for the next bus. So this had Gretchen once more trying to solve a time problem with money. She approached some cab drivers who quoted her a price of thirty euros for a ride back to Kotor, which seemed a bit much. But then they suggested we try car pooling with someone else arriving from the cable cars. Gretchen is great at convincing people to do what she wants them to do, so she soon had a youngish couple agreeing to join our cab ride back to Kotor. The only problem was that we didn't have any euros, so they'd have to pay and we'd have to pay our half to them after visiting an ATM. The couple turned out to be from Russia, with her being an English teacher and I forget what he was. Our conversation never got around to the "special military operation" in Ukraine, though it's possible part of the reason they're traveling is so he can avoid being sent to the fight in Ukraine. But, since they're from St. Petersburg, perhaps he doesn't have to worry about that. (Vladimir Putin has been trying to avoid civil unrest in the big Russian cities by only sourcing cannon fodder from remote cities populated mostly by ethnic minorities.)
Our cab driver attempted to end our ride somewhat short of the Kotor city gate, but Gretchen was having none of it. She said no, she'd arranged to be taken to the Kotor gate, and that was that. The driver folded immediately.
While Gretchen was off getting money from an ATM, I stayed with the younish Russian couple as a sort of human collateral. We didn't talk and it felt awkward.
Today might've been the day that I ordered a beer at lunch and thought they might've served me a non-alcoholic beer by mistake. Later up on deck, we had a spectacular view of the Kotor fjord as we steamed (or whatever the word is) back out to the Adriatic sea. Along the way, we passed a couple of weird half-water-filled tunnels cut at sea level into the side of the fjord at regular intervals. At the mouth of the fjord was an island with a structure that Dirk claimed contained an extremely high-end hotel, a place for the superrich to go in their superyachts.
I think this was the afternoon that Kelly and Brian had Gretchen and me play a card game called Five Crowns using a special deck they'd brought with an additional (fifth) suit that is then doubled, thus having nearly 120 cards. The game itself is a bit of a slog given that it has eleven rounds, and of course I was the worst of the four players. But Brian bought me a big beer, which was nice, though it was a fairly disappointing macrobrew-style lager and seemed as if it contained almost no alcohol.
At some point I took another nice afternoon nap, indicating I am still not adjusted to the local time zone.
We had dinner tonight with the Kelly, Brian, and the two veterinarians from Brighton. One of the dishes available (which I had) was the baba ghanoush, which I referred to at times as "Robert Ghanoush."
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Swallows with their mud nests near the Kotor gate. Click to enlarge.
Buildings in Kotor. Click to enlarge.
A primitive frieze in Kotor. Click to enlarge.
This "clothesline" above the street is actually a metal sculpture. Click to enlarge.
A narrow street in Kotor. Click to enlarge.
Minisplits are popular in Kotor. Click to enlarge.
Ceramics for tourists to buy in Kotor. Click to enlarge.
Front of a tiny church in Kotor. Click to enlarge.
Inside a tiny church in Kotor. Click to enlarge.
A cat in Kotor. Click to enlarge.
A calico cat in Kotor. Click to enlarge.
An orange cat in Kotor. Click to enlarge.
The sign posted at the closed gate on the vague path we followed up the escarpment. Click to enlarge.
Rooves above Kotor. Click to enlarge.
A creek entering the north edge of Kotor from a gulch in the mountain. Click to enlarge.
A zig-zag stone wall climbing the escarpment above Kotor. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen takes a picture from the cable car. Click to enlarge.
The harbor, viewed from the cable car. Click to enlarge.
From the cable car. Click to enlarge.
The cable car. Click to enlarge.
The air strip we could see from the cable car. Click to enlarge.
Mysterious tunnel in the side of the Kotor fjord. Click to enlarge.
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