Nothing fancy. Booked online, as usual, it all looked great. I turned up at the rather nice reception, only to be taken down the street, around a corner, upstairs into a musty apartment that smelled of, well, old. In the distance, seven huge cruise ships were docked in the harbor. The historic streets were jam packed with thousands of tourists, a maelstrom of one English conversation blending into another, as I necessarily navigated through huge groups of guided package tourists.
Like a good mullet, there are two sides to Kotor. Up front is deep, clean, blue, water. At the back are mountains — littered with walled fortifications from the Venetian period, mixing it up with ruins from the early middle ages. Nor ostentatious. Montenegro shares historical similarities with other Balkan countries. Illyrians, Romans, Slavs, Ottomans, Byzantines, Venetians, and Serbians have all controlled the rugged land at one point in the last couple of millennia or so.
More recently, Montenegro was a republic within the former Yugoslavia. Finally, only as recent as , citizens of Montenegro declared independence from Serbia, and formed the young nation it remains today. Although tourism numbers have increased in the first few years of the new Montenegro, during only 55, fortunate tourists arrived in Kotor.
For a small town with a permanent population of less than 15,, this is a huge number to be sure. However, like a small apartment with large windows, Kotor feels bigger than it really is. Even just before peak season the streets were comfortably uncrowded.
Which is perplexing. Prices remain reasonable in Kotor — especially considering the added value of the natural surroundings which are after all, free.
