Day 14 Dubrovnik-Montenegro

Left first thing in the morning for our tour to Montenegro. We were a small group of 6 – two girls from Finland, a couple of retired professors from Brazil and us. The drive along the Croatian coast is beautiful. The border crossing into Montenegro immediately changed the terrain. It is obvious that it is a poorer country than Croatia. The first impressive site was the bay of Kotor. It is a large rambling inlet of the Adriatic with several historical villages and lots of yachts. The next stop was the town of Kotor, an ancient little town on the bay with a lovely old town and very impressive city walls that go up from the bay high into the mountains in a triangle. Unfortunately, there were 3 cruise ships in town so it was awfully crowded. We decided to climb up the walls towards the fort at the top. We only made it half-way because we didn’t have enough time to go all the way, but the views were spectacular. Then, we continued to the Budva Riviera, which as our driver/guide explained, was dominated by the Russians who invested heavily into hotels and other infrastructure and traditionally about 85% of visitors to Budva were Russian. This year supposedly Putin made a deal with the Greeks and the Russians started to pull out of the Budva Riviera, which lost a lot of tourists, investors and money. We did see a lot of properties (including hotels) for sale, but we also saw and heard a lot of Russian tourists in town. After 2.5 hours in Budva, Milo, our driver showed us two seven star hotels in the area. One is brand new hotel that just opened, and the other is the historical Sveti Stefan hotel, which is a little island with hold stone houses and a church in the middle. Each house is one apartment. Apparently a lot of celebrities and heads of state stayed there over the years. We got back to Dubrovnik around 6:30 pm and headed down to Stradun. For the first time there were no crowds and the city felt like a normal city.