Kotor, or, Friends Make Things Good

Kotor made its way onto my itinerary here partly thanks to geography (as a way to get to Dubrovnik from the northern Balkan states) but also because it had the reputation of a less-touristy Adriatic coastal walled city, kind of Dubrovnik without the craziness. It was... not entirely that, but I still had a grand stay, thanks in part to the power of friendship. Post-jump: things!

Kotor from the climb up the town walls! Hikes are the best, gang.

So. The Bay of Kotor is achingly gorgeous, and the Montenegrin interior is similarly so. I can imagine that tooling around here with a car is thoroughly delightful! The city itself, as you can see in the video above (and the photos here) is beautiful, with a great sense of its history as a port city. (The main gate to the city used to be right on the water, so you could only get in by pulling your ship alongside and stepping directly into the entryway.)

"Wow!" old timey ship captains used to say, "That's quite a view! What are all these cruise ship passengers doing here?"

But the thing is... Kotor is very much on the cruise ship map these days. This means to some extent that it gets crowded with day trippers, which is never the most fun, but it's also the first place I've visited where I felt the insane change of culture in response to the cruise ship influx. Most of the cities I've visited that had cruise ports have been fairly sizable, cities in their own right. And they all retain that sense of local culture, even in smaller cases like Venice, where tourism is very clearly the main engine of the local economy. Kotor's not that - it's small. And the depressing reality is, or seems to be, that everybody in Kotor is selling constantly.

The city is also full of cats! I did not elect to visit the cat museum although I did visit the cat souvenir shop. Lot of cat-themed things in there, which I guess is good if you like cats or cat-themed objects?

 Which, you know: this is their job! And there's nothing wrong with that. But while we were able to have a good conversation with a waiter our last night there, it otherwise made it feel really difficult to make any kind of connection to local culture, since most of what was on display was meant to appeal to international travelers. Fair or not, it felt like the arrival of cruise ships had fundamentally altered the character of the place and made it a pretty spot, a good spot to use as a base for hiking or coastal wandering or sailing adventures, but not a place to connect in a culturally exploratory way.

These two locals refused to talk to us at all, probably because we weren't buying souvenirs. Thanks a lot, snobs!

The compensation in all of this was the arrival of my friend Kate from Bristol, who I've known since we were freshmen at Northwestern. She's now a literary agent, and she and her husband Stuart have become two of my best pals, people I visit every time I'm overseas. Last year Kate met up with me in Krakow the weekend before my divorce hearing so I would have an old friend at hand around that event happening, and this year decided she wanted in on a slice of my Balkan adventures. It was great! We met in Kotor, hiked the intense city walls up the side of a mountain, ate whole fish at a great traditional restaurant in town, and then headed off for Croatia and Bosnia. All that and more in future posts... For now, suffice to say, friends are the best and swellest, and make all situations adventures!

Kate drew a portrait of me and then photographed it, so I took a picture of her behind some beers, because both of us are artists in our own way