Thanks to my not so respectful roommates in the hostel, I woke up early enough today to have a good breakfast and still leave before 9:30. I had looked up a trail that would climb the mountain Vrmac right next to Kotor and descend in Tivat on the other side.
When I left the hostel, I saw a gigantic cruise that had arrived during the night and was now laying in the bay very close to the small harbor next to the old town. People had talked about this but I hadn’t imagined such a huge ship coming so deep into the bay. Its length exceeding the length of the whole old town, its height towering any building on the coastline, this monster seemed like the symbol of a completely ridiculous and odd type of tourism.
My trail went up in serpentines and I met a German woman and a French couple on the way but left them behind quickly and kept on walking on my own. After about 1.5 hours I reached the top of the mountain and the breathtaking view towards the other side got revealed. The Montenegrin coast looked almost like an arrangement of several islands but I was actually looking at the enormous bay of Kotor, one of the largest bays in Europe and also the deepest one.
I kept on walking slightly upwards through a pine forest and then through the sun on a pretty broad path on the crest of the mountain chain. When I started to feel a little exhausted, the sun burning hot on my head (I hadn’t thought of bringing a hat), I saw another snake like the one I had seen in Albania. It was shorter but fatter, with a slightly greenish head. According to my research the other day, this kind of snake is actually not a real snake but rather a Glass lizard (Pseudopus apodus).
I saw another two of them on my way and, apart from little brown lizards and colorful butterflies everywhere, I also spotted a larger (25-30 cm) bright-green lizard-like animal. As soon as the terrain got bushier, I met another animal I hadn’t seen before in this form; At first I thought I had startled up a small bird but it turned out to be a huge grasshopper with wings that could fly like a bird. The grasshoppers were everywhere afterwards and longing to find more snakes, every stick and root started to look like one.
When the path got to the very top of the mountain on around 760m, I decided to turn left and follow a sign to Tivat, following also the GPS track I had downloaded. It started descending and kept on a broad stony dirtroad. After a while, a very small path split from the big one and, checking my GPS, this was the one I should take to get to Tivat. I followed this path thought thick vegetation descending and ascending wildly along the hillside. At some point, I armed myself with a stick to avoid running into annoying spiderwebs all the time. Smaller paths were splitting up every now and then and I tried to always choose the one that looked biggest until I got to a small clearing where animals had made a little muddy hole. From there, I had the choice between no less than 5 paths, one as unconvincing as the other. I tried the one that made most sense according to my map but hit a dead end after 15 minutes. I followed the same way back and tried a different one. When I checked GPS after another 10 minutes I was in the middle of nowhere, no mapped path anywhere close. I was lost again (surprise!). So I followed back the same path to the junction again. The only reasonable path was the one I had tried first so I tried it again. At least I didn’t have to de-spider the path as I walked it a second, third, fourth and fifth time. Having my phone in my hand and tracking every meter, I found the place where I had left the path before and – with a little fantasy – I could recognize the correct path between the bushes. This time, GPS and hiking map had really saved me. I followed the new path, faithfully, more according to the GPS than to the actual visible path. Dozens of similar paths crossed and split from the “main” path all the time. I was supposed to come by a church according to my hiking map but I only saw the ruins of that church when I was standing about 3 meters away from it. The bushes were so dense that I started to doubt even the map but followed through and behind the church the path got a little clearer. It took me all the way down into civilization.
I got there around 3, completely full of scratches, sweaty, dirty and with no water left. I walked towards the coast and after passing through a parking lot with several barriers I entered right into a different world.
I had arrived in the paradise of rich people on the coastline of Tivat. I walked along a completely new and impressively clean beach promenade made of white stones, with fancy fountains, flowerbeds and palm-trees, the harbor to my right and full of extremely fancy and expensive yachts, one bigger than the other.
I witnessed the presence of mostly +60 German and Dutch people with blue wristbands, smelling the flowers and strolling along the yachts, possibly checking out their future investments.
Some of them didn’t even bother to walk but drove around in golf carts. I saw one old man driving a young boy to the seaside to play with his toy – a 1.5m-high, realistic, remote-motor-model of a fancy sailboat. I got myself a resupply of water and a gluten free snack in the only existing shop – a fancy healthcare shop with biological fruit, Seeberger nuts and a good assortment of gf stuff.
At first I felt too odd to sit down on one of the super clean white banks with my Tupperware lunchbox in the middle of yachts and wristbanded rich people. I was also too fascinated with this new world to stop walking so I strolled to the end of the harbor. I came by more elder Germans, some French, younger Russians and Chinese in flowery or leopardy dresses and with large sunglasses labelled with Gucci or Dolce and Gabbana. A few dressed-up ship-captains with dark marine-blue and golden uniforms also crossed my way.
I finally sat down on a bench close to the enormous and beautiful sailboat of the Montenegrin marine or police.
My Tupper-lunch and hiking boots earned a few very obvious, condescending looks from two elder German couples with Schwäbisch accent but I enjoyed myself very much, feeling a little like a space tourist that had just landed on a different planet.
After some more “sightseeing” in the neighborhood, I strolled to a random bus-station and got on the bus back to Kotor. Almost like a miracle, the Frensh couple was also in that bus and one station later the German woman joined us. They had taken a different path than I had (of course).
After talking a bit, the French couple offered me a ride to Dubrovnik tomorrow, which I accepted gladly.
I decided that I still had some energy left and didn’t want to go back to the stupid hostel so I stood on the bus to go to the old town of Perast. The bus stopped half way and I had to get off and wait for another one that came 20 minutes later. In the meantime, all my energy had vanished, so when I finally got to Perast, I stayed there for only half an hour. It was a beautiful little village, old but perfectly renovated and arranged for rich people’s holidays with very nice restaurants and hotels. I got there right in time to see the big cruise leave the bay.
By sundown, I got back to the hostel, where the English couple was drinking their fifth liter of beer, and was very thankful for a hot shower and some freshly washed clothes.
Tomorrow I will be leaving Montenegro, the most beautiful but least interesting country so far.
