Day 133: Bay of Kotor

Aug 14 - Odette has a low fever, but is in a cheery mood and we already paid for a boat trip today, so off we go. It is a 3-4 hour excursion in a speedboat. I booked the 9:00 departure, in hopes that most tourists can’t drag themselves out of bed early enough to be out on the bay at that time.

The cruise ship from yesterday is gone, but another is just now chugging into port. Our speedboat could probably hold twenty, but there are only 15 of us. Part of the reason I wanted to do this was just to be able to visualize the bay and surrounding mountains, which is difficult to do from the narrow shores. The bay itself is a submerged canyon, having filled in with seawater from the end of the last ice age. If we were in Norway, it would be called a fjord.

The western end of Kotor.

An old Catholic church in the hills on the south side of the inlet leading to Kotor.

A few looking west.

The historically significant town of Perast. It used to have a large population, but today this has shrunk to 600 people.

The Catholic Monastery of St. George, built on its own tiny island. It is now private land and tourist launches cannot land.

The island next door, however, is the church of Our Lady of the Rocks, and can be visited. This jumble of rocks poking out of the bay was enlarged significantly over the years to include a decent-sized church and surrounding plaza. In the 15th Century there was supposedly an Orthodox chapel here on the rocks, but the real construction was done by the Venetians in 1630, who replaced the chapel with a Catholic church and continually widened the island with rocks and sunken boats.

The wide plaza around the church is known as the ‘Place of Reconciliation’, and historically was used as a neutral meeting ground for feuding clans, so that they could find a peaceful solution.

For a small church, it is richly decorated.

Attached is a museum of all sorts of random stuff, including some displays of medals.

The next stop was one of the three submarine bunkers blasted into the steep shoreline.

These were used in WWII.

The inside of the bunker.

The next place to see, from a distance, was Mamula Island. A fortress was built here in 1853 by the Austro-Hungarians. It was used by the fascist Italian forces as a concentration camp during WWII, mostly for inhabitants of the immediate area. Recently it was bought by an Egyptian real estate developer and is being converted into a luxury casino.

The last stop was one of the many sea caves in the region, similar to the ones we went to near Dubrovnik.

An example of what much of the coast here looks like, at least the part facing the open ocean. The limestones erode fast and fall into the ocean as blocks.

The entrance to the Blue Cave, not to be confused with other ‘blue caves’ up and down the Dalmatian Coast. This one is big enough the speedboats can (carefully) get inside.

View from the inside, out the main entrance. We had the option to swim in here, but there was no snorkeling equipment available, and I felt it didn’t serve much purpose to just sit in the water. It looks warm in the photos but there was a lot of wind and the ride back to Kotor was long.

View from the inside, out of a smaller entrance to a different embayment.

Clear stratigraphy on these rocks, and some folding.

More caves nearby, but no time to see them.

Just a good profile of the mountains, seen on the return journey to Kotor.

After this we find some cheap lunch in Kotor and let Odette rest for the remainder of the day. It is Sunday so not many businesses open, including the grocery stores.

Montenegro