With word from my once and future travel partner Kate that she’d like to head to Turkey ASAP to beat the heat, Sarajevo became the westernmost stop on this particular leg of the journey. The coast was still calling, and Dubrovnik is marginally closer to Turkey than Sarajevo (this is possibly untrue), so off I went. It’s pretty much impossible not to like Dubrovnik – the old town is straight out of the medieval movie of your choosing/Assassin’s Creed, all pale stone and tiny alleys climbing up and up to the walls, with the mountains looming in the background. I spend a visually pleasing two days there, before heading on into Montenegro, to the small town of Kotor, buried in the bay (see previous).
After the initial, overwhelmingly positive impressions, Kotor managed to continue to impress. The hostel had an excellent soundtrack, and was populated by a succession of fantastic people (this list is more for my memory than because it makes any kind of decent blog entry – Anna, the painter from Moscow; the Berliners, the Swedes, the incredibly English girls, and Olivia of the mangled hamster. Good people just seem to come out of the woodwork – Maya with the green eyes and gaggle of friends playing hookey to show us around their town, the dancing Montenegrin, the barkeep with his stylish rakia bottle, Alex the former professional gamer turned hostelkeep, and every character along the way – so fantastic.
Kotor’s beautiful in a way I can’t really describe. The chapel amongst the ruins and scattered white rocks, sheer cliff behind and fortress towering above. You couldn’t make up a more picturesque scene. These stunning memories sustained me through the 4-border, 20 hour bus ride back to Bulgaria (hot, winding, rattling, and generally terrible. My laptop took a worrying tumble (still kicking) and died with 10 minutes of a movie left, the music was terrible, and I didn’t have local currency so it was a lot of pretzels). There were places that could have been good stops along the way, and I managed a couple hours of wandering in the grey dawn of Skopje, but I needed to make up the bonus days in Kotor, so now there are more things on the rather daunting list of things ‘to do in the spring,’ Now settled in Sofia for a couple of nights off, some laundry, and other such intrigues. Excited to be heading back to Turkey, though upon arriving in Bulgaria I’m strongly reminded of how much I love the particularly Balkan land and cityscapes. Even a few days away in the more pristine beauty of Kotor and the sight of the imperfect arc of a half-collapsed cooling tower against snow-capped mountains and fronted by a mosaic of broken windows and rotting steel strikes me as so beautiful.
Planning a slow day of taking pictures tomorrow, and depending on onward transport, maybe a hike, though there’ll be plenty of that in the near future.