We added our 6th country of the trip today. We are now parked in the marina in Bar Montenegro with a nice view of most of the Montenegrin Navy (4 ships). Our second border crossing was not as uneventful as the first, but it is our fault.
We are supposed to be traveling with a document for François called a Carte Grise. Our original Carte Grise went missing during Covid and the location we use for storing François changed so we needed to modify our Societe Civile and after that was complete change the address on the Carte Grise to reflect the new address. For a lot of reasons the documents were not ready when we arrived. We discussed our options with Eurocampingcar and decided to go with copies, it was not ideal but we thought with explanation the copies would work.
The first border crossing in Croatia was a non-event as they did not even look at our passports or vehicle documents. Today in Montenegro we pulled up to a very quiet border crossing and handed the guard our passports, and he asked for the vehicle documents. He typed our passport information in, and then looked at the documents and said: “Montenegro requires original documents”. There was a pause while he looked at me, then he stamped our passports and handed back our documents and our copies and repeated “Montenegro requires original documents.”; but pointed into Montenegro. I asked may we enter, and he replied “Have a good day.” So we are in Montenegro trying to track down our original documents from Eurocampingcar, before we go to Albania.
The other issue from yesterday was every time we entered a tunnel Ton would tell me to turn on the headlights as it was very dark, and every time I would look at the dash and the little headlights on icon was shining brightly. When we arrived in Bar for the night we moved into our spot after dark and Ton was right the headlights are not on despite the nicely lit icons, the running lights work, the high beams work, but the low beams don’t. So we will be spending some time trying to iron that out.
In between the drama we visited Kotor. Kotor is on an incredible body of water that looks a lot like a Fjord, but is technically not a Fjord but a flooded river valley. Still it is beautiful and Ton enjoyed the views while I was busy driving a very twisty, but wide road. As we pulled into Kotor it looked very interesting but we knew it was going to be crowded because there was a giant cruise ship looming over the town.
Kotor had the most impressive ruins of an immense wall and fort running up a nearly vertical mountainside. It was quite a feat of engineering when they built it. The town walls connect to the mountainside walls. We walked the town walls, and while it is possible to climb to the top, we passed on the opportunity.
Kotor has a thriving cat population and has latched onto that as a tourist trade opportunity. The cats are cute and act like it is their town and we are lucky we let them use it. Everywhere we have visited in the Balkans the town and campground cats have been well treated. Since we are now cat people thanks to our sons cat Dottie we have enjoyed watching them play and beg for food with a dignity that only a cat can muster, while they are asking for food they make it clear that it is our privilege to feed them.
Kotor was the first city we have visited in Europe that is primarily Orthodox Christian. We took a look inside to get an impression of the difference in the art and layout of the churches. Our initial impression is that the art work is a little more austere and stylized than in Catholic and Protestant churches.
We enjoyed Kotor it is less developed as a tourist destination and feels more “authentic”. But it has recently hit a lot of lists as the new hot destination in the Adriatic, so already most of the storefronts are now set up to meet the needs of tourists and not the locals. It feels like a mini-Dubrovnik which is not all bad.
We are now parked in the Marina in Bar, Montenegro. Our friends Cory and Ovi kept their boat here during Covid and recommended that we stay here, they even introduced us to a friend of theirs who set us up with our own space with electricity. After we arrived Tito met us at the marina and directed us to our spot. As he was on duty for the night we got to spend a couple of hours talking to him.
