The Bay of Kotor, Montenegro
Another gloriously sunny day! Today was our day to explore Montenegro. We were out the door just before 8am and had breakfast at “our” café on the corner. The only change I made I made was ordering a double cappuccino – it was Delish!
We headed over to pick up the rental car around 8:45am and we were on the road shortly after that. We had no trouble getting out of the city (the rental car agency was just outside the Ploce Gate) and we left Croatia without a hitch. Crossing into Montenegro took about 15 minutes. The guard wanted to see the rental car papers and it took me a few minutes to understand what he wanted. Once he reviewed all the papers he stamped our passports and gave us everything back and we where on our way to the Bay of Kotor.
The rental car agent gave us terrific directions and we took the road along the coast and then up into the mountains going around the bay. It was the natural beauty was simply remarkable. We rode through Kotor, but couldn’t find where we could park, so we didn’t get out to have a look at the town. We drove over the mountains andinto the town of Budva. Budva is a good siz
ed town, but it didn’t seem all that spectacular, just an average town.
Our ultimate goal was to go to Sveti Stefani, which is an island resort off the coast of Montenegro with a small causeway from the mainland to access the island. We parked our car in the parking lot on the mainland and walked over to the island. The island is pretty small, but it is a resort and we paid 7 Euro each to walk around. Good thing I carried some Euros with me…Montenegro is on the Euro.
We walked around a bit and took some pictures. We thought we would stop at the beach here, we even came prepared with our swimsuits, but by 1pm after being there about 45 minutes we were ready to head back to Dubrovnik.
It had taken us about 4 hours to get to this point by taking the road around the Bay of Kotor (to see the great views!). On the way back we took the ferry across the short portion of the bay (as suggested by the car rental agent) and it took off almost 2 hours of our trip! Going back through the border crossing was a snap. They looked at our passports in Montenegro but did not stamp them and at the Croatian border they didn’t even look at our passports.
After stopping to gas up the car, we used about half a tank of gas; we got back to Dubrovnik around 3:45pm. On the road back into town we stopped at a pull off that had astounding views of the Old Town and took some pictures.
We took the car back to the rental car lot and locked it up. The office didn’t open up again until 5pm, so we stopped back at our sobe and then headed out to get something to eat.
We decided to have our big meal of the day at Lokando. It’s a seafood place right in the Old Port. We ordered grilled squid, seafood risotto and salad. They also served great foccacia bread…the best bread of the trip! The grilled squid were EXCELLENT!!! The risotto was just so-so (Hvar risotto spoiled us!). We agreed we should have had 2 orders of the grilled squid!
After eating we went back to the car rental office to return the keys and settle the bill. The cost of the rental car for the day was 490 Kuna, about $85 and the gas was 150 Kuna, about $25. With the entrance to Sveti Stefan and some other expenses for the day our total for the day for both of us was about $110, so it was slightly less then what we would have paid for doing the Atlas tour to Montenegro.
After we returned the rental car we stopped for some gelato at Dolce Vita. I thought the gelato here was A LOT better then the gelato we’ve had the last 2 nights at another place. I had 1 scoop of chocolate and 1 scoop of tiramisu…hey, if the calories are going right to my thighs it is going to be with chocolate!
The rest of the evening we just spent strolling around and then called it an early night.
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