Montenegro Diaries: View from the Top
How to get high in the Bay of Kotor
I’m standing in the St. John’s Fortress overlooking the Bay of Kotor and something is nagging at me. I know that I have never before stood at St. John’s Fortress and looked out over the Bay of Kotor, but I really feel like I have. This whole scene, the mountains, the calm water, the tourists looking at near artery-breaking point as they climb up here, it all looks too familiar.
Then I realise, I have seen it before. Many times. I just wasn’t in Montenegro when I saw it. I saw it on Instagram.
A travel tip that I’m not actually that convinced by myself, but that I’m going to share with you anyway, is beware the place whose main attraction is climbing something. I’m suspicious of any place where the best thing to do is get away from it, vertically, as quickly as possible.
Kotor falls into this category. Its main attraction, by far, is to climb to the Fortress of St. John, which perches on one of the many mountains that surround the bay. You do this by going up the many steep fortress walls that surround Kotor, this being a city which has a particularly bad habit of being invaded.
But Kotor as I’ve shown does have more to life than its views, but you’d be hard pressed to see that on social media. Montenegro is all the rage nowadays for travellers who want fantastic views and tasty food without paying Croatian prices. The main thing your insufferable travel blogger friends will tell you they did when in Kotor is climb to the fortress and then they’ll show you their photos.
So when you too finally visit Kotor you will stand at St. John’s Fortress and think, huh, it really does look just like the pictures. But they’re really quite gorgeous pictures so it’s okay, and you’ll take some and add them to social media. Then someone somewhere near a Norwegian fjord will choke on their herring and realise they could have got similar views to the ones they’re seeing, while getting southern European weather and without having to sell a kidney to pay for a pint.
You’ll work for those photos too, though if you’re like us, you won’t have to pay for them. The good people of Kotor - and this really is as quaint as it is stupid, they should milk us for all we’re worth - do charge you to walk up to the Fortress, but only in high season. So in early April we stroll right past the ticket barrier which is being worked on at the time by no less than three maintenance men.
And then you’ll climb up and up and look it’s really not that interesting to hear about someone walking up a big hill and you know what it’s like so I won’t go on. I will say though that I changed into active wear for the hike and felt both simultaneously pleased with myself for being so prepared but also completely ridiculous, as people twice my age were completing this slightly challenging activity in jeans and t-shirts.
Not everyone, to my relief, makes it look so easy. At about halfway you come to the small Church of Our Lady of Remedy. We fall into conversation with an American woman who looks like she’s considering the possibility that her heart is about to burst right out of her bosom. Her husband is back down in the Old Town, having completely refused to even entertain the hike.
She takes a selfie and we point out we’re about to carry on up the hill. This it seems is the first time she has noticed that she is not at the top, and we don’t stick around for the impending crisis this has clearly caused within her.
Instead we reach the Fortress and go across a rickety bridge to explore the ruins which, as their name suggests, aren’t exactly luxurious. We, of course, take photos, which won’t even need a filter. Then we meet two Irish women and take a photo for them, too.
Eventually I stand at the very top of the Fortress. A flag of Montenegro blows in the wind in front of the Bay of Kotor. The water is calm. The mountains still feel enormous but closer, more real, less like a painting, as they do from the ground.
I have seen this view many times online, and now I’m seeing it again. And it’s fantastic.