Montenegro Diaries: Where are you, Catherine Zeta-Jones?

Autograph hunting in Montenegro's Venice

When I’m waiting for a train or the microwave or sitting in a particularly long meeting, I like to imagine where, when I’m disgustingly rich, my summer house will be. The French Riviera, California, Tuscany, all of these idyllic and expensive places tend to feature somewhere on the edge of my conscience. Somewhere that has never cropped up in these daydreams is Perast, Montenegro. But then I’m not Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Over a decade ago, the good people at Wales Online spilled the fact that Catherine Zeta-Jones and her also famous husband Michael Douglas had a “mountain retreat” in Perast.

I go there thinking that this is quite a rogue decision from the pair, and this feeling only intensifies upon arrival.

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The bus that takes us from Kotor to Perast is small, and the driver operates a machine that he has to crank to produce tiny, thin paper tickets the size of postage stamps. It drops me and the other passengers off on Perast’s main street, which isn’t hard to find because it’s also Perast’s only street.

It’s a tiny town, out of season, and it’s main square is pretty if a little downtrodden. Lonely Planet calls Perast a chunk of Venice that has “floated down the Adriatic,” and has now landed here, in the Bay of Kotor.

This isn’t entirely untrue (the Venetians ruled this part of the world back in their conquering, city-state days), but it is ambitious. One could say that I’m a chunk of Jon Hamm that’s floated down to north London. I have dark hair and a beard and can often be seen in glasses, but I’m still, crucially, and to my considerable chagrin, not Jon Hamm. Perast is very much not Venice.

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It’s grey on the day we visit, despite promised sunshine, and we wander down the promenade looking at the upmarket restaurants. There are a couple of very fancy hotels that out of season look dusty and quiet. Celebrities, even those who own mountain retreats nearby, are thin on the ground, as are regular people.

The main people around, other than the odd tourist, are men who stand around the docks hawking boat rides to Our Lady of the Rocks, one of two islands that sit just off the coast inside the bay, the other being St George.

Both contain churches, though you can only hitch a ride to Our Lady of the Rocks. It’s literally hitching. Perast’s main employment opportunity, other than working in restaurants or hotels, is clearly owning a boat and charging tourists a few euro to trundle over the narrow stretch of water to the island.

We do this, because there isn’t much to do in Perast, particularly out of season. We do quickly walk up to what is billed as beach club first, which is closed for the winter. It being called a beach club is as tenuous as comparing Perast to Venice; its stretch of beach is about 20 feet long and 1 foot wide. Technically, there is a beach. Technically, I have similar physical characteristics to the gorgeous and talented Jon Hamm. And yet.

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So, a romantic boat ride across the bay? Not quite. We board a boat that wouldn’t look out of place on a front page news report about a major maritime disaster. Our disinterested captain is our only companion. He is, quite clearly, very bored in his line of work, and doesn’t even react when a rogue wave climbs aboard the boat and sends cold water down our backs.

This isn’t a one-off, and by the time we reach the island we look like we decided to swim there to save the cash. He says he’ll be back in 15 minutes. When we ask if he’ll come back in about half an hour too, he shoots us a look that tells us 30 minutes is a very long time on this island.

He’s right. There’s one church, which is small but ornately furnished inside. It somehow manages to be staffed by two attendants - they really do cram people into jobs anywhere they can in Perast - who do such a shoddy job at actually attending that at one point they both leave the church with us in it. They do this with a smile and a request to not go into the room at the back, of course making us want to go in there even more.

We don’t, and instead board the boat back to the mainland. Lots of people join us on this trip, and they get to join us in the experience in getting absolutely soaked by the Bay of Kotor.

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We walk down the road again and debate lunch at one of the upmarket restaurants. We decide against it. It’s windy and our clothes are damp and the prices are higher than in Kotor.

We instead wait at the bus stop for the bus back around the bay. It’s hourly, but timekeeping isn’t a primary concern here. Some half an hour after it’s rumoured to be expected, it shows up. I scan the passengers as we board. There’s a woman sitting near the front. Could it be? Catherine Zeta-Jones, is that you?

No, of course it isn’t.

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Some housekeeping.

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