[PICTURED: The Crown Princess anchored in the Bay of Kotor, as seen from the castle atop Kotor's City Walls.]

Sailing Into the Bay of Kotor

I set my alarm for 5:30am, so we could have breakfast at 6am, and watch our sail-in at 7am.  But at 5:15am I woke with a start, for we were already in the Bay of Kotor. Chiara asked if we had overslept, but I said I think it’s just a really big bay.

We watched the sail-in from the Horizon Buffet, eating shitty buffet food while servers refilled our bottomless coffee/tea/orange-juice glasses.

Why was the buffet food shitty?  It depends on who you ask. For Chiara, they usually only have whole fruit, not cut fruit. For Gianna and Sam, the food is processed and mass produced, in sharp contrast to the five-star cuisine they have become accustomed to in New York. For me, they keep rotating between eggs benedict, eggs Florentine, and fried eggs, when I would rather that they rotated between different types of eggs benedict. Also, the third of the three Horizon Buffets, the one on the stern inexplicably referred to by the ship as the “Caribe Café,” has lox and cream cheese with no bagels, even though there ARE toasted bagels at the two Horizon Buffets on each side of the ship, and I don’t know anything as shitty as lox and cream cheese with no bagels, unless it’s a cruiser too lazy to go get a bagel from one of the other buffets so he just eats his lox and cream cheese on a plain bun.  All of that is shitty in different ways.

Tendering in Montenegro

Like Santorini, the Bay of Kotor was a tender port. But unlike Santorini, we did not have an excursion arranged. Instead, we simply intended to climb the city walls to reach the castle 135 stories above the Bay.

Aaron and Toni expected to reach the top without breaking a sweat, but whether I had in me 1,352 stone steps up a mountainside remained to be seen, so we didn’t feel like we needed any further plan.

Aaron and Toni showed us how to be first in line to get tender tickets at 6:45am outside the Michelangelo Dining Hall, and we got the very first tickets 1-6 -- and boarded the very first tender.

The Bay of Kotor’s tender boats only held 38 passengers, which seemed like not enough. It would take scores of such boats to empty the Crown Princess, and two other cruise ships had sailed in hot on our heels. The first ship behind us was, surprisingly, another Princess ship, the Sea Princess, which was on a 100+ stop around-the-world cruise. The second was the Norwegian Star. Both the Sea Princess and the Norwegian Star held 2,000+ passengers, which was less than our ship held. But if a combined 7,000 cruisers might attempt to come ashore, I didn’t see how the 38-person boats were going to do it.

Our captain did a good job by getting to the Bay of Kotor first.  We got the best parking spot, right near the dock, while the other two ships had to moor about a half-mile or so further back in the bay, which meant longer tender journeys for those passengers.

A few months ago, in May, while moored in the Bay of Kotor, our ship, the Crown Princess, got hit with 50 mph winds, and the crew lost control of the ship. She dragged anchor, and nearly crashed into the shore, which would have been catastrophic. The weather was fine on July 10, but I can’t help think but our captain, remembering that experience, would prefer the more sheltered part of the Bay, and might have made an extra effort to get that spot.  We were powering through those white caps awfully quickly the prior evening, and we did arrive in the Bay a little earlier than scheduled.  #GamesShipCaptainsPlay.

On shore, Aaron, Toni, Chiara, and I were the first ones off the first tender boats, from the first ship, so we made our way quickly through the empty streets of Kotor and found the entrance to the City Walls before the arrival of the person who would have charged us eight euros each to enter.

The Cats of Kotor

The first thing we noticed in Kotor were the cats.  Stray cats everywhere, and kittens especially.  If we had done our research, or if I had stayed awake during the Boring Man’s travel lecture, we might have learned that Kotor is famous for its cats, and we might have anticipated that the souvenir shops that we would encounter later in the afternoon would be stuffed with Cats-of-Kotor merchandise. Instead, we thought we had discovered on our own this strange abundance of strays.

Up To The Castle

Up the stone stairs we climbed.  Up, up, up.  We took photos when we thought we were high up, even though we knew we would later be higher up still, and even though we weren’t high up at all, and then we continued to climb.  I took frequent breaks, like at the top of every switchback. But we continued to climb.

Aaron and Toni found a sign that said, “Forbidden. Danger. Do Not Enter.” That was, for them, an invitation to enter, so we all climbed up a particularly dilapidated set of steps that took us to a particularly abandoned rampart with just as dramatic views as anywhere else, or maybe just a bit more.

Aaron said he found a cave with bats in it; I did not go to investigate that.

Eventually we arrived at the very top of the City Walls, inside the remains of a castle, and took all the amazing photos.

The city walls of Kotor were built over many centuries, starting more than a thousand years ago. During some of that period Kotor was under Venetian rule, so some of the doors and arches in the city walls bear the image of the Winged Lion that is the symbol of St. Mark and Venice.

However, the walls are not in good repair. On the way up we passed some workers who had lugged the ingredients for mortar half-way up the hill and were mixing cement to repair some collapsed areas. They have a lot of work to do. Where the walls are in good repair, they stand only 30-inches high, which is not consistent with OSHA safety standards for cliff-edge barriers because it would be too easy to flip over the top. And in many places the edge had collapsed entirely and there were zero inches of barrier.

Normally that kind of thing would spook me, because I am afraid of heights.  I think my fear of heart attacks from over exertion trumped my fear of heights in this instance – you can only be afraid of so many things simultaneously, and I have been in high places and lived to tell the tale, but I have never climbed 135 stories on a hot day.

But it happened this day.

Back Down to the City

Next we hiked back down to the city, which took a lot less time, but was not a lot less painful. The trip down hurt partly because our shins were in no way prepared to resist so many downward steps, and partly because the traffic up the hill had grown dense, frequently forcing us off the steps and onto the scrabbly slope besides the steps, which was uneven, unpredictable, and slippery.

When we reached the town, we found it mobbed with tourists – the tender boats had been busy! 

We also found Sam. Gianna had stayed on the ship, but Sam ventured out to see the city walls, so we pointed him in the right direction.

Aaron then found us a Montenegran restaurant, Cesarica, that was off the beaten path and not touristy. Everyone in the trip takes greater offense than I do from getting stuck in some touristy place; I am insensitive to whatever it is that bothers them.

This place passed the authenticity test because (1) There were almost no other tourists there, (2) The other customers were speaking to the host in her native language of Montenegran, and (3) The menu featured “Squid stuffed with shrimp” and “Squid stuffed traditionally,” without saying what the traditional stuffing was.

Aaron first ordered the traditionally stuffed squid, then asked what it would be stuffed with.  “More squid,” said our server. I froze at the thought, but Aaron knew just what to say. “That’s a good thing,” said Aaron, “Because if you’d just brought me squid I would have said there wasn’t enough squid, so stuffing the squid with squid solves the problem.”

Toni’s keychain collection has grown truly ponderous, and Montenegro is a particular gem.  We searched far and wide for a key chain depicting St. Tryphon holding the City of Kotor in his hand, eventually settling for a key chain with a container of holy water that depicted St. Tryphon holding the City of Kotor in his hand.

Chiara and I found a blue glass hanging lamp from Montenegro that would be JUST the thing to light our patio under the grape arbor, so we have a souvenir, which is unusual for us, although Delta smashed it on the way home.

We also discovered in Kotor a new and delightful flavor of gelato: Kinder Bueno.

Back to the Crown Princess

When we returned to the dock to tender back to the Crown Princess, we learned how they solved the problem of the port’s having inadequate tender boats.  The Crown Princess lowers as many of her life boats as needed, and uses them to tender.  Each of the Crown Princess lifeboats holds 150 people, and there are more than a dozen of them, so it is no problem to set up a continuous line of tender boats, even if the port offers nothing. Indeed, the Crown Princess and the Sea Princess both were using lifeboats to tender, which is how the city of Kotor filled up so quickly behind us.

The sail-away from Kotor was somewhat dramatic, since the Crown Princess, the Sea Princess, and the Norwegian Star all saluted each other with long noisy horn blasts as they passed. When we left, the Norwegian Star was close on our tail on the way out, too.  We watched the Bay of Kotor for a long time, and then we went to the Michelangelo Dining Hall to eat, drink, and nurse our aching legs.

Princess Theater

The Princess Theater had been strangely quiet during the first few days of our voyage. Instead of any kind of stage show or musical review, the ship had been featuring small acts on the big stage – an improv artist on Saturday night, and some musical groups that I would have expected to be playing Crooners rather than the big stage – and which WERE in fact playing Crooners the following nights.

But Tuesday night offered a Musical Tribute to Soul on the big stage, and I went by myself to learn more, because everybody else was too exhausted to watch a stage show. And even if they weren’t VERY exhausted, a Tribute to Soul was nobody’s cup of tea but mine. And not really even mine.

I had an empty seat at each elbow in the front row, even though the theater as a whole was maybe 75% full when the curtain rose, and there we saw the Crown Princess Singers, the Crown Princess Dancers, and the Crown Princess Band.

They played Rolling on the River, Soul Man, You Can Feel It All Over, I Heard It Through the Grape Vine, My Girl, stuff like that.

The band was excellent. The four main vocalists were very talented, and the dancers ranged from good to very good. The apparent purpose of the show was to mimic as closely as possible the kind of musical review that you can see on any Disneyland stage, which is a 40-minute medley of familiar tunes with a lot of energy and a lot of costume changes.

The stage performers threw themselves into it – they left it all on the stage, took nothing back to the dressing room. You never know when there will be a talent scout in the front row. But they fought against profoundly uninspired direction and production and repertoire. There was some perfunctory strobe flashing, and some perfunctory fireworks. The dancers perfunctorily took to the aisles at one point.  It was fine, and I enjoyed it.

Afterward, the ship’s entertainment director said that this evening had been the premier performance of this new cast of singers and dancers.  They had been training in Los Angeles for some time, and had flown to Athens and boarded the ship when we did, and after just a couple days of jet lag recovery and working with the band, this was their first show. It was a good debut of a mediocre show.