Kotor; Tuesday, 09 May, 2023
When I’d been up on the walls the previous day I had noticed what looked like a set of ruins close to the South Gate of the city, so I headed over there first to have a look around. It turns out it is a set of ruins, but of what I wasn’t quite certain. There were no signs or information display boards on site and Google Maps claimed it was both the ruins of an Ancient Roman Settlement as well as the ruins of St Francis Monastery. None the wiser I took some photos and then wandered back into the old town via the Gaudric gate, headed up onto the walls, and wandered round to the café that I’d spotted up on the walls for a late morning coffee and water, whilst watching another cruise ship, albeit much smaller this time, deposit its passengers onto the city.
From the walls I headed back down into town and walked round to another set of ruins, this time those of the monastery that had been attached to the Orthodox St Nicholas church – but given the need to reuse space in a cramped old town this is also now the site of the Kotor Bazar, basically a tourist tat market with stalls nestled between the ruins of the monastery and cloister.
A short walk away from St Nicholas and my last stop on the trip was at the Maritime Museum which has a decent collection of artefacts, maps, pictures and models about the history of seafaring and the navy both in Kotor, the Bay area and more widely the area that makes up modern day Montenegro. The museum is housed in one of the old palaces of the city, and is in fact the only one of the palaces that you can visit as the rest are all privately owned.
Final museum visit completed I stopped off at a very pleasant pasta restaurant for lunch before heading back to the hotel, picking up my luggage and head back to the area beyond the walls to pick up my transfer back to the airport.
Tivat airport is the busiest airport in Montenegro, which is a bit of an eyeopener as at 14:00 on a Tuesday there were just four flights left for the rest of the day – three to Belgrade and my one back to Luxembourg. To add to the quiet fell this was the first available return flight to Luxembourg as the first flight of the season had been the one I’d flown out with on Saturday, so there the flight back was only about half full, and pretty much everyone was a familiar face from the flight out.
The journey back to Luxembourg was smooth and in the end frustratingly early and well managed. When I’d booked the flights several months earlier I’d had to do them as two separate bookings as the LuxAir website didn’t allow me to create a connecting booking. I’d originally had a return leg for my London City flight booked for 21:00 in the evening, giving me a – probably too long – three hour connection in Luxembourg, but a few weeks before my trip LuxAir had cancelled the flight and moved me onto the 19:15 flight.
As it was on two separate bookings there wasn’t an option to transit through Luxembourg, instead I’d have to clear immigration, collect my bags, get back up to check-in and drop off my bags for the next flight. Check-in closed 45 minutes before departure and the arrival time of my Kotor flight was just 50 minutes before the departure time of the London flight – 5 minutes was not going to be enough to make the connection, so instead I had myself moved to the first flight the following morning.
Of course we promptly landed in Luxembourg 15 minutes early, cleared immigration in under 1 minute to find my bag already on the belt and was up at the check-in desks with what would have been 10 minutes to spare. Instead I headed out of the airport and caught the bus back round to exactly the same hotel I’d stayed at four nights previously.
I had a quick drink in the bar and a quick bite to eat before having an early night as I needed to get up very early for my flight back to London the following morning – given that check-in closed at 06:30
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