Since we were down in Dubrovnik we thought we’d take a short trip to Montenegro and Bosnia & Hercegovina since there’s some cool stuff nearby. First stop was the town of Kotor in the Bay of Kotor. The naming’s not super-original but a bit more thought went into it than ‘Townsville’.
The bay itself is a pretty spectacular natural location, it’s surrounded by huge mountains rising straight up from the sea that it looks like a fjord.
Some bright spark in the history of Kotor thought it would be a good idea to add a fort to the top of one of the hill behind the town and build walls all the way down to the town, so now you have these steep fortified cliffs which are good fun to explore. Since they’re partly ruined it does feel like you’re climbing around an old forgotten castle.
You can also go hiking in the mountains behind the fort, which is what we ended up accidentally doing. We thought we’d just take a relaxed stroll through the old town, found a path leading to a waterfall, thought we’d follow it to see where else it went, and then found ourselves halfway up the mountain.
We finally managed to get some good weather at the right time (it had been raining most days while we were in Dubrovnik) so we took a day trip to go white water rafting in Tara Canyon. It was the right time of year for it, so the river level was high and flowing very fast so we got some proper rapids to paddle through. The guy there rated it grade 4+ out of 5. I don’t think the ‘+’ is part of the official rating system, but it does make it sound more impressive.
It was definitely a wild ride. No one really knew what they were doing apart from the captain. At first we were all too worried about falling out of the raft so we were leaning a bit to the inside of the raft, which meant that when we went over rapids we’d end up with half the raft (of 10 people) falling off their seat and onto the floor of the raft, leaving the captain to desperately try and keep us afloat. Once we got the hang of it we got better at being vaguely coordinated in our paddling and had a lot of fun bouncing over the rapids and being launched into the air and trying to not smash our paddles into each other when we landed back in the water. It was hard work but the 20km seemed to go by too quickly. This is definitely something we need to do again!
We also had a short stop in Mostar, in Bosnia & Hercegovina, to have a look at the old town and famous bridge: Stari Most. The bridge is about 25-30m above the water so people use it as a good spot to jump off. The locals do it for fun (or money if you really keen to see someone jump off), or you can even do it yourself. We decided not to. Maybe next time. For sure…
During the civil war in the 90’s Mostar went through hell and you can still plenty of ruined buildings absolutely covered in bullet holes that they look like Swiss cheese. Not even the famous bridge was spared, it was completely destroyed.
We’ll finish up with a happy story. Here’s a picture of the dog who fell off the wall into a tree and got stuck. He couldn’t go up or down and was yelping a lot in fear. With a bit of help from some bystanders we were able to pull him back up over the wall and reunite him with his pack.
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