We crossed the border from Bosnia into a land of mountains. Montenegro seems to be made up of mountains and canyons everywhere except around the capital Podgorica. We first travelled to the spectacular coastline of the Bay of Kotor on a big new highway, winding our way down to the narrow coastal strip.
We stayed in an apartment, 30 minutes walk from the old town of Kotor, trying to avoid the cruise boat tourists who arrive in their hundreds every day even in the off season. Dinner in the old town on our first night was a bit disappointing mostly due to the bored waiter and the inflated prices.
So for our second night we followed the suggestion of our apartment host Milos, and walked 5 minutes in the other direction to Konoba Portun. And what a good decision it was. We decided to splash out and have the seafood platter....prawns, stuffed squid, fried squid, black risotto and three types of fish. It was delicious. So delicious I forgot to take a photo of the risotto but it came in a black pot so it probably wouldn't have shown up anyway.
We then spent a couple of nights out in the countryside of the Lustica Peninsula, too far from restaurants so self catering using some of the wild sage growing everywhere to flavour chicken and fish we had bought.
Lake Skadar was our next stop and I had booked an Airbnb several kilometres out of the town of Virpazar which sounded promising. It was called an Etno house, home to a vineyard where they made wines, several flavours of rakija and fruit syrups. They also provided meals. We followed the very narrow road up into the hills where a natural spring had been tapped to water the garden of George and Mira. As soon as we arrived we were escorted into their cellar door area and given tastings of their red wine, pomegranate (slightly fizzy) wine, walnut flavoured rakija, coffee and some the natural spring water. We followed George for a tour of his small vineyard and Mira took us to a church which had slid 200m down the hillside and rotated 90 degrees after an earthquake a few hundred years ago and still stood where it had come to rest on a slight lean. Mira then whipped up the best meal we had in Montenegro....crispy trout, marinated carp,salad, home made cheese, fresh bread.
Breakfast next morning was pretty good too. Prosciutto,eggs,cheese,tomato eggplant,zucchini, all locally produced.This gave us lots of energy to set off exploring for the day.
More narrow roads with great views and a hike following a stream past a small hydroelectric plant.
We decided to try Mira's cooking again that night. This time even though we had tried to indicate that we wanted smaller portions, we were still served a huge but extremely bony fish with a delicious paella style rice.
Next morning it seemed Mira couldn't bear the thought of us self catering our breakfast and brought us some jam filled pancakes as well as some spinach egg slice which we saved for our lunch....in Albania.
2 comments:
When is Part 2 coming?
After Albania
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