Camping Maslina – Kotor 46.94km 🚴♀️ 3.08.18 ⏱ 15.0km/hr ⬆️ 730m ⬇️ 750m
After a restless sleep in our sauna tent we were woken early by a hedgehog 🦔 and not much later by a cat 🐈 that paying us a visit. We had planned on waking up early anyway to get a head start. The lady at the bakery around the corner mentioned she opened at seven, but when we arrived she wasn’t happy at all with us actually showing up at seven. We weren’t happy either. The croissant 🥐 that looked so tasty the day before had sugary chocolate inside and wasn’t very tasty. High breakfast expectations ended in a big disappointment.
When we hit the road traffic was already getting busy and it pretty much stayed like that for the entire morning. It was absolutely the worst we’ve had until now. We would love to go back to the Albanian highways 🛣 instead of cycling on the M-1 in Montenegro. When we thought it couldn’t get any worse we hit Budva. Maybe it’s a nice city, but we hate it. Traffic was horrible, once we were about to cycle out of the city the road got even narrower than before and cars 🚙 , tour busses 🚌 and trucks 🚛 were speeding past us in one continuous stream of traffic. We hit a tunnel and didn’t even have time to stop and cross the road, which would have been suicide, to cycle on the sidewalk instead of the main road.
We stopped just after the tunnel to catch some breath and Suuz nearly had her first mental breakdown. We needed to keep going though for another short stretch until we could get exit this horrendous road. For real, Mas would rather date a Chucky doll 🧟♂️ than cycle any further on that shit thing. And she really hates puppets.
Anyway, when we finally reached the exit we stopped at a cafe for an espresso and a fresh smoothie fruit 🍉 🍎 🍌 before continuing our trip on a secondary road. It was a huge relief, beautifully quite, hardly any cars 🚗, good surface but sooo steep. We loved it though. The main road would probably have saved us a lot of climbing but this was so worth it. A lot of caterpillars 🐛 on the road distracted us a little from all the effort we had to put in cycling up 20% inclines. Quite a challenge not to run them over. Once at the top we had some crazy violent dogs 🐕 on our downhill. They were barking and coming close. It seemed they were guard dogs protecting territory, those are the worst.
We circled down around the mountain ⛰ and all of a sudden we had this amazing view of Kotor 😍. Probably one of the most mind blowing views we ever experienced. This old Montenegrin city was built along a small bay surrounded by these huge mountains ⛰ and the ocean 🌊. Absolutely beautiful.
After the most gorgeous and totally deserved downhill into Kotor we cycled along the water to our apartment situated just outside of the city on the road we would be following tomorrow. We enjoyed our midday swim 🏊🏻♀️ in our private pool and looked at our route after Dubrovnik. After today’s traffic terror and the stories we’ve heard from other cyclists we are very reluctant to continue down the touristy coastline of Croatia. We will probably take some ferries ⛴ and cycle some of the Croatian islands instead.
In the late afternoon we took a taxi 🚕 to the old town of Kotor. If you ever have the chance, go visit. It’s touristy, for sure, but it’s also very much a fairytale of a city. We walked around for a bit, exploring the small cobbled streets and alleys and visited the Cat Museum 🐱. Motor is the city of cats 🐈 , so Suuz was over the moon. Museums get you thirsty, so we went to a craft beer bar Suuz had read about, had a nice home-brew 🍻, played gin-rummy and later devoured some tasty shrimp 🦐 and saffron spaghetti 🍝. A good finish to what started out as a pretty shitty day.
Komt het toch weer goed 😘