Finally, the end of our trip!

Please bear with me a bit more!  I promise it will end soon.  We dropped off our little red VW at the Dubrovnik airport and took a taxi across the border to the town of Hercig Novi in Montenegro.  Our taxi driver was a professional race car driver so he got us to the bus station in plenty of time for our bus to Ulcinj.  It also helped that the border crossing guard was a buddy of his, so we quickly made it through the passport check station.  Our bus trip along the entire coast of Montenegro cost 17 euros for both of us, a bargain for a scenic 3 1/2 hour tour.

It was nice to do some sightseeing without worrying about driving off a cliff or something, like I had been doing for the past 10 days.  Annette was snapping pictures the entire way, so you may see some reflections off the bus window, but we just want to give everyone an idea of what we saw along the route.

Most of the trip was going around the entire perimeter of Kotor Bay, a huge natural bay.  The mountains go right from the water's edge up to elevations of 2000' to 3000', so the road hugs the coast the entire way.

We passed the St. George Monastery, located on a tiny island in the bay, and other pretty views like the one below.

We passed through the old city of Kotor, which is one of the best preserved medieval towns in the region.  The photo below shows some of the protective wall around the old city as well as part of the 5 kilometer long defensive wall built on the hillside surrounding the town.  We hope to get back to Kotor to explore, since it looked like a very interesting place to spend a day or two.

Our bus held maybe 20 passengers, it was about the size of an airport shuttle, and somewhere along the line a scruffy looking older fellow got on who just might have been drinking a little too much that morning.  He was sitting a little behind us and must have thought the bus needed some additional entertainment, so he started singing along with some of the songs that are played on all buses in this part of the world.  Nothing better than being serenaded by a drunk Montenegrin in a small bus for about a half hour.  Sadly he asked the driver to let him off somewhere in the middle of nowhere, but Annette got a picture before he walked away.

A bit later we passed a little island town, which thanks to Google Earth I just figured out is called Sveti Stefan.

It was apparently a real town at one time but during the Yugoslavia days it was turned into a luxury resort that was very popular with Hollywood stars and royalty from the 60s to the 80s.  It is named after St. Stephen, and like St. Stephen became a bit of a martyr after the breakup of Yugoslavia, falling into disrepair and neglect.  In the mid-2000s the Montenegro government put out bids to refurbish the resort, and it reopened in 2010 and is now a 5-star resort.

One final pretty view, then we turned off to the bus station at Ulcinj, on the coast near the Albanian border.  Ulcinj is a pretty beach town with a fort on a cliff, but all we saw for 4 hours was the run-down bus station since we were baby-sitting our luggage.  We were hoping the bus from Ulcinj to Prizren would be bigger, so we could have plenty of room for our bags and be able to stretch out a bit, but it turned out to be an even smaller bus.  But at 6:00 PM the full bus departed and went off through the narrow, winding mountain roads in the rain toward Prizren, arriving around 10:00 PM to bring an end to our fun 3 week journey.  It felt good to get back to sleepy little Prizren.