Kotor, Montenegro - Best Adriatic Coast-Town 🇲🇪

Right now I'm in Cotor Montenegro which is surrounded by big-ass mountains on one side and the Mediterranean Sea on the other one and in this video we're gonna take a better look at the old coastal town of Cotor. So it's 6 30 p.m and I'm in the gorgeous Mediterranean port town of Cotor and this place is in a really tiny inlet in Montenegro right next to the mountains. For those of you who don't know Montenegro actually literally means black mountains and you can probably tell that from all the mountains surrounding you no matter where you go in this place. This place has been a very strategic port for a long time because of its location and if you take a look around you'll probably see fortifications or walls and castles built over the last 2 000 years from everyone to the Byzantines to the Austrians and the Ottomans but primarily built by the Venetians. When you think about Venice now you probably think about that city in northern Italy with the boats and a lot of really cute building and architecture but back in the day Venice used to be a kingdom of itself that used to control a huge part of this Adriatic coast so they spent a lot of time building the fortifications over here. Enough about that let's go check out the old town of Cotor. Now I'm in front of the Cotor Cathedral which is one of the most important buildings in the whole city. This is one of the two Roman Catholic cathedrals in the town of Cotor and was consecrated almost 900 years ago. It's definitely one of the finer works of architecture this was actually destroyed several times by several big earthquakes that happened on the coast of Montenegro but restored each time it still looks pretty damn good. Although there's only like 15 000 people or less than that living in Cotor right now this place has been inhabited by people for more than 2100 years and the age of this town is very evident by the narrow alleys that you have to go through whenever you want to go to anywhere in this town. Looks a lot like Harry Potter to be honest. So the old town itself is completely walled off and fortified on all sides. One really cool thing about Cotor's walls is that you can actually get on top of them. Not all of the wall is preserved so it's not like Dubrovnik where you can walk around the entire city but there is this one tower sticking out called Kampana tower behind me that offers a pretty nice view around sunset time. I can't get over how ridiculous this view is. There's the sun setting on the mountains on one side, there's bigger mountains on this side, there's this moat behind me separating the town from everything else and then there's the old town on the other side. This is pretty damn cool. A really funny part is that I haven't seen half of these places that I'm seeing today before and I was actually in Cotor for a few days back in 2018 but I think I was just partying the whole time. I'd never climbed on top of this tower but I recognize this club on the stairway to this tower where I had partied two nights in a row last time I was here. Okay another huge thing about Cotor is that there are cats everywhere. So many cats that they even have a museum for cats. Okay so right now I'm in Peras Montenegro which is another cute little coastal town only about 10 kilometers away from Cotor. You usually can take a bus but I couldn't find one so I had to get a taxi to get here and this place is like a vacation spot for locals in the Balkans from what it seems. You can see people going for a swim, reading a book, riding their yacht if they're rich enough to own a yacht. I'm here because this is my favorite kayaking spot in the Balkans if not one of my favorite kayaking spots in the world. I was here three years ago but never made a video of that so coming back here to redo it this time. Finally out kayaking and I can't really talk much This is such a sick view. The little last bits of sunlight on top of the mountains is really cool but this also means I need to hurry up before it gets dark. Okay I definitely still can't get over how pretty those mountains look behind me but this is the coolest part of the canoeing adventure. You can come to this little island. There's actually two islands, one back there. In the middle of this little bay you can kayak here. You can definitely take a speed boat here but kayaking is a lot more fun and wild in my opinion. And the legend of these two islands goes that whenever seamen used to return from a voyage, a successful one, they would throw rocks here in the middle of this sort of like inlet and eventually it became an island. There's still like a local festival every year when people come and throw more rocks at these islets to make them bigger I guess. I gotta head back on because it's getting kind of dark and canoeing in the dark is not fun and I also paid for this thing for one hour only. Found a really really cool beach bar so I'm gonna have a beer and call it a day. Okay so this is day three and this one's gonna be a little bit spontaneous but I'm going to this fortress on top of a mountain for a barbecue with my hostel. Let's see how this goes. Wow what a setup. So bad. So right now we're at what used to be a Austro-Hungarian fortress on top of the hill and we're gonna have a barbecue at the very top so this should be fun. This place is also full of bats everywhere so if that's not your thing, stay away. Are you very impressed? Yeah. This is Kotor's annual manliness competition that's happening behind me. We have contestants from Ireland, Brazil and Montenegro. So as you can probably tell there's a big barbecue party going on behind me but I just have to say this is the coolest sunset I've seen in the Balkans in my life in the five or six months I've been in the Balkans at least. It's really cool. It's my last day and I just got a PCR test so as long as that comes negative I should be heading over to Bosnia tonight but I want to finish off this vlog with a story from when the first time I was here. In 2018 I came here and like this time I was at this bar called Letrica behind me every single night and then one day I was sitting right there by the stairs and there was a couple of Swedish people at our hostel and one of them was really drunk for some reason. I mean we're all drinking but this guy was super drunk. At one point we're all just sitting outside and he was drinking beer that he got from a grocery store which is what we're all doing because it's cheaper there than it is at the bar and it's totally legal to do that over here. He just threw his beer can into that window on the top straight into the room for no reason at all. He's not a violent person and the glass just smashed in there and the bouncers came running after him and almost beat him up and I thought this was the biggest idiot I've seen in my life and then this guy ended up being one of my closest friends. I went to visit him in Stockholm the next year in 2019 for a week. Him and a couple other people I've met over the years ended up staying four weeks. I think it crashed at his place a bunch of times. At one point he just went to Poland and left his apartment We're great friends now and we've been texting the whole time and he's probably going to watch this. That's the essence of what I love about travel. Meeting crazy people and then becoming friends with them. I'll quote this Netflix show that I was watching recently. The best part about travel is probably the friends you make when you're away from home. That's it for this one. Don't forget to like if you like the video and subscribe if you want to see more and follow me on Instagram for more real-time updates. I'll catch you guys hopefully from the next vlog somewhere in Bosnia