Kotor – the rest of the story!

In my first article about Kotor, I focused mainly on our arrival via the Bay of Kotor on the Viking Star and my climb to the heights above the city to visit the old fortress. But one article isn’t enough to fully explore this beautiful location! After lunch we had more time to explore the city itself before embarking on our coach ride up and over the mountains to Cetinje and the royal gardens. The city of Kotor is walled, old and full of intriguing details. Inside the walls, it is a pedestrian paradise with beautiful tiled streets, old churches and restaurants.

Some of the images and scenes really cried out for more of an artistic treatment, I thought, and so I used a pencil sketch technique on this street scene. The original had a big store sign above the window on the right. I’m sure this looks more in keeping!

I do have the original photograph in my store as well if you want to compare and make your own decision on which is best.

This lovely old restaurant, shaded from the sun by huge umbrella shades, was similarly treated:

And then this little side entrance to the church shown in my first photo looks good in with charcoal, I think:

Of course, photographs can also capture the beauty of the location – this is the St Tryphon church with the mountains and fortress behind.

And to complete this tour of the town, a view of the city walls, again with the fortress sitting watch on the peak behind:

Later in the afternoon, we took the coach up the winding and narrow Serpentine road that climbs over that same mountain. This next picture isn’t great art, but it shows a coach we met on the way having to reverse (with cars behind) back up the road to a wider section so that we could pass:

But when we got to the summit, the views stretched for miles around.

This panorama shows the path the ship had taken from the far left to the corner on the right and finally, you can see it docked in Kotor in the bottom right. The small islands I had photographed that morning are somewhere up in the top right. Incidentally, this is a stitched panorama – created by taking several images as I slowly rotated around the scene and then combining them into one large photograph that could be printed to fill a wall!

Our tour concluded with a visit to King Nikola’s Palace and the adjacent monastery in Cetinje. It was an interesting end to that day!

Back on the ship, we were ready for dinner and the sail to our next port of call – Dubrovnik. From what I recall, it started to rain that evening and so the return path through the bay was nothing like our arrival. But I could hardly complain!

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