Bus to Kotor and then to Orahovac

Our bus is not until 11am so it's a leisurely start to the day. Before Sarah is awake, I pop down to the bank for more cash and withdraw another €400 plus the fees. My grumpiness at paying these bank fees is marginally less than yesterday. On the way back, I purchase one apple and one cherry strudel from the bakery. We are almost out of muesli.

Just before 10am we check out and start the 1.2km walk to the bus station. It's bloody hot and there's no shade to be seen. 🥵 At the bus station, we head straight for a luggage storage place as it has air-conditioning running. Many others have the same idea.

The bus pulls up very early, about 30 minutes before departure. Getting on is a circus. There's a bus driver loading bags by himself who is taking €2 per bag for the service, which makes the whole process take twice as long as he is also handing out change. There's a woman on the bus checking tickets and telling people they can't take small backpacks onto the bus—i.e. our front packs. I double-check with the driver as I give him €5 for our two bags and he says the small ones are fine on the bus. They have our passports and other things in them so there's no way I'm sticking them underneath. Others suggest politely to the woman to chill out and let us take them on. On pressuring her, she doesn't object.

We sit back and watch the ticket-checking circus with front-row seats. She checks the tickets but doesn't really read them and then asks the second person of two for a ticket when the first person has shown her a ticket for two people. Then a mother shows her a phone ticket for four people but the others aren't there yet. That causes quite a ruckus, such that the mother tells the woman her husband and children are on the way, ignores the woman's protests, and takes a seat. The ticket woman goes down the bus in pursuit to discuss this further, and a dozen more people get on without their tickets being checked at all. Why am I wasting good blog time with this story?

Because the bus is soon full and the bus driver gets on. The ticket woman is about to get off. It's 10:50am and a young couple turn up with a valid ticket. "The bus is full," says the woman. So instead of checking everyone's tickets again, they have the young guy sit on a pillow on the floor near the driver and his girlfriend sits in the fold-down jump seat. It's scheduled to be a 2 hour 10 minute trip. I would not be happy sitting on the floor! But off we go.

The ride out of Dubrovnik is stunning and very scary. The sides of the road are a sheer cliff and the road is quite narrow. There's a normal safety barrier to stop cars going over. It would not stop a bus! My brain cannot ignore this fact and although I'm not scared of heights, I cannot help but think about the consequences of going over the edge. I do console myself with thinking that the driver is quite old and has survived this long. But what if he has a heart attack? Fortunately, this does not happen. 🤞

We have discovered that the scheduled bus departure times are quite accurate if it's the first departure station like this one. But the scheduled travel times are not reliable. They make no allowance for the border stops. We arrive at the Croatian checkpoint and everyone gets off, and the driver organises everyone into small groups rather than one big line. I'm not sure what the advantage of this is. The border police are quite quick today and after 40 minutes we are back on the bus. The Montenegrin side is even quicker—only 20 minutes. But we are now at least an hour behind schedule by my calculations.

The ride around the Bay of Kotor is very pretty. It's like you are looking at a large lake. It's a big inland bay with multiple side bays and towns with huge cliff faces running up exposed rock-face mountains. We pass the seaside village where we are staying as it's about 10km out of the Kotor city centre. We have to get another local bus back to there somehow. The bus pulls in a good 1.5 hours later than the scheduled arrival. Note to self: don't book onward connecting bus rides without big gaps between them.

At the bus station, we head to the ticket counter to ask about tickets to our next location. It's a week away and our FlixBus app says all the tickets are sold out. But there is another alternate bus company we found online, though they don't do e-tickets. They have available seats at the station ticket counter so we lock those in for €44 while here. Cash only! Now we need to find the local bus stop, which is not at this bus station—it's near the Kotor Old Town. It's a hot walk in the sun to get there and it takes us a bit of mucking about before finding the bus stop.

The local bus arrives at 3:20pm and costs €1.50 each, which seems reasonable. The bus has some air-con running thankfully, but it's still very hot. The bus clock says the temperature is 37.8 degrees! That will be from a sensor on the bus, not in the shade, so it might be representative of what we were walking in. I'm sure in the shade it's merely 35 degrees!

We hop off at our local village bus stop. The village is called Orahovac. But I think it's pronounced "oh-rah-hoh-vahts". It's a small place. One tiny market shop, a couple of hotels and restaurants, and a number of nice-looking houses/apartments. Ours, of course, is the one up the hill and the furthest from the road where we got off. A steep hot climb but only about 250m.

The host shows us up to the first floor of the three-storey house. There appear to be two apartments per floor and she lives at ground level. She might be Russian but could be Montenegrin. I can understand her, which is good for me as I'm hopeless with hearing foreign accents speaking English. Sarah is always the interpreter. She had a Belgian Shepherd dog called—would you believe—"Doggo". That should be easy to remember.

The apartment we have booked lives up to its listing details. It was described as a Luxury One Bedroom Apartment. It's so big it feels like a whole house. A small house, but massive compared to previous places, and it's very, very nice inside. It even has hot water in the kitchen—and pots! 😂 The size is listed as 90sqm. That's three times bigger than the one we had in Budapest. It also has a very nice view out to the bay towards Kotor. The only small concern is if the size is going to make the air-conditioning challenging as it only has one unit in the lounge and a fan in the bedroom.

After settling in, we go to the mini market to see what we can find for dinner. It has essentials, but just those. We decide to just get enough to eat something tonight. Tomorrow we will do a bigger shop in town. We purchase 2x beers (I said they had essentials only 😂), a capsicum, a tomato, chicken luncheon, 2 apricots, UHT milk, and potato chips (again, essentials only). We will survive the night on those rations. Total cost €11.90 or around $23 NZD.