Friday 21 September 2018. Yesterday we flew from Manchester to Dubrovnik to join the Marella Celebration cruise ship for her Venetrian Vistas itinerary. No sea days on this trip so we have in effect an extra day's port ashore.
We start by sailing overnight to Montenegro. We have visited this country a couple of times on previous cruises, but have on those occasions docked in Kotor, which is a lovely medieval city with ancient walls climbing even more ancient mountains.
Today we are in Bar, and as yesterday was an extremely long day (our taxi picked us up at 2:20am!) we are taking things easy and intend a stroll along the seafront and nothing more energetic than a drink or two. In a place named "Bar" it would be rude not to!
A shuttle bus has taken us through the fairly industrial port and dropped us off at one end of a long promenade walk. The beach is pebbled but popular and well served by bars (with a small "b").
At intervals along the beach rows of shower heads have been set up for swimmers to wash the salt away after bathing in the sea.
After walking for about three quarters of a kilometre, we came to the mouth of the Željeznica river. The pathway continued via a pedestrian footbridge and we paused for a moment to enjoy the activities in the water,
Namely, ducks and fish. The ducks were stirring up quite a bit of mud, but the fish weren't put off by this. Presumably a few tasty morsels for them were also being brought out of the river bed!
Looking inland from the bridge. The river has its origins in the row of mountains in the distance. Roughly the same distance that we are from them on the other side is Southern Europe's largest lake, Lake Skadar or Scutari which forms part of the border of Montenegro with Albania and which on the Montenegrin side is a designated national park.
We cross the bridge and carry on until the path leads away from the sea towards the main road on which we can make out the shapes of quite a fair bit of traffic. We were sitting on a bench when a few fellow passengers came past and debated their next steps. "We can walk back along the main road into town," one suggested. The others were a bit dubious. We had decided to retrace our steps anyway as we fancied a drink and I suspected there were more bars along the beach than on the main road...
So back to the bridge and across and then onto a pleasant veranda where we bought a couple of lemonades and enjoyed the breeze and the view. We were close enough to see the ship again through the groups of people at tables.
We left the cool of the bar and carried on and I found a place to sit and sketch a bit which passed another pleasant hour or so. As always, this started a few conversations with passers-by.
With no day at sea, it felt strange to be having the Gala Night after a port visit but we duly scrubbed up, which I do enjoy and went off to meet with the Man-in-Charge. I've learned that whether to dress formally or not is only third in line to a conversation about politics or religion. You either love it or hate it, but I'm flummoxed by these nights' ability to incite people to heap scorn on others for either dressing up or not. Very strange...
Our long-standing friends Tomas and Maris were performing on the ship in Horizons bar and a major highlight of the trip is meeting up and spending some time with them again. It has become a bit of a tradition that I do a couple of numbers, borrowing Tomas's guitar. I tend to do sixties songs that people will remember and sing along to and they went down very well! Tonight they included Concrete and Clay and Love Hurts. Tomorrow, we are sailing back to Croatia to visit Korčula.
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