Day 20 - June 4

Distance - 12.2 miles (19.6 km)

We left Kotor in the morning, and, on our way back to Dubrovnik, we stopped in Perast and Herceg Novi, both towns on Kotor Bay.  Perast is a small village with two tiny islands offshore, each with a church on them.  One of those islands is actually man-made.  The legend is that some fishermen saw the image of the Madonna and Child in the water and decided to build a church there - only problem was it was under water.  Over many years, stones were thrown into the bay to build up an island, and eventually a big church was built on it.  Over the centuries, the island has grown as the locals have kept up their yearly tradition of throwing stones onto the  island to make it bigger.  We, however did not get a stone's throwing distance from the island, as it would cost about $15 for the short boat ride and maybe another $5 to enter the church, so we admired it from afar.

Perast

View over Perast - The Church of Our Lady of the Rocks is the blue-domed church on the man-made island on the right

From Perast, we took the bus to Herceg Novi, where we would board a bus back to Dubrovnik.  Herceg Novi, like Kotor, has a lovely Old Town on Kotor Bay (though it is much newer than Kotor's Old Town) and it also has nice beaches.  In our few hours of free time before our bus showed up, we found some food and just sat on the pebble beach.

Herceg Novi

Pebble beaches are the best

When we finally made it back to Dubrovnik in the late afternoon, we made the short walk to  the apartment/hostel we were staying in.  I then went for my run, starting out on a trail along the side of a steep hill following the course of a long inlet.  The trail surface was, as usual, pretty rocky, but was quite flat, which was nice for a change.  I continued on briskly for about 3 miles before seeing a giant spiderweb zooming toward my face.  It was too late.  I ran right through it.  It was spread between two trees on either side of the trail, so it was pretty much unavoidable.  After thoroughly writhing and convulsing every last bit of the nasty silky stuff off of myself, I looked up and saw an even bigger spiderweb a few meters in front of me, this one with a fat black spider siitting in the middle of it.  I stopped dead in my tracks.  The sunlight streaming through the trees lit up the path for another 20 or so meters, making it easy to see the row of successive, huge spiderwebs on the path ahead.  At that point, I figured it was best to turn around and find a different trail to run on. 

View of the port from the start of the trail

Bridge

View from the trail

The trail

After running all the way back the way I came, I ran up the hill above the cruise ship port and looked for a trailhead that seemed to be visible on the Google Maps imagery I had saved on my phone prior to my run.  After a few false leads and a couple hundred meters of off-roading it on the rock-strewn, scratchy-weed-filled hillside, I found the trail and found that it led up to the top of the same hill I had run up just four days prior, the one with the lookout over the Old Town and the goat pasture on top.  I didn't see any goats this time, but the sunset added a whole new degree of awesomness to the view from the top.  Now I've seen one of the best views in Croatia - probably the world - at both sunrise and sunset!

View looking back as I ran up the steep hill above the harbor

View over the Old Town at sunset

The fortress on the hill over the Old Town

I took the winding rocky path back down to the Old Town, then ran the 2 or so miles from the Old Town back to our apartment/hostel by the port. 

Now that's a sunset

When I got back, I met our 4 flat-mates - two girls from Canada, one from Australia, and one from Japan.  Curtis cooked up something for supper (I honestly can't remember what, but it was darned good) and we spent the evening hanging out in our nice, spacious, unbelievably cheap apartment.  Kind of on a whim, Curtis and I decided we should go to Mostar in Bosnia tomorrow.  Many people had told us it's wonderful, so we figured we'd do that and cut out a stop on the Croatian coast, since the places on the coast, although astoundingly beautiful and nice, are quite similar to one another.  Mostar would break things up a bit and add some diversity.