Day 41 Kotor

M rose early to beat the heat, the crowds and the entrance fee to walk to the castle of San Giovanni above the town, K declined preferring to catch up on some sleep.

M returned with the sad news that today there were two huge cruise liners is town and we could already hear the difference in the crowd noise from inside our apartment. We decided to escape the crowds again and went to the bus station to get the bus to Budva about half an hour away. We arrived at the bus station to be told the road was closed and probably would be for another hour. It was only then we noticed that there wasn't the normal bumper to bumper traffic, in fact there was no traffic, The normally busy port street had become a pedestrian mall, we did wonder why there wasn't a sign at the entrance to the bus station informing everyone rather than only finding out when it was your turn at the ticket window. We walked back around the outside of the old town and crossed the river to the other side, here we saw that there were police manning the roads and all local drivers were being stopped and told to park their cars. Then we saw motorbikes and lead cars coming down the hill past us followed by men on bikes going incredibly fast, a bit later there were more police motorbikes and the  a large group of riders followed by some stragglers. The fact that this bike race would have been organised well in advance to close roads made it even more strange there wasn't any signage here or anywhere. The drivers on the side roads had given up and left their cars parked in the middle of the road, we decided to grab some lunch at a cute beach spot and wait until the road returned to normal.

After a nice lunch we finally caught the bus to Budva where we had considered staying at one stage instead of Kotor. Budva is very different to Kotor, a larger marina for pleasure boats but no cruise ships. The buildings were more highrise and the old town not nearly  as nice as Kotor so we were happy with our choice. They did have a strip of a rock beach and then another slightly better beach strip which was more popular, but that was about it, it wasn't as charming as Kotor.