Budva by Day

After resting, we spent the morning walking Budva (again). Parts of it reminded me of the Jersey shore, with a boardwalk/carnival feel. That was the area behind the beach farthest from Stari Grad, which you can see in the first picture here. This is one of the churches; there were two - one Roman Catholic, one Orthodox. The whole old town is made up of the same stone. Touring every street of it takes about ten minutes. There are some fairly nice restaurants inside.

And here is part of what the crowds were about - one of the cigarette boats being taken out of the water to be transported back to the starting line. While we were there, they were still doing time trials. Noisy to hear and exciting to see.

This is a shot of some of what's normally in the harbor. Boats range from dinghys to yachts. And, as usual for around here, the sky is a lovely blue and the water is a great bluish green. The water in the boatyard wasn't as clean as what we've been seeing in Croatia, though. If you want to see more pictures of Budva, follow the link in my previous "Night in Budva" post. There's an excellent panorama there.

Night in Budva

We were very, very lucky when we pulled into traffic-jammed Budva after our very long day in the car. The first hotel we tried, Hotel Oaza, had a room available and we took it. Oaza is located just across the boardwalk area from the marina and about a hundred meters from Stari Grad (old town - all the towns with fortifications from medieval times are called Stari Grad in Montenegro). It turns out that there was a World Powerboat Championship race the next day, and the whole town was partying before it, along with a few thousand tourists/race enthusiasts. There was a concert bu Russian girl group (Eurovision contestants in 2007) Serebro (pictured here), a fireworks show, and a bunch of dazzle.

So we ate dinner, walked around Stari Grad, listened to the music, and my companion took a lot of pictures. This one is from Stari Grad looking back out across the bay toward the south end of Budva. If you look closely (or at the bigger version of the picture in this set), you can see the race sponsor's name in green laser in the sky by the mountains. Neat trick. After a few hours of the walking around bit, we went back to the hotel for sleep. I'd recommend this place. The room was big, even had two bathrooms (one with jacuzzi), and breakfast was included.