The Bay of Kotor twists 28 kilometres inland from the Montenegrin coast through four linked bays, under bare karst mountains that drop straight into the water. It looks like a fjord and is not one. No glacier ever came near this coast; a river cut the canyon through soft limestone and the rising Mediterranean flooded it. Kotor sits at the far end, a walled town of medieval lanes with no straight line for you to follow, where alleys open without warning onto small stone squares and Romanesque churches. Almost anywhere you look up the wall is overhead, because it does not stop at the town. It switchbacks up the bare mountainside like a stone seam, past a small church built into it with Kotor's red roofs directly below, and from the top all four bays open around you.
Across the water, Perast is a Baroque captains' town: stone palaces and two bell towers along a quay a few streets deep, with no cars and the bay at the embankment. Small boats cross from there to Our Lady of the Rocks, the only man-made island in the Adriatic. Local sailors built it up stone by stone over five centuries. Inside, silver votive plaques cover the walls, one for each seaman who got home safe. In 1698 Peter the Great sent young Russian noblemen here to learn how to command a ship, under a captain from Perast. Boats still run out through the narrow straits to coves the road never reaches, and into a sea cave where the light turns the water electric blue. The road hugs the whole shoreline through fishing villages and stone chapels, and where the old serpentine climbs towards Lovćen the entire bay coils below you in one silver curve. In that island church hangs an embroidered icon a woman worked on for twenty-five years while she waited for a sailor to come back. She stitched it in gold, silver and silk, and used her own hair for the figures — dark where she started, white by the time she finished.