Fishte and Tivat

We left our hotel on time and headed to our last stop in Albania, an agrotourism farm, Mrizi i Zanave. They’ve taken a number of different concepts and combined them into one enterprise. There are ostriches, geese, and goats; they take milk from local producers and turn it into cheese; they make wine and rakia; they take all kinds of vegetable and fruit produce and pickle, dry or jam it; and they take pork and turn it into charcuterie. 

Mariella demonstrates wine

The wine cellar

Oo-er, missus! Look at all that sausage!

Jam, jam, jam jam...

The cheese room

Our guide, Mariella, took us around the factory rooms, showing us cheeses in various stages of maturation, as well as sausages and hams, and the smoking rooms. No, not for cigars. 

Afterwards we had a little bit of time as they waited for the lunch service, which started promptly at 12 noon. The lunch was a lavish production of just about everything that they had to offer. We started with a  taste of rose water – exactly what it sounds like, rose petals infused into water. Fortunately without adding sugar, which would have made it too sickly, but instead like Turkish Delight without the sweetness. We had charcuteries and cheese, pickled vegetables, other vegetables including stuffed courgette flowers; mystery meat (may have been goat), beef, and pork skewers. Just as we were saying “we’re stuffed”, they cleared it all away and brought puddings – cheesecake, fruit, chocolate fondant and gelato. The gelato included one made with pine syrup – made by adding a load of sugar to pine cones, then letting it infuse. Not one I’ll be trying at home, tbh. 

We left Albania behind us and crossed the border into Montenegro. Danijela told us on the way that we would be leaving behind “funny money” and entering the Euro zone. Montenegro is not officially a member of the euro, but has universally adopted it anyway. What we were also leaving behind, she told us, was the cheap prices we’d got used to in Macedonia and Albania. Montenegro and Croatia would be exhibiting more “modern” pricing.

We arrived at Hotel Helada at around 6:00pm, so after a quick check-in and moving in to our room, reassembled downstairs for an orientation walk in Tivat. This basically involved taking us down to the waterfront and walking along, pointing out an ATM for those all-important euros, and then some of us had a light dinner at a waterside restaurant, Bokka whilst the rest continued their perambulations. There isn’t much else to Tivat, so tomorrow we’ll be exploring the much larger settlement along the road, Kotor. Why aren’t we staying there then? Danijela explained that the two hotels they’d used in previous seasons had received negative feedback – being too far from the centre, or being too old-fashioned (lack of lifts etc.) and noisy for the one in the Old Quarter. There’s no pleasing some people! Now they’ve decided it’s better to stay in a more modern establishment along the coast instead.

We then headed back to the hotel, taking careful note of where to turn to get back and forth from the waterfront. There’s very little beach as such, and most of it seems to belong to one hotel, so we won’t be doing much beaching here.