The weather god giveth, and the weather god taketh away... After several blissful days of heat and refreshing breezes, the past 48 hours have been oppressive, cloud-filled and, today, saturating. The torrential carwash through which we drove this afternoon would have any normal person battening down the hatches and settling in for the long haul with a good book, but following a cabin-fever induced downturn in my mental state of late (not helped by yesterday's power cut which rendered the DVD player useless in the middle of our Sunday afternoon screening of Guys and Dolls), we knew not just our relationship, but possibly our lives depended on us vacating our apartment today.
Thus it was that we drove approximately 130 kilometres (we're in Europe now, baby - it's got to be metric) - perhaps not immediately impressive as distances go, but given the downpour and the terrain, our circular route took us around five hours, past ancient towns marooned at the end of causeways, through cities destroyed countless times by wars and earthquakes, over a grey lake through which swims the Montenegrin/Albanian border - and back down to our village nestled in the hills of Kotor Bay, via a steep and many-cornered road that I might have described as driving down a small intestine would it not have followed that our destination and humble abode were thus a metaphorical anus.
The scenery throughout our tour was straight out of a/the Bond film: cloud-scraping mountains and lush meadows, hair-raising bends tight against jagged rock faces which suddenly open out onto a weather-beaten Adriatic and a misty horizon. And of course, as in all good Bonds, the driving was tense. Our guidebook warns that Montenegrins "drive fearlessly and with verve. It is best not to call their bluff." Tempted though I was to put our rented Fiesta through its paces, I had to consider my passenger, and instead rarely left second gear.
Tonight we're all dressed up and in Kotor Old Town for a night on the Unesco-protected tiles. Hopefully the sun will get its act together for tomorrow - we've only got two more full days left and there's a distinct possibility that we will return to London the same pale grey shade of two weeks ago. Somehow I doubt my travel insurance covers 'lack of tan'.
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