The hostel provided us free cooked breakfast in the morning, which is the first time I've ever seen that. This hostel was very expensive by Balkan standards ($20 a night!) but I definitely feel like you get what you pay for. Kotor isn't especially cheap anyway. I met up with a group of people to go up the mountain and see the fortress. We hiked up for a few hours through a tight network of switchbacks into the mountainside and eventually clambered up through a window in the fortress. The fortress is amazing. You can explore every part of it freely and there's nothing off limits the way I know there would have been were it in western Europe. They seem to trust you to not get yourself killed in a way that richer countries simply can't fathom, which is such a breath of fresh air. We spent a while up there before continuing on up the mountainside. There were pomegranates growing along the whole length of the trail, so I had a few since I didn't pack any sort of lunch. The entire time the views were incredible, but they of course improved as we got further up. Possibly the only way to make Kotor more beautiful than by sailing is by being high on the mountain slopes.

We came back down and I made dinner with Tom. Almost everyone at this hostel except us is Australian and it's starting to annoy me - as much as I like Aussies in general, I really loved the multiculturalism that the earlier wave of the trip had. I think it's just because they tend to come to Europe for a really long time and nobody with only a couple weeks to travel makes the Balkans a priority. We played water pong in the common room for a while before embarking on a "pub crawl" to the only pub in town. Not much of a crawl, but it was fun all the same.

These entries may be shorter and less detailed for the time being. I'm not exactly sure what's changed, but I've been more tired than I'm used to lately and it's making me more reluctant to post to the blog. I've been gone for a long time, so that might be part of it, but I've also just had a series of really intense days, so perhaps that'll improve once I take things more chill in the days ahead. I've booked a bus to northern Albania tomorrow since I think I've seen pretty much everything there is to see here.