Two countries in one summer week, five nights in the first and two in the second, separated by a border I had been warned about and which held us up for a quarter of an hour. Boka Bay does the swimming. Dubrovnik does the walking. They are ninety minutes apart and they could not be less alike.
Getting there
We flew Seattle to Dubrovnik on Delta by way of Paris Charles de Gaulle, and arranged a private car to meet us at the airport and drive us across the border into Montenegro.
I had read enough about that border to expect it to cost us an afternoon. It cost us under fifteen minutes. The whole transfer ran a little under ninety minutes, and it is an unhurried and genuinely pleasant drive — the road tracks the coast, the water keeps appearing on your right, and by the time you clear the formalities you have already started the holiday.
One&Only Portonovi
The resort sits on Boka Bay, near Herceg Novi, and it is new enough to still feel unworn.
It is also only one component of a larger development: condominiums, a village, and a substantial yacht marina. That last part turned out to be one of the unexpected pleasures of the week. Walking the marina in the evening and looking over the boats became the thing we did after dinner without ever deciding to, and there is a spread of restaurants along it if you want to eat outside the hotel. We ate at Caminetti and at the Portonovi Beach Club, and both were worth the walk down.
The shape of the days
Our mornings started at the main restaurant with the buffet, which is a serious piece of work: an enormous spread, and a deliberately international one, so nobody at the table is eating a compromise.
Then back to the room, change, and down to the water. The resort has a man-made white sand beach directly on Boka Bay, and between that and the pool we did not require a great deal else. We swam in the bay. We swam in the pool. We swam in the bay again.
We always travel with a football, and I would recommend it to anyone with sons. Throwing a ball back and forth fills the hours between swims better than any planned activity, and it costs nothing and weighs nothing. Five nights went by like that, which is the point of five nights.
Kotor
The one day trip worth building the week around is Kotor.
It is a medieval town sitting directly on the bay, and walking its cobbled streets is exactly as good as that sounds. The setting does most of the work: the bay is ringed by mountains and steep hills that come almost to the water, and the town is pressed into the narrow ground between them. It is one of the more dramatic pieces of geography in the Mediterranean, and the town has been there long enough to belong to it rather than sit in it. Cruise ships come up the bay and look small against the hills, which tells you most of what you need to know about the scale.
The submarine base
Look directly across the bay from the resort and you will see a tunnel mouth cut into the mountainside.
It is a Yugoslav naval base, built to hide submarines inside the rock. The entrance has since been closed off. It is a strange and compelling thing to have in your eyeline from a sun lounger — a piece of Tito's Yugoslavia and its Cold War calculations, sitting a few hundred metres across the water from a resort that did not exist when it was built.
Dubrovnik
We drove back across the border and spent two nights in Dubrovnik at the Hilton Imperial, which has an indoor pool — a detail that sounds trivial and was not.
Every day was in the high eighties. That dictates the rhythm: walk in the morning, retreat in the afternoon. We did a tour of the city and walked the walls, which is the thing to do in Dubrovnik and ought to be done before the heat arrives. The view back over the roofs and out across the bay from up there is the one you have seen, and it is better in person.
For lunch and dinner we ate inside the walls, at Spaghetteria Toni on Nikole Božidarevića and Konoba Dalmatino on Miha Pracata. Both are small, intimate rooms rather than grand harbour-view affairs, and both were fantastic — the kind of places that are easy to walk past and worth not walking past.
I am a Game of Thrones fan, and King's Landing was filmed here, which adds a layer to a walk through the old town that I did not expect to enjoy as much as I did. You find yourself placing scenes against real streets. The staircase from Cersei's walk of atonement is right there, and so is the square where the crowd stood. The show has been off the air for years and the city has absorbed it completely, which is its own kind of compliment to a place that has been standing since long before anyone filmed anything in it.
Then back to the hotel, into the indoor pool, and out of the afternoon.