The people you meet when travelling :-)

Visiting some of the oldest of Europe's Old Towns is both a visual and spiritual experience.

So, when you are out perusing the wonderful sights to be found among old cobbled streets and narrow alleys, and then you're suddenly confronted by historically dressed characters who seem to have been resurrected from the distant past, it just heightens your appreciation of these old, European towns.

In both Koper, Slovenia, and Split, Croatia, we found these characters in all sorts of places; in public squares, outside churches, and we even came upon a couple just taking a casual stroll among those afore-mentioned cobbled alleyways.

I assume they were hired by the Town Council to interact with the tourists - they were certainly keen to accommodate photographers and would happily strike great poses. There were even a couple of Roman Soldiers challenging tourists' children to fights - much to the delight of camera wielding parents.

However they got there, though, their participation added greatly to the ambience of the places we found them, and were much appreciated by the towns visitors.

Dobrota, Montenegro.

The township of Dobrota is essentially, now, an outlying district of the much more tourist-centric, Kotor. We didn’t visit this little neighbour, but I noticed it while taking the camera out on my regular, early morning circumnavigation of deck 12; we sail overnight between those Adriatic coastal ports we’re scheduled to visit on our cruise so, having docked in a new country, I like to get out early with a long lens and capture some of the amazing vistas afforded from the highest point of the ship.

What first drew my attention to this little Adriatic Hamlet – rather than the Port of Kotor itself – was the way in which the sharp, early morning light fell on the white-washed houses and, especially, on the church tower, clearly defining them against the contrasting backdrop of steeply rising, dark escarpments. I say ‘dark’, but, as the sun rose and the light softened, the forested areas seemed to blend from darker shades of teal through to a lighter, sea green (which might have been accentuated by the light reflecting off the sea itself), while the exposed, craggy surfaces turned from dark brown to an almost purple hue.

The other thing that caught my attention was the fact that the bay, that morning, was being used as a cruise ship parking lot; there were three of these enormous oceanic giants anchored in this fashion. We normally park hard against the port walls and exit the ship on gangways from deck 3, however, while the bay was obviously deep enough to accommodate these monsters of the sea, the port was not, so they remained at anchor while we were (later) delivered to shore on the ships tenders.

They’re not the greatest pictures – I always feel my long lens gives my pics a milky texture – but they’ll serve to remind me of the picturesque little hamlet of Dobrota, and of the peace and quiet that (I feel) is best enjoyed when you’re out at sea and cut free from the constraints of terra-firma.