If you cast your mind back a couple of days, you may recall me saying that Montenegro has thrown aside it's dark past and moved on from the days when it was nothing but a haven for the rich and famous. Well, as it turns out, this was a lie. No, I don't mean a lie. What's that expression American presidents like to use when they've totally messed up but don't really want to admit it? Ah, yes, that's it. I appear to have misspoken.

You see, things may have gone back to the good old days out in the sticks where the most excitement you're likely to encounter all week is when the local fisherman comes home with two fish, but it's a somewhat different state of affairs once you arrive in the big city - and when I say "big city", I do of course mean small village, because Montenegro can't really spare the room for anything too big. It seems, unfortunately, that Kotor has started to develop delusions of grandeur of late, and I'm not happy about it. Not happy at all. Spend any amount of time here these days, and you'll quickly start to get that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that something isn't quite right with the world - and you'd be spot on. What the Montenegrin government has done, you see, is take everything that once made Kotor really special and repackage it in such a way as to syphon as much money as possible from the rich and famous - and the result, I'm very much afraid to say, is a beautiful medieval city surrounded on all sides by more glitz than a Hollywood showbiz party.

The Venetian influence in Kotor is more than obvious from the moment you first round the corner and find yourself staring up at its towering gates - so much so that you have to wonder why nobody thought to dig out a few canals while they were knocking it all together. Indeed, if you rush to your computer right now and type Kotor into Google - or Bing if you work for Microsoft - and then spend several hours filtering out all the advertisements for a computer game called Knights of the Old Republic, you'll probably be more than a little impressed by the photographs of a perfect medieval Venetian city undisturbed by time. Well, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to sit down while I break the truth to you - Kotor has once again been seduced by the dark side, and not just because it shares its name with a Star Wars franchise. If you can resist spending too much time looking at tacky souvenirs in the tacky souvenir shops or buying pretend Gelato from street vendors who have never been to Italy in their lives, you'll be surprised to discover that you can explore old Kotor in less than twenty minutes. That's twenty minutes to discover every street, every alley, and every dark corner filled with cats - and yet, just outside, there's a port large enough to support the constant arrival of cruise ships from all over the world with more people on board than live in the entire region. Call me fussy, but when I arrive at a perfectly preserved, UNESCO protected relic of a forgotten time, I usually want the first thing that strikes me to be the impressive fortified walls or the narrow cobbled streets - not the ship parked right outside with announcements blaring out of the tannoy concerning the winner of last night's Miss Knobbly Knees competition. Please tell me I'm not that much out of touch with reality.

I have absolutely no problem with the city itself, I'd just like to make that absolutely clear from the outset. The entrance to Kotor is probably one of the most imposing sights I've seen in quite some time - despite having just left Dubrovnik - and it almost knocked me off my feet the moment I arrived. Surrounded on two sides by lush forest covered mountains, and protected by a perfectly preserved Venetian wall which couldn't even be bothered to stop at the edges and snakes idly off into the mountains as soon as nobody is looking, Kotor is quite literally a town out of time. It almost feels as though it's been lifted straight from the pages of a Tolkeinesque fantasy epic, and you find yourself constantly wanting to search in dark corners for any sign of goblins. If Kotor was hidden away in the rain forests of Peru, or nestling gently on the banks of the Amazon, it would be the most amazing place on Earth - but unfortunately, it finds itself surrounded instead by the filthy rich and filled with tacky souvenir shops in which they can browse. If somebody blindfolded you and led you to Kotor, standing you outside its impressive medieval gates before revealing it to you in all its glory for the first time, you would very probably be lost for words. But then, at some point, you would have to turn around and find yourself staring at the Montenegrin equivalent of Chelsea Harbour - and the whole romantic image would be killed off in an instant. Imagine somebody digging a channel up to Stonehenge so that the QE2 could sail right up and disgorge three thousand people onto it all at once, and that's pretty much what we're talking about here. If anybody ever sat down and wrote a book called "How to ruin a historic monument", Kotor would be featured on the front cover.

I also seem to be suffering slightly from what I think I'm going to be referring to from now on as Dubrovnik fever. If you're hoping to come to Kotor and be impressed by its narrow streets and historic churches, I strongly urge you to do so before moving on to Dubrovnik - otherwise you may well end up feeling a bit let down. Kotor doesn't even come in a close second to that fair city. This isn't a criticism of Kotor, as such - the same thing happens all over the world. Visit Niagara Falls, for example, and no other waterfall will ever seem the same again - until the day when you visit the Victoria Falls, and then Niagara will instantly seem like nothing. It's a shame, because I was genuinely looking forward to exploring the old streets of Kotor and experiencing the charm of Dubrovnik all over again. Perhaps, when all the fuss has died down and the cruise ships have moved on to ruin pastures new, I might force myself to come back and see what it's actually like without the crush. For now, Kotor is perhaps a victim of its own success - a place for rich people with yachts to drop anchor and throw a party in the shadow of one of the world's most important historic landmarks. It's not, I'm afraid, for me.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.