After all the chaos in Albania, Macedonia was a nice quiet
reprieve. Chris and I were both getting over colds so we needed a few relaxing
days. Macedonia is almost as cheap as
Albania but without the hassle...you can drink the water out of the tap, there
are proper bus stations...everything is just a little bit more orderly. Our first stop in Macedonia was Lake Ohrid,
described as the “jewel in Macedonia’s crown”,
the lake and Ohrid township are very scenic. On arrival with our Albanian
taxi driver (from the border) we promptly got lost in the old town trying to
find our hostel. Luckily for us some
waiters from a nearby restaurant rang up the hostel owner and got him to meet
us ...I doubt we would have found the hostel otherwise as the old town is a bit
of a maze.
The next day we set off on a bit of a walking tour of the
old town as described in our guidebook.
It has been a bit of a love/hate affair with our lonely planet
guidebooks on this trip. At times they
have been completely wrong, bad recommendations, locations marked wrong on the
map, completely out of date (especially in Albania) but this time they pulled
through and suggested a good route to follow of all the main sights. We started at the top of the castle at the
top of the hill, not much is remaining but they do seem to be excavating and restoring parts of it (between smoko
breaks). The views of the lake are good
though. From there we headed down the hill checking out ruins of churches,
reconstructed churches, mosaics, and just plain old churches....all very
photogenic with the blue lake and blue sky as backdrop.
The next day we thought about hiring a car and exploring the
area surrounding the lake, but with us both lacking energy and feeling a bit
sick with our colds neither of us could be bothered with the hassle. Instead we decided to go on one of the boat
tours heading up the lake. We had
checked the departure time the night before, but when we got down to the dock
we discovered that the boat had already left.
As it was too late in the day to do plan b (hire a car) we ended up
doing not much. A lot of relaxing,
reading our books and eating extremely cheap tasty baklava.
From Ohrid we headed to Sofia in Bulgaria, but due to the
bus schedules we had a few hours to kill in Macedonia’s capital Skopje. At the moment Skopje looks like one big
building site, with several new buildings being constructed, earthworks along
the river banks, road works etc. If they
do a good job it could be very nice city in a few years....but at the moment
it’s just one big mess. We spent a few
hours walking around in the heat, having lunch and trying to use up the last of
our Macedonian dinars as it is basically impossible to exchange the currency
overseas.
Bulgaria wasn’t on our original plan, after Albania we had
planned to go to Greece then island hop our way across to Turkey. However, we had to cut our trip short by a
couple of weeks and due to the lack of time as well as all the strikes and
riots happening in Greece we decided to skip Greece and go to Bulgaria instead. Our main reason for going to Bulgaria was to
catch the overnight train to Istanbul, but since we were there we decided to
spend a couple of days checking out Sofia (the capital) and surrounding
areas. On our first morning we joined
another “free” walking tour around Sofia. Sofia is unusual for a major city as
it is not located near any significant waterways. Instead Sofia has hundreds of groundwater
springs ensuring a great water supply for the city. We wandered around the city checking out
churches, government buildings and ugly communist era buildings and
sculptures.
The next day we joined a tour heading to Rila Monastery, a
couple of hours south of Sofia. Our tour
turned out to be just a couple of taxis with drivers but it was still a good
day. Our trip took us up into the Rila
Mountains where the taxi drivers showed us a cave and small church in the
forest. Next we checked out the
Monastery itself, it is one of the of the biggest tourist attractions in
Bulgaria and deservedly so. The exterior
of the church is decorated with numerous paintings depicting scenes from the
bible, inside the church there are also plenty of frescos. We had a good look around, had lunch then
headed back to Sofia. That evening we caught the sleeper train to
Istanbul. It was my first time on a
sleeper train. We had a small room with
two bunk beds and slept pretty well apart from having to get up twice during the
night to get our passport stamped.
