Well, I've made it to Athens; dreamlike, I'm almost unsure of how I got here. After Albania, Athens is a waking dream of Frappes and Smart cars; of Bluetooth and ipods. I'm back in the West. However Eastern that West may be.
It's been two weeks since I last wrote and it's been an up and down two weeks. From Varna I took the train West to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria: the highest capital in Europe. My couchsurfing host was fantastic and I was thrown straight into meeting her Sex and the City friends, as she called them, for dinner. (As I sat there with them, it occurred to me that that must make me Stanford...*) Sofia was fun, vibrant and, surrounded by mountains, felt fresher and more exciting than the slightly faded streets first suggested. I loved the people I met there, friendly and interesting and engaging. In a wonderfully random series of days we visited the justly famous and gorgeous Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, pausing to listen to the low sounds and breath in the scents of Mass; went to the ubiquitous Irish pub, present in every city in the World; played table tennis with a former semi-professional; watched a hip-hop dance competition and then danced until 4:30 in the morning. Looking back, the slump that came next was inevitable.
From Sofia I took the bus to Skopje, a spectacular winding drive through ravines and hidden valleys, Italian job moments threatening at every corner. Deposited unceremoniously in Skopje, jolted awake by the dust and heat, I joined up with two other backpackers and headed to the hostel. I'd been unable to find couchsurfers in FYROM or Albania and sadly it would be hostels until Greece. Two nights in Skopje was enough, abandoning my planned third night for an unexpected trip to Ohrid, in Southwestern Macedonia. I spent two days there, absorbed in sunbathing and swimming in the clear blue Lake Ohrid. The hostel in Ohrid was nice, but with that slightly strange atmosphere of expat, overloud nerviness that solitary hostels in small towns can acquire. With nowhere else for backpackers to stay, the hostel becomes a shelter and a warning beacon. It's that distinctive air of foreigners crowded together in a foreign land, sheltering perhaps, a little bit of home mixed up alcohol and incest and powerful personalities.
I had fun: eight of us hired a boat and the kind boatman dropeed us off on a spectacular, secluded beach. We had beer and a picnic, books to read and the crystal clear waters to swim in after the bright sunshine became too hot. It was fun and I had a good time, unable to keep the smile from my face at the beauty of it all.
But for reasons I can't quite work out, Macedonia was still the low point of my trip. I felt tired and underwhelmed by Macedonia, Skopje was a disappointment, boring with little to stay for. I walked round the castle and the old town bazaar twice and couldn't face a third time; there's really nothing else to do, no nice big parks to kill time in or shady avenues with benches on which to read your book. There are no trains and bus travel is much less pleasant. I felt hassled by taxi drivers and market vendors. No one spoke English and everything felt difficult.
The problem, of course, lay not with Macedonia, but with me. I felt a general malaise, a melancholy that had no obvious reason, but just was. I was tired and I no longer had my heart in travelling. My mindset was all wrong. Rather than thinking "A 10 hour bus journey? What an adventure. No air conditioning or opening windows? Even better!" - the prerequisite paradigm for long distance travelling and the way I'd viewed the trip up to this point - I was just tired of it all. I was tired of waiting, of being hot and dusty, of not understanding, of nothing being on time and of nothing being easy.
Perhaps it was a combination of a number of so-called reasons. It was possibly just those unexplained but inevitable lows that accompany long journeys, the melancholy that sometimes strikes, wherever you are or whatever you are doing. They pass, of course, and I knew this one would too. Maybe it was tiredness, or maybe a little homesickness. I still don't know. It gradually passed in Albania, and I'm back to loving the whole thing, eating up the miles and relishing the adventure.
From Ohrid, a bus took me, slowly and painfully, to Tirana, the capital of Albania. I've noticed a strong trend that, as you travel Southeast through Europe, each country views your next stop as being more backward, more difficult and less friendly for visitors. The Czech consider themselves more advanced than the Slovaks, who, in turn, consider their country more developed than Romania, which is, of course, less backward than Bulgaria. Here you hit the sea and the process heads West. Bulgarians consider Macedonia a backwater (albeit a pretty one) and Macedonians view Albania with suspicion. Here it all stops; you've reached the end of the world as far as many people in the neighbouring countries see it. In general most people living in the Balkans had visited their neighbours, but very few, if any at all, that I met had been to Albania. As one Macedonian observed, "I have Albanian friends, they're nice. But in their own country, they live like gypsies."...
Tirana is certainly a crazy place. There are no trains to speak of in Albania, a few that run occasionally and very slowly, but absolutely no international rail links. The buses don't usually have timetables, they just wait until they are full, the ticket collector standing on the street shouting himself (it's invariably a man) hoarse, encouraging travellers to get on. Pavements are generally non-existent, or just mud, and crossing the street is as adventurous as anywhere you could care to think of, especially with drivers frequently ignoring redlights. Power cuts and water shortages are common, particularly in winter, though I experienced a random blackout while I was there. It does feel safe though. And this isn't just due to the 700,000 indestructible concrete bunkers constructed by the crazed dictator Hoxha, who ruled until twenty years ago (though the Communists ruled until 1992, when economic mismanagement finally did for them).
The people were helpful and friendly, though no one spoke English (Italian is the most common Western European language spoken). And the hostel was fun, less fraught, more relaxed than the one in Ohrid. I really enjoyed my time there. Albania was beautiful, though obviously poor even for the Balkans, and there's a lot to see, if little infrastructure to see it. I guess that it's all changing but I'd like to go back, with more time and well rested, to see the beaches and mountains of the South and to dip my feet in the Adriatic again. In two weeks I'd watched the sun rise over the Black Sea, I'd crossed the Balkan peninsula, and I'd seen the sun set over the Adriatic. It was time to head South.
Which I did at four am. A foolish thing to do, it turns out, but I made it in the end. The bus was uncomfy and, despite my exhaustion (I hadn't had more than four or five hours sleep for nearly a week), I couldn't sleep. Loud Albanian music filled the bus and everyone was content to leave the lights on and chat. I was not. We made it, of course, arriving at the border six hours later. The border took nearly two hours to cross (getting into the EU isn't so easy as getting out), though as soon as they saw my British passport, customs waved me on and the border guards dismissed me. An hour later and we were in Ioannina. This being an Albanian bus, it didn't stop at the bus station, preferring to drop me on the outskirts before driving off in a cloud of dust. I wandered for a while, looking for a pharmacy (traveller's tip people: high probability of someone speaking English in a pharmacy) and they directed me to the centre of town.
And so I'm in Greece. I love it. The bus to Patra was fast and comfortable, the drive down the coast every bit as spectacular as the One in California, though perhaps not as long. As I arrived at my hosts in Patra, there for only one night, I took a shower and, reaching for my wallet, I had that sickening feeling you get when you just know it's not there. I searched and I emptied my bag and I searched again, but I knew it was gone. There were two options: I had either left my wallet in the bus station or on the bus.
It turned out to be the former and a kind woman had handed it in. Thank you World for kind people. They are out there. I had it back within two hours and I liked Greece already. The next day seemed only to confirm my impression. The bus ride to Athens was almost as spectacular as the day before, as if there isn't a boring view to be had in Greece at all (until the suburbs of Athens anyway). My first day here and I've seen the Acropolis, gawped at the Pantheon and wandered around the Ancient Agora. My couchsurfing host is lovely, the perfect host in fact, and Athens a wonder of sights and sounds yet to be explored. The world is sunny again and Macedonia long forgotten.
* For those of you who haven't seen it (i.e. probably large sections of my family) he's the Gay Bestfriend, the "Fifth lady" of the group.
