Fyrom

hmmmm… I really need to think what happend these last few days as I didn’t have any internet and was to busy with other things so didn’t write anything down.

O yes, the tire. So, somewhere after the busboat and the border with Kosovo I got nailed… hehe… well the rear tyre did. I saw it when fueling that I had a big and nasty nail in the tyre. Left it there, thinking that I would find a fix for it in Prishtina. I finally found a place where they could fix this, we agreed that they would take everything off and fix it from the inside out. I get 3 mechanics all for myself! And when the bill comes I’m even more happy… 5€ for 2 hours work… and the nail I took with me as a souvenir, 8cm long!

The new Ferrari and Lamborghini are to be seen here in the streets:

Ride of the Valkyries anyone?

I found what looked like a really interesting and promising road on my map, but as there was no marking if I could cross the border through this road, I searched for a police station asking them if they would be so kind as to call the border station commander and ask if I could pass there with a Belgian passport and bike. Nope was the answer, so I’m glad I only ‘wasted’ half an hour to figure this out instead of a whole day going up and down a road that would inevitably lead me to nowhere.

So I go back to Albania to go south and enter FYROM from there. I thought I could easely make it all the way to Ohrid, my next stop. I finally crossed the border after 8pm and was to tired to continue. O and I don’t have a headlight anymore as it just went dead somewhere in Kosovo… it’s always something… Anyways, the reason for going so slow is that the road on the map is nowhere near the road in reality and that it’s just impossible to drive faster than 50 on that “road” for various reasons, being there are no signs and my map sucks, there is sometimes just no road anymore, sometimes the road is just “under construction” and when there are signs I am probably too stupid to understand what they say…

What you also see a lot are these small one person bunkers… they constructed 700.000 of them scattered all across the country! Macedonia-FYROM is another pleasant surprise, but they are also divided into muslims and orthodox, so depending what town you ride in you just know what religion is king here.

I spent the rest of the day in Ohrid, walking around, doing nothing at “the beach” but enjoying the sun and my book. (that now I remember I’ve already read long time ago). At the place where I stay there’s also a German couple, but they are cycling through some parts of the Balkans, we start talking and in the end we ended up talking all evening.  At night I go to a Jazz bar where there’s a live band performing, it was a perfect day! As I only slept for a few hours I am seriously thinking of spending one more day here, but I decide not to, to continue to Thessaloniki in Greece and to stay there for two nights. A few hours later I arrive and before I realize it I’m off again as I don’t like the place at all. Just go further east… But then all of a sudden it starts raining and thundering again and I’m falling in a really bad mood and decide promptly to skip my plan to go to Istanbul and just head north again, direction of Bulgaria. I think it’s because I had such a good time the last two weeks in the whole region, that I just really don’t like Greece and that it won’t be bad to arrive a day or two earlier home… I stop in Serres which is rather nice, nothing to see, but a nice ‘vibe’. Tomorrow I will probably go to Plovdiv and the day after to Sofia…