Feb 2009

Facing our earliest start yet, we dragged ourselves out of bed at 4am in order to catch the 5:25am bus to Dubrovnik. After hauling our backpacks almost 4km through the dark and dingy industrial estate of Bar we eventually boarded our bus. We’d been careful to choose to sit on the side of the bus that afforded us the best view and when the sun came up over the Adriatic Sea it soon became pretty obvious to us why the region heaves with tourists over the summer season. The coast is absolutely stunning and we realised we should have stayed in Budva or Kotor in Montenegro rather than just-average Bar. Arriving in Dubrovnik over the hills behind it rewarded us with a postcard perfect view of the old town.

Beautiful Dubrovnik harbour

We met a man in a park just outside the bus station who owned a hostel (as they all do). We seldom book anything in advance but generally have an idea of where we’ll stay unless someone can offer us something better. Our usual plan involves hanging around the bus/train station with a map and our backpacks and bargaining with the touts until the price reaches 10 euro per night. The man we met in Dubrovnik was about 70 years old and on his way to the market to buy sardines so we decided to go and stay with him. When we got back to his place he prepared and grilled his sardines in garlic and lemon and gave us half to eat on his patio overlooking Dubrovnik. Definitely a winner. Our nameless host’s wife, Budema, got us familiar with the map of town and assured us that it never snows in Dubrovnik, or at least hasn’t for 30 years. We’re finding our accommodation to be fairly hit and miss but generally we’re pretty happy with a comfy bed and internet access of some form. We’re been pleasantly surprised with the availability of Wifi internet everywhere we’ve been.

Our first afternoon in Dubrovnik we spent outside in the sun walking the coastal route.

A Croatian fisherman bringing in his catch

The following day we headed into the old town to wander its narrow streets and see its harbours but were thwarted by rain. The next morning we woke to find Dubrovnik’s first snow in 30 years. According to Croatian radio it was the first snow to actually settle on the ground in more than 60 years. And it snowed all day. Big, fluffy, blizzard-like snow. Visibility was zero, but after being cooped up in our tiny room all day we decided to venture out and see how the locals were fairing, and for once it seemed the locals were more enthralled by the snow than we were. When it hasn’t snowed in 60 years, there is no etiquette for snow-play and we got amongst it with the four year-olds and the 74 year-olds.

Snowy Dubrovnik

The following day we were out and about early to check out the old town in the snow. The council workers were out with their modified snow shovels and the locals were using dustpans to shovel their walks. It was the only time we’ve seen snow chains in use and our guesthouse lady was beside herself with excitement. The streets were full of snowmen and the harbour covered in snow.

Modified snow shovels

Dustpans for snow shovels

Oddly, Dubrovnik was going to be our back-up plan if the rest of Eastern Europe was too cold for us too handle. The crazy snow only proves that bad weather is, in fact, following us.

Again, we’d really only planned on transiting through Montenegro on our way to Croatia but ended up spending a couple of nights in Bar, on Montenegro’s Adriatic coast while we investigated our transport options. It would seem that most of Eastern Europe hibernates in winter, Montenegro’s transport system being no exception. We spent a day wandering around the ferry terminal and along the coastal pathway. Despite a cash injection from the USA which enabled the building of a beautiful foreshore esplanade, the rock beach is covered in trash and we can only imagine that a huge clean-up operation takes place sometime before all the summer holiday makers arrive from Italy.

Pebble beaches at Bar, Montenegro

Montenegro's Coast

Appreciating beer as we do, and given that beer is cheaper than water in all the countries that we've been to so far, we've made it our mission to diversify our beer tastebuds by drinking the local brew in each region we visit. Consequently, 'Happy New Beer' has replaced 'Happy New Year' as our toasting mantra.

Until we reached Albania, with the exception of the Blagoevgrad stuff-up, we’d been fairly spoilt with the types of transport we’d been taking. The buses had been comfortable and the trains quite civilised with their old but private compartments. So we weren’t much looking forward to travelling through Albania given that the trains were largely reported to be decrepit and the availability of information non-existent.

Arising early, we took a bus from Ohrid around the shore of the lake to Sveti Naum on the Albanian border. The bus stopped right at the border and we got out and walked to the border patrol booth. It was freezing cold and we stood outside in the wind while the border guard scrutinised our passports. After exiting Macedonia, we walked 1.5km in the freezing cold mountainous breezes through the grey zone to the Albanian border and customs ‘caravan’. Granted entry, we were met on the other side of the Albanian border by a taxi driver eager to take us into the transit town of Pogradec. We paid him more than we should have on account of the huge shotgun on the back parcel shelf of his alarmingly new Mercedes. Pogradec train station is 4km out of town and we wisely chose to get out in town and get cashed up before we went there. Finding another taxi was not a simple task and only possible with the help of a kind local who parked his car in the middle of the road while he found us a taxi. Pogradec train station, despite its waiting area and price listing, was where Bec’s frustration began to surface. Cursed with being female and the subsequent inability to pee standing up, Bec was pointed in the direction of the ‘public toilets’ which she’d previously deemed derelict and overgrown and had the worst toilet experience of her life. Enough said. It made her very grumpy.

Train timetable

The arrival of our train was also fairly interesting. It would seem that along with drinking coffee, the other national Albanian pastime is throwing rocks at train windows. We chose a carriage with the most number of intact windows (by no means all of them) and settled in for a heater-less and toilet-less ride to Durres on the Albanian coast. Though painfully slow, the time seemed to pass quickly as the train made its way through mountains, across valleys and past backyards full of children who derived great joy from throwing rocks at the train. Reminders of Albania’s grim past are everywhere in the form of about 700 000 concrete bunkers dotted all over the country side. Some of them are painted and others are hidden behind plants but most are in various states of disrepair and dilapidation. We again arrived in the dark and found ourselves an overpriced hotel in the centre of Durres.

Albanian bunker through the cracked train window

We’d only intended Albania to be a transit visit on the way to Croatia. After investigating the possibility of taking a ferry to Dubrovnik we were again foiled and found ourselves at Durres train station with the plan of taking the train to Shkodra on the Albania/Montenegro border. Internet research had shown an early connecting train to Shkodra so we (stupidly) defied the woman in the ticket booth and got off the train at Vora to aghast looks from the locals on the train. Naturally there was no connecting train and we had four hours to kill in the middle of Albanian nowhere until the next train came through. We spent an hour drinking coffee and lemonade in a smoky Albanian pool hall where Bec seemed to be the only woman to have ever set foot in the place and then decided to hang out at the train station (read: closed shack beside the train track).

On the platform in Albania

We got a good lesson in rural Albanian life by watching the comings and goings of the sheep and cows and their shepherds. Bec has unashamedly taken to peeing behind buildings, not caring who sees her, caring only that she doesn’t get arrested. Eventually our train arrived, preceded by its usual cacophony of whistle, grinding breaks and rattling window panes. The train was older than any we’d seen before and so full we had to sit in the little fold out seats in the aisle. Eventually we moved into a cabin with a very friendly Albanian couple who seemed fairly intent on determining whether we were married or not. We couldn’t understand a thing each other was saying and reverted to the usual charades-like conversation before they got off the train a few stations later amidst a lot of handshaking and farewelling.

A typical Albanian train station

We eventually arrived in Shkodra, again at nightfall, and found a taxi to take us to the Montenegren border. After an uneventful border crossing we paid someone to take us to Bar, Montenegro’s coastal playground.

We both had a bit of a dummy-spit in Albania. Glenn was the first to announce he was sick of it and Bec was soon to agree. Travelling frustrations are beginning to get to us. Glenn is sick of the effort it takes to find the transport and sitting on trains all day and not really doing much. Bec is sick of having a dirty jacket and smelling like a homeless woman and having hair like a scarecrow. Happy Valentines Day to us.

We’d read, and heard from numerous people, that it is possible to get to Ohrid in Macedonia from Bulgaria without having to go through the large capital cities. Maybe so, however arriving at the bus station in Blagoevgrad at 6am to be told that the advertised bus doesn’t exist (not told exactly, but received the waving finger and no further information) proved somewhat frustrating. We legged it to one of Blagoevgrad’s equally uninformative bus stations and eventually decided to take a bus to Sofia (Bulgaria’s capital), then to Skopje (Macedonia’s capital), then to Ohrid. We’d hoped to avoid the big cities and the touts and confusion that goes with them but could see no other timely way of getting to Ohrid. Twelve hours, three buses, one unconscionable tout and one border crossing later we arrived in Ohrid. The border crossing between Bulgaria and Macedonia was time consuming and disorganised. Crossing by coach meant that all 50 people on our bus had to get off and open their bags for both Bulgarian and Macedonian customs.

Macedonian rail station

We arrived in Ohrid in the dark and didn’t wander around for long before we were approached by Antonio who owned a set of reasonably priced studio apartments and as a result became our new best friend. We spent two nights in the studio apartment and then moved to Antonio’s family home. We woke the first morning to clear skies and set about exploring Lake Ohrid and its surrounding old town. Ohrid is set on the sure of a huge lake which forms part of the border between Macedonia and Albania and is absolutely stunning.

Beautiful Lake Ohrid

We weren’t wandering for long before we were befriended by our own personal tour guide in the form of a shaggy grey dog who led us around for almost four hours. We’d get to an intersection and he’d take us in the direction of the next point of interest and he even traipsed across the turrets of the fortress in the rain with us. He sat with Bec while Glenn viewed some frescos in a local church before taking off to find his next group of tourists. We suspect he has a tourist sensor and gets fed well by the tourists he hooks up with.

Glenn and his tour guide at the fort

On our second morning in Ohrid we woke to snow which only served to make the place prettier and we walked along the lakeside in the opposite direction.

A typical Macedonian car

That night we moved to Antonio’s house where we met some other travellers and availed ourselves of Antonio’s mum’s biscuit-bearing hospitality. We went out to dinner with our new American, Australian and Swedish friends and enjoyed a much needed night of snow fights and general stupidity before heading to Albania the next day.

Farewelled by half a dozen community dogs from Bucharest train station, we set off for Veliko Tarnovo in central Bulgaria. Alone in our little train cabin, we devoted the first hour or so of the painfully slow ride through Romania to attempting to learn some of the Cyrillic alphabet so we could at least know when to get off the train. Our train was ultimately bound for Thesalonikki in Greece, fairly inconvenient should we miss our stop. We ‘checked out’ of Romania at Giurgiu, a process which involved the snatching and subsequent disappearance of our passports by the border official and the inspection of the roof compartments of the carriages for contraband vodka by the customs official. This done, we proceeded through the grey area to Ruse where, after a lot of muttering about ‘Australians’ into walkie talkies, we checked into Bulgaria. While at Ruse, we were turfed off the train and left standing on the freezing platform while they undertook a not-very-well rehearsed shunting manoeuvre which resulted in the train having the exact same number of carriages and direction as it did pre-manoeuvre.

Very few Bulgarian train stations are clearly named and those that are named are named in Cyrillic only so we’ve taken to sitting at the front of the train so at least we can see it pull into the station. We also entertain the locals with a lot of poor pronunciation and finger pointing. Just before arriving at Veliko Tarnovo, a very agitated man entered our little cabin and began yelling Излезте с колата at us fairly wildly. Completely unnerved, we used our best Bulgarian to say ‘No Bulgarian, English only’, to which he spat ‘English schminglish’ with complete disdain before producing his train conductors card. Turns out we were in the cabin he wanted to use as the conductors cabin. We moved out and five conductors moved in and promptly began taking off their clothes and settling in for the night.

We arrived at Veliko Tarnovo at about 8pm and walked from the train station along a winding, dark, scrub-lined road (the type our mothers told us never to walk along in the daylight, let alone at night in the middle of Bulgaria) into town to our hostel. The next morning we woke to the most dramatic view across the valley. The houses seem to cling precariously to the cliffside and are in various stages of disrepair.

Houses cling to the cliffsides

A typical Bulgarian house

Veliko Tarnovo has a very impressive set of ruins and we spent a morning exploring them. The same set of ruins is also the setting for the Sound and Light Show which takes place once 300 euros have been collected. Basically, uninformed tourists pay and the rest of the town gets a free show from the bottom of the hill, albeit without the sound. It’s impossible to know whether the show will go ahead so we hung around hopefully at the bottom of the hill with a considerable group of locals and were eventually rewarded with a bells-only light display circa 1985.

Veliko Tarnovo by day

Blurry sound and light show

We spent a good few days wandering through the beautiful old town. We hiked through the Bulgarian hillside to Albanasi, another old monastic town, and Glenn went riding with some local bike enthusiasts through the Bulgarian countryside.

Bulgarian food is superb. Bec was in her feta cheese/olives/salad/yoghurt element and Glenn was loving all the different manifestations of pork. We both enjoyed the variety and quantity of Bulgarian beer. We ate in the same restaurant several times because the food was so good and the menu so long it would have been possible to eat there every day for six months without ordering the same dish twice. The shropska salad proved the favourite. We went to the local market for fruit and veg and the nameless (for us) local street food which resembled a toasted pocket of ham and cheese filled with ketchup and mayonnaise.

We left Veliko Tarnovo and spent a night in Plovdiv before taking the scenic (but very uncomfortable on account of the hardness of the seats and the choice of music blaring from the mobile phones of the local teenagers) narrow gauge railway from Septemvri to Bansko. Very slow but beautiful rail journey. From Bansko we caught a bus to Blagoevgrad to cross into Macedonia.

A Bulgarian churchyard with death notices posted on the gate

Bulgaria is excellent and we’re lucky to have seen it before it succumbs to tourism and the euro. Even the owner of our hostel referred to his people as harsh people but we saw nothing but helpfulness and compassion. The Bulgarians always seem to have their wallets open for something: people begging outside restaurants never walk away empty handed, women selling holy pictures on trains always make a sale and we watched two young women buy two slices of pizza and a bottle of water and place them in front of a homeless woman in the street in Plovdiv.

So onwards to Macedonia………..