Barrelling Around the Balkans--October/November 2016

Ranomafana, Madagascar

Our three weeks in Europe in October and November seem very long ago now as I sit in a tropical valley in the mountains of Madagascar, but with an effort I can shift my attention back to that action-packed period of time long enough to get it down in print. 

Terri and I hiking in Meteora, with a small uninhabited monastery behind

We arrived in Athens on October 18^th from Johannesburg, via Dubai. We were there to lead a trip for school students, and the first ten days were devoted to doing the pre-trip and then running the trip itself.  We spent most of our time in the Meteora area, a beautiful part of northern Greece that had been on my to-see list for decades, ever since watching For Your Eyes Only back in about 1983.  The monasteries really look like something out of a fairytale, perched high atop eroded conglomerate cliffs.  We (and our student group) did a great 4-hour hike in the Meteora hills leading ultimately to one of the monasteries; they definitely need to be approached on foot in order to appreciate them properly. 

Meteora landscape

The surroundings are not what you immediately think of when you hear the word “Greece”:  no Mediterranean blue, no maquis bush.  Instead there are ancient oak forests full of wild boar and even wolves and bears.  There are obscure little hermitages tucked away in tiny hidden valleys, and even a cave full of Neanderthal and Neolithic remains (sadly closed, although we did drop into the museum).  One day, we drove up to Lake Plastiras, a lake high in the Pindus Mountains, along a spectacular road that I wanted to keep following to see where it led.  Overall, we were quite pleased with our Meteora experience.

Salamander in the Meteora forests

One of the Meteora monasteries

Terri, me and Leonidas at Thermopylae

We also visited Delphi, one of the most evocative ruins in all of Greece, nestled under the bulk of Mount Parnassus, and (on the way between the two) passed the site of the Battle ofThermopylae (a strangely forgotten and unatmospheric spot but a place of huge historical resonance).  In Athens we went through the amazing new(ish) Acropolis Museum, one of the great museums of the world, and strolled around the Acropolis itself on Oxi Day, a national holiday devoted to the word “No” (said to the Italians in 1940); there was free admission to the Acropolis that day, and the crowds were astonishing.

Meteora hermitage carved into a cliff face

Driving around rural Greece, though, the signs of the economic plight of most of the country were everywhere, with shuttered factories, boarded-up shops and derelict half-built buildings everywhere.  Thiva, ancient Thebes, stuck in my mind as a particularly grim example of post-2008 post-industrial wasteland.  Talking to Greeks, it doesn’t sound as though anything has really improved despite 8 years of bailouts, austerity and political brinkmanship.

The view from Delphi

Friday, October 28^th found us on a flight to Tirana, Albania.  We wanted to do a quick busman’s holiday around the Balkans, and the Greek rental car companies are not keen on letting their cars go across borders into countries like Albania, so we decided to start in Albania, where we picked up a rental car in the airport for 15 euros a day.   I had been to the Balkans twice before, both times on a bicycle.  In 2009, after finishing my Silk Road Ride, I had cycled quickly through the countries of the region in November, too late in the year to really appreciate the surroundings.  In 2015 Terri and I had ridden down the Danube, ending up in Bulgariaafter passing through Croatia, Serbia and Romania.  This time we were in a hurry once again, but we had a few objectives:  we wanted to visit friends in Mostar, I wanted to see Sarajevo, Terri wanted to add Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro to her country list, and I wanted to see the mountains of northern Albania.  I also wanted to see Gjirokastro, in the far south of Albania, but we just didn’t have time to fit that in.

Terri in the Accursed Mountains above Boga

We spent the night in a cheap guesthouse in a tower block in Tirana before pointing our wheels north on Saturday morning.  We escaped the manic traffic of Tirana and got onto a newly built motorway that made for easy driving.  Our objective was a mountain range in the far north of the country known as the Accursed Mountains; with a name like that, we had to visit!  After passing through more snarled traffic in Shkoder, we turned off the main road and entered a spectacular world of mountains and old stone villages.  We drove up, up, up along a valley lined with autumn colours on the trees.  The weather was perfect, and every turn of the valley brought another postcard-worthy view.  The limestone cliffs shone white in the sunshine and contrasted sharply with the deep blue of the mountain skies.  It reminded both of us of fall weekends in the Swiss Alps, and the brand-new asphalt road could have been straight out of Switzerland as well.  Finally, atop a 1600-metre high pass, we ran out of asphalt and although we bravely tried to push on in our tiny two-wheel drive compact Maruti, it was an unequal struggle and after having to back up on a narrow dirt track in the face of an oncoming livestock truck (actually we gave the keys to one of the farmers to back up for us, as it was a pretty scary stretch of road with a huge cliff on one side), we gave up and retreated to the pass.  

The valley of Boga

We had to abandon the idea of driving ourselves to the village of Theth (visible far, far below) and instead parked the car and went for a walk for a few hours up the valley to a dramatic viewpoint perched atop a cliff, looking down at the Theth Valley below our feet.  This mountainous area has gotten onto the radar of western European hikers in the past decade, and it’s easy to see why.  This area has all the beauty of the Alps at a tiny fraction the price, and with a tiny fraction of the number of hikers on it (we saw exactly none that day).  The hiking trail was well marked and well maintained.  We had read about a new international long-distance hiking trail, the Via Dinarica, and it passes right through this area.  If I had much more time, I would love to hike the length of the Via Dinarica, getting to know this mountainous area of the world that is so little known in the West.

Hiking in the Accursed Mountains

After our hike, we drove back down the asphalt to the village of Boga, where we found accommodation in the home of the family of Zef, a gruff farmer.  He, his wife and his daughter Madgalena made us welcome in their farmhouse and we had a great time, despite not having any language in common other than a tiny amount of Italian.  Like everyone in the valley, the family is Catholic; I hadn’t really appreciated what a multi-confessional country Albania is, with Catholics making up the second biggest religious group (10% of the population) after Muslims (about 57%), just ahead of Eastern Orthodox (7%).  Mother Teresa was an ethnic Albanian Catholic (born in Skopje when that was a Turkish city; it was then a Serbian city before becoming the capital of modern Macedonia; this is why four different countries now claim her as their own; we had landed at Mother Teresa International Airport in Tirana), and it is encouraging that in a region not noted for its religious tolerance in the past few decades, Albania has not had any religiously inspired civil strife.  We had a wonderful evening trying to talk to the family, and Terri hit it off with Magdalena in particular.

Terri with our wonderful host family in Boga

It was a chilly evening, and we delayed our departure the next morning while the sun warmed up the bottom of the valley.  We went for another short hike up above Boga in the sunshine, drinking in the views and watching the villagers walking back from church service.  We returned to the farmhouse to find the parents entertaining neighbours with coffee and cake after church, while other villagers took themselves to the local café for something a little stronger.  We said our goodbyes and drove off down the valley, snapping photos and promising ourselves that one day we would return to explore the Accursed Mountains properly.

Fall colours in Albania

Sveti Stefan, Montenegro

We drove north along the main road, past fields planted with medicinal herbs (a big cash crop in the area) and eventually to the northern shore of Lake Shkoder, where we crossed the border into Montenegro.  It was a quick, painless process, as all our subsequent Balkan border crossings proved to be.  We bought our 40-euro car insurance Green Card (good for all European countries for 15 days), showed our passports and car registration, and two minutes later we were off into Montenegro.  It was a very pretty drive along the lakeshore, past monasteries, prettily situated villages and a smattering of holiday homes.  Eventually we popped through a tunnel linking the lake with the Adriatic coast and turned north.  We drove along one of the prettiest coastlines in Europe, one of the highlights of my 2009 bike trip, and eventually turned off the road in Sveti Stefan to find accommodation for the night.  We first had a stroll along the coast, past the bridge to the gorgeous offshore island of Sveti Stefan (once Tito’s summer fiefdom, now a private and very expensive Russian-owned hotel) and past another couple of top-end hotels on the mainland.  It was a very pretty walk, but eventually we returned to the car and got serious about searching for a place to stay.  Most rental apartments were closed for the season, but just before sundown we found a place for 30 euros, ran to a nearby grocery store for wine and toasted a dramatic sunset over a wind-whipped Adriatic. A takeaway pasta carbonara dinner and an early night completed the day.

Bay of Kotor, Montenegro

The wind howled all night, but once the sun came up on Monday, October 31^st, the sea calmed down.  We had a slow, relaxed start with time for me to have a run up and down the hilly streets of town before a breakfast of bread, honey, olives and jam.  By 10 am we were underway, driving further up the coast before turning inland to drive halfway around the dramatic (and dramatically traffic-choked) Bay of Kotor.  We turned inland up a big climb over the coastal mountains and onto a limestone plateau that continued for many kilometres to the Bosnian border and beyond.  We continued along the plateau, through the Republika Srpska (the Serbian bit of Bosnia-Hercegovina) until further progress was halted at the pseudo-border with the Bosniak-Croat confederation by mine-clearing operations beside the road, a reminder of the lasting aftereffects of the Bosnian War.  Once the mine-clearers were finished, we drove upstream to pretty Trebinje, then along a lovely valley and over a hill to reach Mostar where my friend and former LAS colleague Jonathan and his wife Jane are living.  We rendezvoused with Jane at the United World College, located in the old Gymnase building in the centre of town, and drove to their apartment overlooking the old Turkish centre of Mostar.

Night over Mostar Old Town

Mostar is one of my favourite places in the Balkans, and I used to have a print of the Hungarian painter Csontvary’s painting of its famous Ottoman bridge hanging on my bedroom wall at university.  Jane, Terri and I walked down to the bridge and enjoyed the beautiful old Ottoman architecture of the surrounding streets.  The bridge was lit up (evening came early now that daylight savings time was over) and looked very pretty indeed.  We returned to the apartment to meet up with Jonathan, and the evening passed by very pleasantly over dinner and wine, catching up on the past few years since they left Leysin.

The next morning was the first day of November.  Jonathan left early for school and Jane waved us off as we drove our trusty Maruti upstream in the direction of Sarajevo.  It was a relatively short drive, and we arrived in the city by 1:30.  We found a parking spot near our rental apartment, right beside the massive Sarajevo Brewery, but couldn’t get hold of the apartment owner to get the keys.  We repaired to a nearby café to use their wifi and have a beer and realized that the non-smoking revolution in bars and restaurants has not yet come to Bosnia.  We were thoroughly fumigated with cigarettes before the owner showed up with the keys and let us in. 

Terri and Jane in Mostar's Old Town

Where the First World War kicked off

Terri had been to Sarajevo a decade before, but I had never made it that far into Bosnia.  We strolled into the old Ottoman centre of town and headed straight for Sarajevo’s biggest claim to fame, the street corner at which Gavrilo Princip lit the fuse that led to the carnage of World War One by assassinating Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28^th, 1914.  It’s just an ordinary-looking street corner, but a branch of the Sarajevo City Museum occupies one of the buildings on the corner and displays pictures of the fateful day and its aftermath.  The amazing thing to me is that Franz Ferdinand had already survived one assassination attempt by the Serb nationalists of the Black Hand that very day.  Rather than keeping himself safe and out of sight until he could leave the city, he decided to drive right back into the city centre an hour later, which is when Princip was more successful second time around.  We took a few photos and then continued our stroll around the old town, past mosques and medressehs and the old market.  It was very atmospheric, and we eventually retired to Pod Letom for a hearty meal; photos outside and on the wall attested to the fact that Bill Clinton had eaten there twice over the years (both times since he retired from the presidency).  We returned to our apartment, re-parked the car out of the paid lot we had left it in onto the street outside the brewery, and retired early for the night.

Mosque in Sarajevo Old Town

Sarajevo was the furthest north we would reach on our Balkans peregrinations.  Wednesday, November 2^nd found us heading out of town along a dramatic gorge cut into the mountains.  Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, and we climbed up to the village of Pale, site of the ski races and then the capital of Radovan Karadzic’s murderous Serbian republican forces.  We continued along, past other ski towns, until we suddenly came upon the border with Montenegro.  As soon as we crossed the border, we left behind the dark, slightly gloomy valleys of Bosnia for radiant highlands in the interior of Montenegro.  It really seems as though Montenegro is the scenic highlight of the former Yugoslavia, no matter what part of the country you visit.  After driving for hours along small roads, we found ourselves in the town of Berane as afternoon turned to evening, so we found a cheap hotel and called it a night.

The following day (Thursday, November 3^rd) was grey and rainy, a sharp contrast to the brilliant sunshine we had had almost every day so far.  We drove past tiny ski resorts and then up, up, up to the mountain pass leading into Kosovo.  Terri had never visited Kosovo and was keen to see the country.  Our plan was to stop in Peja (Pec) and spend the afternoon doing some hiking and visiting the Serbian monastery.  The weather didn’t improve, however, and Peja proved to be a crowded, chaotic construction zone of a city, so we just kept driving (along streets named after Tony Blair, John Kerry, Bill Clinton and others involved in ending the Kosovo War back in 1999) towards the Macedonian border.  I remembered in 2009 not being overly enamoured of Kosovo, and this trip confirmed my previous opinion.  The mountains along the frontiers are very pretty, but the country is very densely populated and is just an unending straggle of half-built new houses, of little interest to the casual tourist.

Alexander the Great statue, Skopje 

We crossed into Macedonia on a road down a deep gorge and immediately the weather and the depressing industrial landscape changed.  We drove into the traffic snarl of downtown Skopje and got immediately lost.  We went in circles, we cursed our Maps.me smartphone app, and eventually we parked the car in an obscure backstreet and set out on foot to find a place to stay.  We ended up in a nice apartment overlooking the remodelled centre of Skopje and set off to explore.

I remember Skopje as a slightly artsy town with a bunch of cafes and Irish pubs in the slightly worn downtown core.  The past seven years have seen immense changes to the cityscape, as the government has lavished hundreds of millions of dollars completely gutting and redeveloping the city centre in a style best described as Las Vegas Marble Kitsch.  Alexander the Great has been adopted as the national hero (even though the ancient Macedonian kingdom was centred further south, in modern-day Greece, and modern Macedonians are Slavic speakers with a language most akin to Bulgarian), and the government has erected immense gilt statues of Alexander, and of his father Philip and mother Olympias and baby Alex, in the middle of a huge pedestrian thoroughfare.  New pedestrian bridges have gone up over the river, lined with more statues of historical figures (both ancient and nineteenth century), while a historical museum, an opera house and several government ministries all rise in Corinthian columns above the bemused Soviet-era concrete lowrises surrounding the centre.  It all looks very kitsch, and it’s apparently not hugely popular with a large section of the population, fed up with official corruption and political underhandedness.

Anti-government paint bombs, Skopje

Some of the marble wedding-cake buildings in Skopje

If you look carefully, you can see blotches of purple, green, red and yellow staining the white marble of the new constructions, the result of protestors hurling balloons filled with paint against the hated symbols of theregime.  We wandered around the downtown taking pictures and reading the captions on dozens of statues.  We were divided in our opinion of the city’s makeover:  I thought it looked very fake and artificial, but Terri thought it was an improvement on the soulless concrete that was once there.

In 2009 I had enjoyed Macedonia more than any other country I visited on my Balkan bike blitz, and I was keen to see new parts of the country and to show Terri the undoubted highlight of Macedonia, the ancient monastery town of Ohrid.  We drove west out of Skopje the next morning and then turned south, passing through pretty valleys studded with minarets (this northwest corner of Macedonia, abutting Kosovo and Albania, is where the country’s sizeable Muslim minority live), over a couple of passes and finally into the resort town of Ohrid.  We found our holiday apartment (at 15 euros a night for a big apartment, it was a deal) owned by a personable professor named Joce, checked in and then went for a wander. 

Veletsevo village, overlooking Lake Ohrid

Ohrid is historically a very important spot, as it was at the monasteries along the shores of the lovely highland lake that Greek Orthodox monks like Clement of Ohrid developed the Cyrillic alphabet to write down Old Church Slavonic, the mother tongue of all the Slavic languages.  We strolled past a couple of the monasteries (sadly one was under reconstruction and the other was locked) and then along the lakeshore, past another big government project to build a new university in the old town.  We bought roast chestnuts to ward off the early evening chill and watched the light fade over the lake.

Hiking in lovely Galicica

The next day we didn’t have to drive to a new city to sleep (the only time we spent two consecutive nights in the same place on the entire trip), and we took advantage of this to have a day of hiking under glorious sunshine in the mountains of the Galicica NationalPark that rise straight out of Lake Ohrid.  We had only a vague hint of a map, and the trail markings were pretty inconsistent, but we still had a splendid day in the mountains, soaking up huge views that extended across the lake into Albania and south into Greece.  We had the entire area almost entirely to ourselves, although our starting point, the village of Veletsevo, was crowded with people laying flowers and having picnics at the graves of family members in the village cemetery (perhaps because it was the first weekend after All Saint’s Day?).  We underestimated the amount of time we would need for the trek, and did the last half hour in the dark, but it was a huge highlight for me on this Balkan adventure, and reinforced my desire to come back with a few weeks to spare to do some long-distance hiking through this mountainous hiker’s paradise.

Hiking in Galicica

Sunday November 6^th found us finishing up the driving of the trip with a few hours from Ohrid back to Tirana.  The scenery was dramatic much of the way as we dropped out of the highland basin of Lake Ohrid down a narrow canyon to Elbasan, where we stopped for an immense lamb feast.  From there we were only an hour or so from Tirana, and we managed to navigate the traffic horror of the Albanian capital more or less unscathed.  We checked in again to Guesthouse Mary and had an early night before our morning flight.

The next morning found us dropping off the car at the airport and checking in for our Aegean Airlines flight back to Athens.  We made our way to the Adonis Hotel, retrieved our stored luggage and then spent the afternoon separately on frustrating errands.  I wanted to get my camera cleaned as there is dust on the CCD, but Monday afternoons by law all shops in Athens close at 3 pm, just after I got to the camera shop.  I didn’t yet know about the early closing law, so I wasted more time trying to find outdoor equipment shops, which were similarly shut.  Terri meanwhile was navigating the crowds and hopelessness of the Greek medical system, trying to get her left knee, still sore 7 weeks after falling on it in the Tsodilo Hills, looked at.  She eventually saw an overworked doctor and paid a ridiculously low 9 euros to do so, but didn’t get much useful practical information on what to do to get better. 

The evening made up for the day, however, as I found some Spanish cava for sale and brought home some take-out gyros sandwiches.  We sat on our perfectly-situated terrace looking out at the lit-up Parthenon and savouring the historical atmosphere.  We both agreed that Greece and the Balkans deserve more time on a future trip, although it’s not clear when that will be.

And then it was November 8^th and we were on an air odyssey, first to Dubai, then Johannesburg, then Nairobi and finally to Antananarivo, ready to spend the next six weeks exploring the “Eighth Continent”, the wildlife diversity hotspot of Madagascar.  Stay tuned to this space to read up on our various adventures in Madagascar!

Lake Ohrid seen from Galicica