The Great Balkan Hobo Christmas Bustour

A silly habit that began nearly 10 years ago is naming all of my trips. Weirdly enough – since I’m someone who hates logistics and gets anxiety around work travel – I find the structure and consistency helpful. Then again, I also still make paper itineraries and plan capsule wardrobes... which I’ll admit I’ve gotten very very good at throwing together the hour before I’m supposed to leave for the airport.

The name of this trip was a throwback of sorts to one I took back in 2010 called Tumblin’ Tumbleweed Hobo Thanksgiving Roadtrip Adventure, which I think was the first named trip. Other highlights over the past decade or so have been: Miknattsolensland (Norwegian-ish for “The Land of the Miknight Sun” – always with the puns), Nostalgie al gusto di curaçao (French + Italian “Curaçao-flavored nostalgia,” a lift and modification of a Paolo Conte lyric), La Folle aventure (French, “The Crazy Adventure” – crazy in as much as I went to Sénégal three or so days after booking my flight), and of course the classic Mikstanbul.

And thus, The Great Balkan Hobo Christmas Bustour. (I throw hobo into trip names when I am lodging-deficient on holidays.) Riding buses in the Balkans is not something new for me. The rail infrastructure rarely lends itself to border hopping, either due to Cold War power plays or because of the wars after the collapse of Yugoslavia. I’ve taken buses from Bosnia to Croatia, Croatia to Croatia, Montenegro to Croatia... you get the theme here!

(As far as Croatia goes, this was my first trip to the Balkans that did not involve a visit there. It’s a beautiful country, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough. Love.) 

So here was the plan that ended up on my itinerary: 

• 18.12.26, 09.30 – матпу bus: Sofia 🇧🇬 to Skopje 🇲🇰

• 18.12.26, 16.30 – галеб bus: Skopje 🇲🇰 to Ohrid 🇲🇰

• 18.12.28, 08.00 – local public bus: Ohrid 🇲🇰 to Struga 🇲🇰

• 18.12.28, 09.30 – дурмо турс bus: Struga 🇲🇰 to Tiranë 🇦🇱

One thing worth noting if you’ve never been to the Balkans... while cell phones are as ubiquitous there as anywhere, putting logistics information online isn’t nearly as common. There are some aggregator websites written in English or at least the Roman alphabet that often times have dated timetables  (or, as I discovered in Skopje, said that a particular bus line had a route which they in fact do not at all) which will do you more harm than good. The only reliable method (though Trip Advisor can sometimes help... as long as the date of the original post is within close range) is to show up at the bus station and look at the posted times on the bus company’s window.

Матпу (Matpu), the bus company I took over the border from Bulgaria to Macedonia, was very well organized. Their website (though only in Bulgarian and hence Cyrillic) listed accurate routes and times; the bus itself showed up to the parking lot exactly when it was supposed to. I think I paid 30 лв for the ticket, which is about $17.50. We arrived in Skopje at 13.30, right on time. 4 hour ride including about 50 minutes to clear the border, not bad at all. The best part by far was the constant late 80’s early 90’s playlist that feels so perfectly Eurotrashy in the most amazing way possible.

After the quiet Christmas calm in Sofia, Skopje’s bus station was a veritable riot – people coming in and out, small “casinos” (slot parlors, really) leaking stale cigarette smoke, a million little offices and ticket windows. I made the decision to get on an earlier bus in hopes of making it to Ohrid in time for dinner and put my trust in an erstwhile aggregator site, which told me that there was an earlier bus through a company called Hisar Turizam. I went to their office, asked if they sold tickets to Ohrid, was given a strange look and told that they offer international buses, and directed to one of the central ticket windows. (All I can assume is that one of their buses to Albania can pick up/drop off in Ohrid, but it’s not the best way to get there.)

​At this point, I figured it couldn’t hurt to take a quick glance at the departure board and lo and behold, there was an “OHRID - 14.00 - 8” listed. 520 MKD or $10 later, I had a window seat on a bus that was run by none other than Галеб Охрид  (Galeb Ohrid), the original bus company I had planned on. Should you ever have a reason to take a bus leaving from Skopje, the station has an excellent website with the essentials, i.e. departure time and cost, which I naturally discovered after this whole adventure. (Again, without English, but that’s what Google Translate is for, no?)

Ohrid is in the bottom corner of Macedonia, right by the Albanian border. We took a winding journey through snowy mountain roads before descending to the lake itself. I nearly drained my phone battery taking blurry photos of the winter wonderland in the hills and arrived in Ohrid as desired, well before dinner.

Sveta Sofia

“The city is a marvel of Byzantine Revival churches sprinkled amongst a mishmash of rote 19th century neoclassical bores and Eastern Bloc bulky brutalist monsters, with surprising Secessionist and Ottoman turns here and there. I was instantly in love.”

— From my last post. Yes, I just quoted myself.

And love it was with beautiful Sofia—which, incidentally, is pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable (i.e. SO-fee-ya) and not like the name as I had previously assumed. I settled on it as a destination as I so often do: finding a cheap flight. In truth, I had wanted to see Macedonia but Sofia was a mere bus ride away and so it was settled.

I arrived on an early Qatar Airways flight from Doha, easily the emptiest I’ve traveled on in years. The emptiness, it would follow, came from the fact that it was of course Christmas morning and most people taking that route had already showed up.

In my defense, most Orthodox-predominant countries celebrate Christmas after the 12th day (so, January 7th), and I quite reasonably assumed Bulgaria was the same. Thankfully, I figured it out prior to departure, but that was little consolation for the hauntingly quiet void that was the city center.

This proved a double-edged sword for my travel passions, which is to say what I look for when I evaluate any destination:

1. People

2. Food

3. Architecture

4. Music

Nº 3 was of course much easier than it would otherwise have been and Nº 2 was not a problem as my hotel was lovely and accommodating. Nº 1 was a near impossibility – everyone was home with families and those who were out and about seemed to be either going to their families or to church – which meant that Nº 4 was an actual impossibility.

So it goes.

I had more than enough architecture to occupy my time. Sofia is astonishingly rich with religious architecture, and I happened to be staying within a ten minute walk of a synagogue (pictured above), a mosque (pictured below), the Catholic cathedral (an altogether hideous building that I don’t think I attempted to photograph), and of course numerous Orthodox churches.

The name of the city itself comes from the church of Света София (Sveta Sofia, meaning either “Saint Sophia” or, as its contemporary the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, “Holy Wisdom”), so it should come as no surprise that the religious tradition runs deep. The Banya Bashi mosque is a relic of Ottoman rule (as one so often finds in the Balkans), and its congregation is primarily Turkish (I had assumed Albanian which is true of neighboring Macedonia, but as it turns out the Albanian population in Bulgaria is very low).

You truly couldn’t have picked a more stereotypical weather pattern for this part of the world. While I find the urban decay (no makeup pun intended) sublimely beautiful, I can see how one might find it too evocative of post-Soviet melancholy. It’s worth mentioning, for the record, that Bulgaria was indeed not part of the USSR but was Eastern Bloc nonetheless and bordered Yugoslavia.

One last thought on the weather – as previously discussed: it’s interesting how different the sky color ended up in each of these photos. Some of that was caused by the light or angle thereof, most of it the victim of my creative editing. In retrospect, there is something to be said for a stylistically consistent set of images… and something else to be said for the platonic ideal of a singular image standing alone.

I’m happy to say I here achieved neither. And, as ever, so it goes.

Post-Processing, the spectacular crutch.

Is it a digression if you start from that point? Post-processing is one of those lovely photographic terms that serves as both an analog holdover and a misleading descriptor of digital workflow. Originally, it happened after processing (i.e. developing) the film. Today, it could be argued that taking a digital raw file and finalizing settings is in fact the processing; in that sense, one could deem Lightroom/ACR/etc. the processing and Photoshop the post.

It seems to me so often the pretentious gearhead semi-novices who argue for and pedestalize a platonic ideal of a photograph that come in critical of manipulation. The type of people that – if I’m being catty – produce technically perfect, soulless, story-less images. You’ll see the judgment thrown in hashtags like #SOOC or #nofilter.

Is it important to learn how to use your tools? Yes

Is it important to maintain some rigid orthodoxy around what the tools produce? No

By the same token, I disdain a “fuck it, I’ll fix it in post” mentality as well. My feelings are this: become a master of the camera you use, digital or analog. (You will miss photos if you don’t.) Craft images that tell stories. As long as you’re not a photojournalist or selling a product – two areas where realism and fidelity are key – the world is your oyster in that quest.

Why does any of this matter? Well, because I hit bad weather in Sofia, of course.

More to come on Sofia itself, but as a quick fly by: the city is a marvel of Byzantine Revival churches sprinkled amongst a mishmash of rote 19th century neoclassical bores and Eastern Bloc bulky brutalist monsters, with surprising Secessionist and Ottoman turns here and there. I was instantly in love.

Pictured here is the view from my hotel (the shockingly charming Sofia Balkan) of the church Света Неделя – Sveta Nedelya – a name which refers either to the term “Holy Sunday” or Saint Kyriaki but is somewhat debated.

This is what my brain goes through when I’m dissecting an image. There are a million and one things to consider when getting to the final image. My first concern was the final aspect ratio (more thoughts on ratios here) as I’d decided a crop was necessary, given the excavations and cars in the foreground. I also wanted to brighten the church without losing the definition in the clouds, particularly since the clouds above the church weren’t much to look at in the first place. Finally, I knew that way-too-modern logo would get in the way.

After some quick cropping and some equally quick exposure adjustments, I had a fairly workable subject and thought first that I’d try monochrome. This would both hide the Huawei logo and allow me to bring down the blues to have more cloud definition. The resulting image is fine, but I missed the hallmark green of the domes.

I returned to color and played with the greens. Is it an exaggerated image? Quite. At the end of the day, it was a much more interesting composition than the original image and as one of many pieces in a tale of the architectural identity of Sofia, it would do the job. However, that bright dab of red kept drawing my eye away.

A quick pop into the shop and voilà, a finished image. It was all about removing distractions to focus on what actually mattered: this gorgeous, storied edifice.