"This music crept by me upon the waters"

““This music crept by me upon the waters”
and along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street”

— T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

Ohrid was not necessarily a place I should ever have made my way to. I tend to gravitate towards the swirling metropolitan chaos of capital cities when visiting new countries. On this trip, however, it was this lake-side jewel that spurred the whole thing. I saw a picture of St. John the Theologian in the snow – half frosted gingerbread house, half orthodox chapel – and I was sold.

In truth, it shouldn’t have been a surprising destination as Ohrid (Lake, town, environs) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site – the source of my only example of checklist travel. Ecclesiastical Byzantine architecture is among my favorite styles, and it is truly reflected and amplified in the town.

My one great disappointment was that St. Sophia (funny how I kept running into her) was closed, so I missed out on any number of frescos, but all in all had a delightful time exploring the churches.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen as many stray cats as I did there.

It bordered nearly on the ridiculous.

Some posed, some ran… I even bore witness to an impromptu feeding from some local boys, carrying a grocery bag of tiny fried fish.

Never ones to be outdone, the town’s stray dogs seemed to make a point to catch my eye.

At the end of the day, the greatest delight was the lake itself, the bejeweled backdrop to every photo and every vista alike. I’d love to find my way back in the summer to soak up the sun and have more people around for eating and drinking and dancing – all things I found quite excellent in Macedonia, particularly given that it was the crisp frigid early winter.

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.

Éblouissante sous le soleil couchant.

“Au bout d’un cap, une ville apparaît, dont la ligne, droite, éblouissante sous le soleil couchant, semble courir sur l’eau”

— Guy de Maupassant, La Vie errante

(At the end of a cape, a town appears, whose line, straight, blinding under the setting sun, seems to run upon the water. )

This quote is from a passage in La Vie errante – Maupassant’s travelogue whence I stole the name of this site – about Hammamet, which may well be my favorite town in North Africa. But that’s another story for another time.

Because this is a story about Macedonia.

And it’s not even a proper story, at that. Just a few photos of the most astonishing, brilliant, sparkling sunset I’ve ever been privileged to behold. The vivid rich colors dashed across the sky and painted the waters of Lake Ohrid like something out of a dream.

If I hadn’t already loved Ohrid, I would have been sold at that moment, but as it was the sunset was the perfect bow on a perfect day. One of life’s simple and perpetual pleasures that no mere photograph can do justice to, but I tried.