Сабота

There's a nightclub going on underneath my hotel room and I have a 7.30am start tomorrow. This is not good.

After I came back from burning my face pink earlier - turning myself into the unequivocal pinkest puppy - I sat and relaxed in my hotel room while watching strange kids TV shows from Romania. I also saw a charming episode of Puppy In My Pocket which made me cry. It was subtitled in Dutch as Macedonia is a popular holiday destination for tourists from the Netherlands.

I met up with Boyan for a beer shortly afterwards after he had helped me buy my bus ticket for Bulgaria, which is my destination on Monday. It was good speaking to him alone before he had to go to the gym
and I headed to the park.

I settled the hotel bill on the way and was soon walking into the sunset alone the mystical yet sadly polluted Vardar River. From the grounds of the fort which sits snugly beside it I heard the aforementioned Duran Duran concert while I was followed by dogs as I went as I was eating a delicious black forest flavor ice cream.

There are many wild dogs and cats here and they hang around in packs. In fact the rule seems to be you can only have a pet toy dog or husky as they are the only dogs I have seen being walked here. There are loads of huskies, many you could describe as doggage, but the sight of stray dogs is sad. Many wear a yellow tag on their ear to show they have been neutered but an animal welfare sanctuary doesn't seem to exist here. Manu bitches have evidently plump nipples too. I was followed by one such creature for miles, she sat and waited for me to catch up a few times too, I think she just wanted someone to walk with. She was mangy, clearly diseased, but really sweet. She departed into the night at the urban beach.

The beach is an attempt to reclaim such an area in the city. Apparently there had been such a place fifty years ago but with the pollution of the river, it had been abandoned. Now some bars are there, a jungle gym and a beach volleyball court. The zoo and main national stadium are both nearby along with some trendy looking flats. It looks a promising development but one that's still a work in progress, much like the rest of the city. The Skopje 2014 project was designed to build or reconstruct forty monuments, of which the big equestrian statue is one. Consequently most of downtown Skopje is a building site but it will be great once it's finished.

Aside the urban beach is a tranquil park in the English country style with bridges and lakes and little ducks going quack. There were many couples here eloping illicitly while the dense canopy made the area very atmospheric, particularly in the gloaming.

On the way back, I caught some anatomically correct lions guarding a bridge and a scrumptious view of the fortress, now lit up against the darkening sky. It was a very moving experience. I also saw a martial arts lesson going on beside the footpath and an old gentlemen stood in the river fishing, even though the fish had gone a long time ago.

Boyan and two other furs (whose names sadly escape me) met me at the hotel and we headed into the winding narrow streets of the old town. This area was Ottoman for nearly 500 years and the Turkish influence is still strong so kebabs were on the menu for our evening meal. It took our third attempt to find a place selling kebabs but once they came - ten wee jobbies and some raw onion - they were most delicious. I would say more succulent, sweeter and with a less harsh aftertaste than the UK equivalents and the salted warm bread served with them was exquisite, nay Devine. They were especially nice served with the dried paprika that accompanied the salt on the table. As usual, cats begged for food and little boys tried to sell us moist towelettes but we just wanted a meal and a chat before heading our separate ways. And this is what we did, largely about comedy, and a great time was has by all, definitely the most relaxing of my trip so far.

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Недела

The noise from the nightclub is back but I think it's a live band tonight which is a bit more palatable than last night's dance offerings. Still, I hope it finishes soon as I have a long journey ahead of me tomorrow and I need to get some rest as it starts at 8.30am. I guess this is the danger of city centre hotels.

Today, Boyan, Aleksandar and I took a bus to Ohrid, Macedonia's principal tourist town some four hours away from Skopje. The journey was long and baking hot, particularly as the air conditioner on the dilapidated German bus had broken. The outside temperature hit 38C and not even the breathtaking mountainous scenery we saw along the winding roads was enough to make me enjoy the ride. The bus went over narrow bridges and ravines, adding to the dramatic nature of the landscape here.

We stopped halfway through our trip to get a snack at a service station. I had бурек, a popular breakfast here which is most like a pasty in the UK. Mine had cheese, ham and ketchup wrapped in fluffy pastry. Sadly time escaped us and we stayed longer than the ten minute allotted break time so the bus pulled off without us. We had to chase behind it to try and make it stop - thankfully some Brazilians had noticed we were missing and we managed to catch up okay.

We arrived in Ohrid about four hours later, the bus station being very under developed, and had to fart about with validating our tickets before we could go much further. Ohrid has a beautiful old town, a castle and a wealth of Byzantine churches but its main attraction is it sits on Lake Ohrid, a fresh body of water some 32km long. Macedonia is a landlocked country so this is the only beach they have.

We herded down their post haste in a taxi, getting out to a party atmosphere by the lake. We grabbed a beer in a bar then headed to the pebbly beach and the beautiful azure water. We made a base and Boyan went swimming, Aleksandar went sunbathing (before becoming fatigued with the heat) and I drank four beers in a row and relaxed amongst the music and sunshine while staring at the Albanian coastline on the other side of the lake. The only drawback was I forgot to put suncream on my legs so they are now prickly in pink. Hopefully they will be okay though.

The Ohrid trout is a speciality of the region but its stocks are dwindling due to over fishing. I believe in ethical tourism so I went for another type of trout at the fish restaurant we went to later, even though the Ohrid variety was also on the menu. To be fair, at £15 a pop, the Ohrid trout was ridiculously expensive too. We watched the start of the Wimbledon final - the bit when Andy Murray was good - while we ate. I got the whole fish, including head, tail and spine. It was refreshing that the killing wasn't sanitized and the cheek meet was most delicious. Picking the meat from the numerous spines was also quite therapeutic.

Sadly due to a change in the bus times, we didn't have chance to see downtown Ohrid, which was a bummer as accordingly to Lonely Planet, I have now not seen Macedonia either. Still, we had to prep ourselves for the four hour ride back on which we chatted a lot and watched a Yugoslavian movie from the Eighties about a pervy old man with a toilet who was trying to woo a German tourist. On the way back, we didn't make the same mistake about the 10 minute rest stop.

The journey was good as ingot to chat kore to Aleksander, whose outlook on life, as well as personality, is quite similar to mine. I have spent a lot of time taking to the Macedonian furs while here and have found out so much about the history, politics, economics and realities of the country. I have met all five of the known Macedonian furs which was great too - they would like me to come back with Wolfie and as it's a useful destination for Balkan tours I might just do that. Plus there is loads of Macedonia I'm yet to see.

Upon arrival at the bus station, at 9.20pm, we checked out the main railway station which is stuck in a 1960s Socialist timewarp. Nothing has changed since then, reflecting the decline in the importance of the railways, while the train information boards have been frozen in time ad infinitim. The place smelled of poo too but it was a churning snapshot into history and totally at odds with the modern bus station sat beneath it.

We had a final drink at the Hotel Anja bar, the place where I am staying, and we also sampled a dessert. I had a local wine from the Tikvis region, a red which was dry but had a very mellow taste. It was then time to say goodbye as we all needed early night's for various reasons. The Macedonian furs have been very good to me, hospitable, patient and fun. It has been great seeing them and I'm hoping sometime and somewhere our paths will cross again.

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