Not (H)Ohrid at all...

...in fact, our brief sojourn in Macedonia was pretty nice!

We caught a series of local buses and reached Ohrid at tea time. It was a pretty pleasant town, with pretty Balkan houses and churches on a hillside, but not a lot going on (except for an awful lot of pizza restaurants).

The following day we were excited to visit the village of Vivcani (mainly to boost the country count), close to Ohrid.  Fed up with border battles in the 90s and cross about an attempt to divert their spring water to a nearby town, they declared themselves independent. The village shop now sells passports and local currency.  The government have studiously ignored them.  I'm not sure what we were expecting (barbed wire and stock plied weapons, maybe), but again, there was not much to see. We did have a very nice lunch, though, of homemade sausage and snails.

Yesterday we set off for Albania with a mental taxi driver, who kept us amused for the first hour, then just grated immensely. He had (apparently) driven both Liza Minelli and the Crown Princess of Japan, and we should have been very honoured to be in his car.  We tuned out of most of his incessant chatter, but I thought his solution to the Macedonia name problem was pretty good: if Greece want Macedonia for themselves, they should let Macedonia be called Greece... Make the Greeks pick one name, but they can't have both!

Arriving in Tirana we took ourselves out on a walking tour of the main sights... of which there are very few! I don't know if our tolerance for Soviet-style concrete blocks has diminished post-Greece, or if Tirana is especially nondescript, but we were done pretty quickly.  At least they have made an effort here, but painting the aforementioned blocks in a variety of bright coloured geometric patterns (think pink and purple concentric circles, yellow and blue stripes) isn't particularly effective at disguising them!

Dinner was in Blloku, the area surrounding Hoxha's old house, which used to be the homes of Communist Party officials, but is now streets full of boutiques, bars and trendy young things. Obviously, we fit right in.

This morning we decided to bail early on Tirana and head north to Montenegro. I think this is the right decision now we're getting close to the end of the trip and don't want to be wasting days, but it's made us think we haven't really given it a fair chance. Maybe we'll just have to come back.  Trevor thinks we may as well fly as go so quickly (but he's just being grumpy and I am ignoring him).

But anyway, we're on the bus heading North again, hoping to hit the MN coast by mid-afternoon.

Gems.