eurotur aventura

The politely intoxicated Serbain metalheads from last night were friendly in the morning and didn’t take issue with my clumsy, sleepless wandering in and out of the hostel room. Getting back to the airport was relatively simple and my bag arrived as planned.

Things got a little crazy after that though.

I’d planned to take a regularly scheduled busline from Sofia to Skopje as soon as I had my bag. This adds five hours to my journey over flying directly to Skopje, but saves me hundreds of dollars in airfare. The one international airport in Skopje has some of the highest fees in Europe and airlines charge hair-rising tariffs to take you there. Once you arrive, you find there’s no public transportation from the airport to the city: only usuriously priced taxis (and that’s if you speak Macedonian—if you speak no Macedonian you might as well just write ‘Bankomat’ on a piece of paper and hang it around your neck so they can withdraw all the money you have).

This annoys me enough that I go the indirect route through Bulgaria. I’ve recommended it to other travellers to Macedonia as well. Now though, I’ll add the caveat that there’s the outside chance you’ll have to do some real legwork to make the circuitous route.

When I got to the central bus station, I found they’d moved the office of the company I was looking for. There are more than a hundred companies, so it took awhile to find mine again. I stumbled on their new office only to see traffic jam of harried-looking people forming out the door. Not a ‘line,’ mind you. Balkan people don’t do ‘lines.’ I’ve dealt with this before, so I knew the drill. I wormed and carefully elbowed and inched my way forward through the shuffle while the sole, stressed out counter lady called out destinations she wanted to see first.

By the time I made it to the front of the crowd, I’d figured out that my bus was cancelled for the day. A minor catastrophe, since somebody was planning to wait for me to pick me up at the Skopje bus station, but two lucky breaks prevented it from turning into a major one. First, there was another (apparently hastily arranged) bus leaving a little later. Second, my American phone and calling plan work in Europe this time around, so even though I haven’t gotten myself a temporary Macedonian SIM card yet, I could still contact my host and let him know I was going to be late. Add in the fortunate coincidence that, while standard Bulgarian is hard for me to understand, Sofia street dialect is much closer to standard Macedonian and people switch to it readily here, and I was able to negotiate my way out of the fix.

Now as long as there isn’t some major international incident at the border or the mountain road doesn’t suddenly disintegrate due to contractor corruption piled on Communist-quality public works, I should make it to Skopje tonight.

(as it turned out, there was in fact one more kink to work through: the bus company had sold four more tickets than there were seats on the bus. Departure was delayed fourty-five minutes while the unlucky leftovers fought it out with the bus driver and saleswoman from the office)

All ended well, however, as a friend of a friend met me at the train station and with startling generosity got me situated with a place to stay in Macedonia. Now for a desperately needed shower.