Ohrid

Ohrid old town from the lake

So, it's been a really enjoyable four days here. Ohrid isn't a big town, but it is permanently busy and, whatever you are here for, there's something usually available to do.

Like many towns in the former Yugoslavia, Ohrid is split between an old town that spirals down from the crest of the hill in a series of tight, cobblestoned-corkscrew streets. Imagine Ansthruther or Pittenweem, with Fife accents and fish n chips replaced by baking heat, burek, and Macedonian, and you're somewhere close. On the other side of Bul Kliment Ohridski is the Tito-era part of town, all rectilinear low rise apartments and hotels in various states of repair.

The old town is quite beguilingly beautiful, as befits a world UNESCO heritage site (Ohrid has held this status since 1979). There are two remarkable churches, one of which- St. Jovan at Kaneo- is widely believed to be the most photographed structure anywhere in Macedonia. The town of Ohrid was founded by St. Klement Ohridski, who has a statue by the plane tree at the lakeside. In the early mediaevel times, Ohrid was a significant religious centre, and the first South Slav university was founded here. Back then there was a continual war between the South Slavs of various origins, and the Ottomans, and the Ottomans eventually prevailed, ruling the roost here until the beginning of the twentieth century.

...and the Lake from the old town

These days Ohrid is mainly a tourist town; Bul. Kliment Ohridski is crammed at all hours of the day and (even Sunday) night. It's like walking on Oxford Street on a busy Saturday. Macedonians are very open, sociable, family-oriented folk; large family groups promenade slowly down to the lakeside, chatting animatedly. The street has its eccentrics, too; a white bearded man, ludicrously sporting some 1970s pink Elton John-style outsize glasses, stumbles erratically through everything from folk songs to Happy Birthday on his wheezing accordion.There is a significant Albanian population here, too, unsurprising with Albania on the other side of the lake. On Friday, as I headed out for a long walk, the call to prayer from the mosque was sounding across the town centre.

It's unusual, too, that the secular and the sacred seem to co-exist so easily here. In the UK, large churches and religious sites have an unspoken small exclusion zone around them, so that no pubs or clubs disturb their peace and quiet; here, Eurodisco and house cranks out from about nine at night, cheek by jowl with some of the remarkable churches on the hill. Much of the tourist population throngs Sar Camuel in the evening, where the main boozers and clubs are. I was delighted to re-acquaint myself with Slovenian Lasko again over the weekend; after the Macedonian Skopsko beer, the smooth, fast-disappearing Ljubljana potion seem the one most widely available.

Yesterday I took a break from watching the 24hr football on Ustream, and went to a real game; 100 denar (£1.25) got me in to the crumbling Biljana Springs stadium to see the local team, newly promoted, against the big city slickers of Vardar Skopje. Or, in Macedonian terms, the Ribari (Fishermen) against the Црвено-Црни (Red and Blacks). The stadium was like a run-down Dundee junior ground, with a running track around it (think Downfield or Dundee Violet, for those of you who know these exotic junior stadia). In truth, watching the capacity crowd of 3,000 was much more entertaining than the actual game, which was brutal- soporifically slow, error-strewn, replete with misplaced passes and woeful timidity in attack.

Flares, Bog Roll and lots of noise as the Ribari ultras desperately try to enliven a dull game

Undeterred, the Ribari ultras proceeded to go absolutely mental in spite of the turgid fare on offer, peppering the little used running track with bog roll and letting off marine flares at the slightest provocation. Ohrid cut open a shockingly bad Vardar defence several times, but sadly their forwards had the penetration of a blunt HB pencil against a block of granite. In the end, the home side were rather unlucky to lose 0-2, to two well taken late strikes from outside the penalty box, as Vardar finally remembered that they had played football before. In a week where Scottish football plumbed new European depths, it was gratifying to note that an Airdrie or a Raith Rovers could comfortably have taken care of these two rank rotten sides.

The Macedonian President's summer hideaway

 Today I went out on a boat on the lake; a little wooden thing with an outboard motor, and a Vietnam-river-boat style old army canvas over the top. We headed off in the general direction of Albania, before cutting back past the summer residence of the Macedonian president, on a secluded outcrop- the building originally put up for Marshal Tito in Yugoslav times. A little police boat bobbed at the edge of the little jetty, indicating that the president was there, although the two officers on duty seemed fully occupied in making their lunch. It was very peaceful, with the water, calm, a deep blue-green.

So, that's pretty much the end of the holiday phase of this trip, and Ohrid was a very good choice to end it in. Macedonia is still off the beaten track for many UK tourists, and options for getting here are limited, but if you get the chance to come to Ohrid, don't hesitate- do it.

This week, I'm basing myself in Bitola, about an hour's drive from here and ten miles or so from the Greek border. Whilst there, as well as looking around Bitola itself, I'm going to Prilep- home of the longest established artist's colony in the former Yugoslavia and still going in contemporary Macedonia, as well as Krusevo, where there is a museum dedicated to Nikola Martinovski, Macedonian's J.D. Fergusson-cum-Chagall. Having written a near dissertation's worth of pure bunkum on here today, my next update will be from Bitola probably on Wednesday night- by then I should have had my first meetings and taken my first notes for the big tome.

Journey south-eastwards

Ohrid old town street & Zastava Fiça

So it's time to collect my thoughts after a few days in Ohrid, a beautiful small lakeside resort in the South East of Macedonia. Lake Ohrid is a gigantic expanse of water, surrounded by mountains; 2/3 of it belongs to Macedonia, and 1/3 to Albania, whose mountainous shores stand out clearly on the distant horizon.

It's about 700 miles from Rijeka, where I was last Sunday, and I took it in leisurely style, via overnight stops in steaming hot Zagreb (and some very nice fried Calamari in an old haunt there) and in a beautiful woodland hotel outside Kragujevac, which was filled, of all things, with an Irish television company making a series about the building of the Titanic. Er, Serbia was clearly an obvious choice to make that, then. Apparently it's boom time in the movies in the former Communist countries; the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Serbia are all vying hard to attract film makers via a series of cashback and tax free incentives. there was also a large party of elderly Italian men making the pilgrimage to Kragujevac from Italy, in their little Zastava Fiça cars- they made a very noisy and slow moving, if entertaining, convoy.

Whilst the EU may have been celebrating the fall of borders since the end of Marxism-Leninism, in this part of the world they've been going up in the last twenty years. Had I done this journey in 1989, I could have driven from the Austrian border to here, without once being asked to show a passport. I've had to produce it four times in the last week, with the Serb and Macedonian borders being particularly niggly affairs, owing to the need to buy car insurance. No UK insurer will cover this part of the world (presumably there isn't enough money in it, and the accident rate is high) so I had to part with cash in order to receive a dubious piece of slippy telex paper in Cyrillic writing, in both countries.

A stone-faced insurance agent girned, huffed and puffed over my card for half an hour on entry into Serbia; in Macedonia, I had to leave the car at the border, and take a taxi into the dusty border town of Kumanovo, in order to withdraw cash and go back to the border to get my bit of paper. The facility to pay by card does not exist at the Macedonian border, nor can you get Macedonian denar anywhere but Macedonia, so it was either take the cab or go back into Serbia. The ride was very Butlins; an amiable, animated and genuinely psychotic unlicensed taxi driver got to Kumanovo in 15 minutes, largely by driving his ailing Fiat Uno at 120km/h on the wrong side of the road. There was a rather uncomfortable "chicken" moment, as we overtook a slow moving convoy and found ourselves head on with a big Polish articulated lorry; we abhorted that with about 15 seconds to spare, amidst a feline screech of balding tyres and an elephantine trumpet on the horn of the juggernaut.

A quick photo stop, 20 miles north of Ohrid

 These alarms aside, the roads outside of the towns are much quieter than I'd expected. There was quite a bit of roadkill in Serbia; a dead sheep stinking and rotting in the mid-day sun; various cats and Alsatians, guts everywhere, having met their end at night-time. It was intensely hot, and dusty; two Serb women, in headscarves, had to turn their back at the side of the road as they were enevloped in a huge cloud of dust by a passing lorry. On two occasions I saw horse-and-carts being driven over motorway bridges (presumably a good way of cutting out the seemingly endless motorway tolls in this part of the world). The Serb landscape, dotted with red-roofed white farmhouses and small towns, was baking; yellow, green, and parched.

Through Mavrovo National Park, Macedonia

From Skopje, the Macedonian capital, the road skirts the base of the Sar Planina mountains, and down through Mavrovo National Park. The road down to Ohrid is easily the most beautiful and captivating scenery I've seen yet. After Skopje, the landscape is lush, green, sweltering; the road to Ohrid is like a B-road in Highland Perthshire; narrow, steep inclines, very tight corners, then dizzying descents; deep valleys, steep inclines, long cool shadows cast by thick deciduous woods, also the feeling of being very remote and cut off, save for the occasional hamlet. In bleaker moments in my last job, I'd toyed with the idea of sneaking off down here, with nothing more than a Lada Niva 4 x 4, a big Sarplaninac dog, and a rifle for company. I'm sure my art books would have made a good winter soup, or could at least be sold for glue.

If you ever see me rolling in one of these, with a dog the size of a small bear in the passenger seat, you'll know I've tired of life

Ohrid itself is a very lively town. The streets are packed with folk eighteen hours a day; the many small supermarkets, pubs and souvenir shops never seem to close; the main Boulevar Turisticka is car-choked mayhem at peak times, with elderly Yugos honking irritably at pedestrians and scooters, and accelerating off with a trademark asthmatic rasp from the exhaust. The main pedestrianised shopping street, Bul Makedonski Prosvetiteli, is also the artery to the lake, where everyone goes at night, and to the winding Car Samuel, which leads to all the pubs and nightclubs. My hostel is just off Turisticka and everything is a ten minute walk away.

However, I'm going to go and see some more first, before writing down my impressions of four days here, later tonight.

Mavrovo shines emerald-like in the late afternoon sun