Skopje to Prizren, 1/X; 13th October

13th October

After a breakfast of what must have been Skopje’s busiest bakery — the equivalent of Greggs — we had a coffee and looked at the map.

We realised it we could make it to the village near the border of Kosovo that day, about 40km with some elevation — and decided, around 11:30am, to do that. We didn’t want to spend another night at the hostel, and it would be very far to cross the border and get to a village with BnB in one day.
So after dashing to another shopping mall to see if they had a map of Bosnia (they did not), we quickly packed up and left by 1pm.

Pretty good bike lane with wands separating the lane from motor vehicle traffic in places

The road out of Skopje was very easy to cycle, unlike the cities of Turkey. There were some segregated cycle lanes as well as shared paths and all traffic lights had the bicycle symbol too.

There were a lot of people cycling on the Sunday, to go about their day. When we stopped to look at the map, one guy on a bike stopped and asked if we needed help. We didn’t, but chatted for a minute or so — he was cycling to a cemetery to visit his mum. As we were talking, a lady speaking perfect English crossed the road and asked if we needed help too.

After crossing a railway line we continued on a quiet road, north. Quite a few sports cyclists coming back from the mountains, getting in their weekend ride. We paralleled the river and train track and enjoyed the views of the mountains and sound of the stream. Passed a few nice potential campspots too.

Memorial commemorating the Balkan wars of the 90s. Since entering North Macedonia there have been numerous flags of Albania -- I guess a lot of people here identify as Albanian.

After come climbing we got to the village of Vratnica. The hostel owner was rightly very proud of his place — apples, chestnuts, walnuts in his garden. He had made the small cabin we booked by hand — it only cost £15 (with breakfast) as the shower isn’t ready, but otherwise it’s very nice.

We talked about the village — he said half the residents had left to either the EU or USA, for higher wages, but they usually visited in the summer. He said he had to do all the handiwork himself as the skilled builders had left, which he was obviously saddened by. Walking back from the restaurant later, only a few houses had lights on.

Large, empty house -- there were many in the village

Another memorial to WW2 -- omitting Turkey, a tragically constant feature of villages, towns and cities that we have travelled through stretching all the way to the border with China, demonstrating the brutal scale of the conflict. This was the first one that was noticeably neglected -- I wondered if it's due to lack of people to perform maintenance work, as the hostel owner said a lot of skilled workers had left to work in richer countries

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