August 10, 2012
Back on the road again: Ljubanista - Bitola
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WE GOT BACK to riding again this morning. We'd intended to spend just one night at Ljubanista, the first village across the border from Albania. But then Steph's innards gave out and, the moment she started feeling better, so did mine. And I don't want to ruin your meal but, to judge by the lavatories at the camp-site, I don't think we were alone.
It's been stinking hot for weeks now, pushing 40 degrees sometimes but never getting there. And that has perhaps been too much for refrigerators and the food has suffered. Anyway, for the moment we don't feel too bad. Which is as well because our day started with a climb of 650 metres to 1 600m, with not a hint of flatness from top to bottom.
We had a choice. We could ride the edge of Lake Ohrid into Ohrid town itself, the largest of a string of holiday places along the coast, or we could turn right almost straight away and climb and climb through Galicica national park (supported by Germany according to the signs).
I knew the road to Ohrid was a long way from flat, so the choice didn't lie there. It was more in what followed. Two Germans I met on our first morning in Macedonia, my having ridden to get cash in Ohrid, told me the way out of town was on a trans-European route.
"Before we came the other way," Georg said, "we met two British cyclists who'd ridden up. And they congratulated us on having a long, long downhill ahead. So what we rode down, you'll have to do up. Not steep but never-ending, and with the traffic."
Since the two options eventually came together, we chose to rip off the plaster in one go and get gravity out of the way as quickly as we could. And how we were rewarded!
We rose like lazy aeroplanes, in the shelter of the mountain and roadside trees, watching the water getting ever further beneath us. We were alone. The sun was that perfect power, warming but not warm. When the road began climbing more earnestly, it did it respectfully by twisting round hairpins.
The lake, the size of a small sea, moved first to one side and then the other.
Sometimes there was so little between us and the fall back to water level that we felt we could hurl a rock and watch it splosh into the calmness. Kindly clouds, the residue of a brief thunderstorm last night that broke the heat, fluffed up above us. We had the sensation of riding closer to them.
And then the top, a plateau of grass and rock and stumpy trees and a parking area for the few who had driven up. People were taking pictures of the view and then of each other. They reminded us of what one of the Macedonians had said: "The greatest honour for a huntsman is to kill a goat on a mountain top - because first you have to get to the top of your mountain."
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These people had killed their goat but they hadn't scaled the mountain. And, since they turned round and drove back down and wondered what to do with the rest of the day - they didn't pass us on the descent - they missed a lot. Because moments after losing sight of Lake Ohrid on one side, we saw Lake Prespa on the other. An underground stream between them keeps their levels the same.
We expected the Prespa shore to be as commercialised as Ohrid's. But there was nothing. Little settlements ran into each other and provided generous work for the makers of place names, the houses set to one side of the road as though they were shy of the lake. The land flat and windy, the fields full of trees of apples and plums. Nobody was about.
We rode past churches with dumpy tiered towers that stood next to smaller mosques with elegant silk-string spires. We passed the sort of building that shouted it belonged to a communist past, square and functional, seemingly neither used or unused, all explanation of its purpose removed. We passed a campground that had lost heart and turned to weeds.
And eventually we turned on to the busier road that the Germans had described, the route from Ohrid. It dragged upwards heartbreakingly, then gave up and sent us whooshing down to Bitola, birthplace of Alexander the Great.
Our notes said this was a busy commercial centre, important enough to have the consulates of a dozen nations. But we saw nothing of factories. We arrived instead in a Macedonia seemingly far from depressed, a town of boulevardiers strolling in their best outfits and packing the cafés and bars and their outside seats.
Signs point, usually outside bars because they're good for trade, to links between Macedonia, and Bitola in particular, and Australia. Many must have emigrated there. Now their offspring are coming back, not to live but for family reunions. We met several of them, including a couple from Sydney, she of Macedonian descent and speaking the language, he pure Oz but already in love with his wife's background.
"We've come for a family wedding," the woman explained. She was 30 with dark eyes and milky white teeth and dressed in black shirt and blue jeans. "I came here when I was young but that was the only time, so really this is the first visit.
"We were helping with the preparations for the wedding all yesterday, decorating the cars and the houses. It's been lovely, although it's easier for me than for Richard because I understand the language. But Richard keeps saying we ought to come back and start a bed-and-breakfast here."
"You'd like that?" I asked him.
"Betcha," he said.
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