Leaving's harder than we thought

  Ohrid, Macedonia
Thursday, September 13, 2007

· Ohrid, Macedonia
· GMT +1:00 hour

Macedonia. 2 days late

01 Leaving, part II

Here is an excerpt from our last entry, dated 3 days ago...

So that, as they say, was that from Tirana. We get the bus in the morning to our next destination, Ohrid, a small town on the shores of Lake Ohrid in Macedonia. The bus departs at 9am and we hope to be resting by the lakeshore sometime early tomorrow afternoon. Oh yeah, we hope.

Well, as it turned out 'that' wasn't actually 'that' as we were foced to spend two more nights in Tirana. Yep, we attempted to leave as planed 2 days

02 Up & Up

ago, but things didn't actually go... well, as planned. We got the 9am bus and sat on it for 4 hours as it went up, and up, and up, eventually reaching the mountain top Albania/Macedonia boarder crossing. And that's where the problems began and we didnt't get any further. Seemingly Canadians need a visa to enter Macedonia. This wasn't news to us; we knew Meg needed a visa but we were under the impression that it could be purchased at the boarder crossing. After all, Ozzies, Kiwis and South Africans need visas but they can get their visa at the boarder. Our guidebook didn't say Canadians couldn't get their visas at the crossing, but it also didn't say they could, and we, being the eternal optimists that we are, assumed they could. Of course as we now know they can't. Whoops.

Dumb Foreginers

03 The past, here and now

The news that Meg had produced a visa-less Canadian passport caused a bit of consternation on the bus and we immediately became dumb westerners in the eyes of the passengers whose journey we were delaying. With the help of a broken-English speaking girl on the bus we were told that Tirana, from where we'd just came from and form where we'd spent the previous three days and nights doing absolutely nothing, was where we'd have no problems getting a visa. Good to know.

Having to go back to Tirana was inconvenient. The fact that we we're on top of a mountain

04 My sunshine

on the Albania/Macedonia boarder, an area served by no public transport, was also rather inconvenient. From those helping us we managed to garner that our only option, assuming we didn't want to fork over USD$100 on a 3 hour taxi ride to Tirana (we didn't), was to take a taxi one hour down the mountain to the nearest town, a place called Elbasan, from where we were told we could get a bus the rest of the way to Tirana. Everyone, from the baggage boy to the bus driver to the girl with broken English and even a few of the passengers, managed to convince a taxi driver to take us. He steadfastly refused to do so initially but eventually agreed to do so. His asking price? USD$30. Grand.

Second failure of the day
And so we finally settled into the back of a typical Albanian Merc taxi for the trip to Elbasan.

05 You can call me AL

The only problem was we didn't make it there either. The taxi driver drove us about 20 minutes down the mountain, intercepted a tour bus (of the same tour company we'd used to get to the boarder in the first place) going to Tirana and passed us over to them. The taxi driver, we assumed, explained to the bus staff what was happening and I managed, somehow, to explain to them that the taxi driver was supposed to be taking us to Elbasan and that by passing

06 Meg again

us off on the bus he was reneging on his commitment to do so. Of course I was well aware that us hopping on a direct bus back to Tirana was a much sweeter deal for us than trying to find a bus to Tirana in Elbasan. I just wanted to let the taxi driver know that he wasn't getting his full fare for the 20 minute trip down the mountain. He wasn't too happy when I passed him USD$20 for his services.

Us again

07 Follow the arrows

So we made it back to Tirana early on the evening of the same day we attempted to leave after an eventful day trip to the Albania-Macedonia boarder. We also made it back to the same hotel, and even the same room, where we'd spent the previous three nights (the staff didn't even seem to recognize us as the two who had checked out of the same room earlier that day). Then yesterday we applied for, and got, the visa we knew we needed to get all along before spending the rest of the day hanging around the city watching it being besieged by Dutch football supporters who were in town for a European qualifying match. We watched the match last night in a local bar, using the occasion as an opportunity to relieve ourselves of our last few Albanian lek. Watching Albanian supporters spit at the TV screens when the Dutch scored a cruel last minute winner was a strange sight. People can get fairly passionate about sports in this part of the world too, even if their team is crap.

Take Two
So we tried again this morning, this time successfully, to get to Macedonia, having spent

08 Our first look at Lake Ohrid

a total of 5 nights in Tirana, more nights than we've spent in any location so far. We never expected to spend so much time in such a low-key location as Tirana, but then again one, even those as poorly informed as us, never expects to get food poisoning or get turned away at border crossings. Today was much like 2 days ago, just with a different result - we got the same bus, with the same staff members, went to the same border crossing and submitted our passports to the same boarder officials. The only difference this time was we actually got to Orhid, a mere 10 minute drive across the Albanian border. And once we got here we soon realised spending unexpected time here would have been so much easier to stomach.

Day 29 & 30 Observations (September 11th & 12th 2007)

· Visa
This is a simple observation - if you're a Canadain and you're planning on going overland to Macedonia from Albania then make sure you get your visa before you arrive at the border. Easy.