Beautiful Lake Ohrid
Trip Start
Aug 23, 1996
1
175
449
Trip End
Ongoing
Loading Map
Ohrid,
Macedonia
Thursday, August 11, 2005
As soon as the bus pulled in, an angry mob was awaiting us. It was good to see all these little old ladies fighting for our money again. We settled on one, and she dragged us off to her place with the promise of a lake view. Sold we were. It was fucking awesome !!!!! We changed, emptied our bags and ran down into town to have a look around. We started walking the streets, taking it all in. Above was the promise of another amphitheatre, hence another reason for being here. There were loads of churches here. They were designed as if they were like a wedding cake. The only problem was that they wanted to charge an entrance fee for every one of them. Personally, I think that this sucks as I feel that a church should be a place of worship and if you feel like giving a donation, you do. We walked on, eventually arriving at the amphitheatre. It was really impressive. We took it in, then decided to move on. There was a fort above us, but we decided that we would leave that for the following day.
Sometimes you get the feeling that not is all right in the world
We found ourselves outside a little shop, so Lucy and I gave in to our needs, and bought a Macedonian carpet as we felt that it would look good with our Turkish, Moroccan and Tunisian ones.
We dropped it back in our room and decided that we would have dinner, repack the bag and take the things that we would need
Thats when the penny dropped.
Our Lonely Planet, the one from 1997 was missing. We ran around like headless chooks. Visiting every site that we had been to, just to see if it was there, awaiting our return to pick him/her up. Up to the amphitheatre, to all the shops, even to the carpet store, but it was to no avail. Our book was gone. I broke down and cried. All of the good times that we had had together. Just the three of us, but now it was two of us. I had read that book so many times, I was trying to remember all the information as we still had to go to Albania. The information was patchy, but I could not remember the maps. Normally, in times of blindness like this, I grab the nearest tourist, borrow their LP and start reading/writing down every last bit of info I can find. But the problem here was that we were the only backpacker type tourists around. There were loads of Dutch people but they were on package holidays. God only knows why !!!!! But they were no help
I cried myself to sleep that night. It was like a death in the family
I awoke and went everywhere again. Hoping that my LP would call out, or even stagger towards me after a big night out. But it did happen. I started to accept that I would never see my best friend again. So we walked up to the fort, to take a look at it and to console myself. Actually, the fort was really enjoyable. We were walking along the walls, and down below, the local version of Time Team were doing some digging, and thats when they found it. Not our LP, but an old skeleton. It was pretty cool watching them dig it out. So we hung around taking more photos. That was the highlight of a very sad day
First thing, the next morning, we jumped into a taxi, and headed over to the other side of the lake. We wanted to see a church called Sveti Naum before we headed over to Albania. A local cafe looked after our bags for us whilst we were looking around. Right next door, was a huge hotel. We walked in the front door, there was nobody there to take our money. We walked in. The sign said no photos, so I took a sneaky one or two. A guy came up to us, who by this stage was now manning the ticket office. He did not ask us for money, so we carried on looking, until we had finished our viewing. We went back to get our bags and asked the boy in the cafe how we could get to Albania. He said that it was a 3 K walk, but if we went with these two boys in the army, it would only be 1 K. We went with them. They took us through an army base. We had armed escorts !!!!! It was so quick. I don't even think that it was a K. And then there it was. The border gate was calling us. So we made our way over and was stamped out of the country
Now, if you ever see a 1997 Lonely Planet Eastern Europe on a shoestring trying to find its original owners, you will know that is ours, and could you please return it safely
