Day 447: Let’s Pretend It’s Summer

Ohrid, Macedonia

An hour bus ride away from Ohrid is a famous monastery St. Naum. Canada, Kiwi and I decided to pay it a visit. The monastery itself was rather lame and none of us bothered to pay the entrance fee to go in. The surrounding area, however, was lovely. We were right at the Macedonian-Albanian border. We were also right by a national park. Lake Ohrid was crystal clear. Autumn was approaching. It was a good day for a bit of trekking.

The three of us came up with the brilliant idea of walking the whole way back to Ohrid by the river banks. But half an hour in, we were walking inland, up the inclined winding mountain road. I thought I’d try my luck and raise my hand up thumbing the hitchhiking hand sign. A car stopped almost immediately. The owners were a Macedonian couple, who had and showed obvious dislike of Albanians. We were given a crash course of the tensions between the two groups. Basically, like most other issues in the world, it all stems from religions. Macedonians are Christians while Albanians Muslims.

Our lifesavers dropped us a third of the way from St. Naum to Ohrid, in a place called Bay of the Bones. Here, one can find Museum of Water where a pre-historic village was reconstructed to showcase how the early settlement would have looked like. The village consisted of elevated houses on water. It’s a more normal take on how to live on water, unlike the unique reed settlement of Lake Titicaca in South America.

After Bay of the Bones, we walked the whole 15km or more back towards Ohrid. It took us longer than we had anticipated. We had also imagined walking mostly on riverbanks judging from the map that we had. We were wrong. Most of the time we were either walking on traffic road or going through bushes. When we did make it to the shore, Canada and Kiwi took the chance to have a dip in the lake. The water was cold but that didn’t stop the two of them. I made the excuse of not having brought my swimsuit, but truth be told, had I have it with me, I was too much of a coward to jump into the freezing water.

Sunlight was almost gone when we finally made it back to Ohrid. It was 4 hours later from our stop at Bay of the Bones. We were all sore and hungry. But hey, after the walk, we could justify having more pizzas and cakes for the night. That’s just what we did.