Our first stop is Bitola, a town supposedly famous for its
beautiful inhabitants and their ‘fancy dress’ (I assume they mean they wear
their Sunday best every day). However we
have a look at the main street and they are not that beautiful, and not that
smartly dressed, although there are fewer tracksuits than in the rest of the
Balkans. There are a couple of
interesting parks and buildings, but all in all only just enough to occupy us
for the 3 hours of our stopover.
The destination for the day is Ohrid, a town on a lake, conveniently
called Lake Ohrid, which is supposedly the oldest lake in the world, although
I’m not sure how they measure that. It
has a lot of old churches as well, again supposedly 365, one for every day of
the year. After getting lodgings from
the bus station, our cheapest yet, we take a walk around town. The main sights are all closed as it is a
Monday, but the views are great, particularly of one old church overlooking the
lake. The old town itself here is not as
well preserved as other old towns, but then it is actually older than
most. Some of the ruins are
pre-christian, and two of the ruined churches are from the 4th and 5th
centuries.
Of course it also has a new town, and we walk up and down
the main street looking at all the shops.
There is even a 1000 year old tree in one of the main squares. All in all it is a pretty good place to spend
a couple of days, even if the weather isn’t as good now. In the evening we go to a local restaurant
for a meal. This may have been the best
value meal of all, but this was mostly because the son of the restaurant owner
was ‘entertaining’ a young lady and to show off we got our bottle of wine on the
house. Even with the wine it would still
have been good value, mostly because of the local speciality, Lake Ohrid cake,
which was yummy.
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