Prilep - 23rd October

We leave Skopje for Prilep, a small town in the middle of Macedonia which is not really a tourist destination.  It is more famous for being the centre of Macedonia’s tobacco industry.  The reason for this is that a friend of Dorota’s mother from Radom lives there now.  Dorota has not seen her for years, but through the magic of Facebook we have gotten in contact and we are going to meet them as we pass through.

Despite being a Sunday the bus is very full.  The trip down is pretty good, the roads out of Skopje are very good, big toll motorways.  I’m fascinated by the fact that one side of the motorway is on one side of the mountain, so looks like a normal two lane mountain road, and the other side going in the opposite direction is on the other side of the mountain kilometres away.  It’s a clever piece of engineering.  This road goes all the way to Athens and apparently one of the reasons it is so good is that it was used a lot by military traffic during the various conflicts, and they chewed it up so it had to be resurfaced recently.

We get to Prilep and walk to our hosts, taking in a few of the sights along the way.  As this is a visiting day the fact that it is our second really bad day (yesterday’s rain was short-lived but we never really saw the sun) isn’t really a factor.  However we do go out in the evening for a short tour of the town and a drink in a café.  Like Skopje, this town is not short of statues and monuments, and we discover from our hosts that these are all recently developed, and are often politically motivated.  We don’t care, it just gives us many more photo opportunities.