NIGHT BUS TO SOFIA VIA SKOPJE

There is no direct bus from Tirana, Albania, to Sofia, Bulgaria any more, so you have to transfer in Skopje, Macedonia. Sounds simple, right? Nothing is as simple as it sounds, especially in the back woods of Europe, the forgotten lands, the old country. The bus to Skopje leaves from the ‘muddy patch in front of the train station’ at 9am so I get there bright and early to get my ticket, me and a handful of locals and another backpacker who seems to want nothing to do with me, probably some Euro-trash who’s ‘more backpack than thou’, afraid that contact with another groover might spoil the authenticity of his experience. Maybe he’s right. Two can play that game I guess. Who needs him anyhow? He seems to be rapping with the drivers, probably hasn’t even realized yet that they don’t understand a word of his English pidgin shit. So we head off into the hazh-pazh countryside of Albania, broken bruised and beaten, not yet having received the coat of paint that the capital has, a splash here, a stripe there, and a mosaic in between, anything to try to forget the lost decades of Commonist rule and the psychological misgivings that can ensue. Somehow Nature always survives regardless of men’s mistakes. Still Albania seems a bit more broken than most, with neither plan nor order.

By the time we approach the border we’re high into the hills again, past 19^th century-style mining operations and failed industry. By this time I’ve broken the ice with my fellow backpacker. Turns out he’s Croatian and a really nice guy, hardly the arrogant a**hole I’d imagined. I feel foolish, but not as much as I would have if we’d traveled the whole way unspeaking. He’s on his way to India via Istanbul and speaks good English, having practiced much in the tourist industry of Dubrovnik. His name is Mladen. There are a lot of backpackers from non-traditional Western countries now, including China. The common bond is a modern western ‘tude, a pocket and a head full of change, and a decent command of English. Upon reaching the border itself we find it so clogged that we change buses to avoid formalities; big mistake. As we continue on the other side it’s soon snowing. Even Mladen looks at me and goes, “WOW!” And I’m thinking, ‘Don’t you freak out or I’ll really freak. You’re a local!’ But I didn’t say anything. It’s been a long hard winter for Europe.

We make it through the snow okay, but that’s not good enough. The old bus pops a gasket or something and soon is wheezing like an old woman climbing six flights of stairs. We pull over and the driver puts on his greasy mechanic’s apron like, “That’ll show the bus who’s boss!” Yeah, right. This old bag of nuts and bolts ain’t goin’ nowhere. So we wait and wait and wait for the company to send a van to pick us up. Mladen’s going to miss his bus to Istanbul, but that’s good for me, since he’ll continue on to Sofia, like me, instead. At this point his presence, and command of All Things Slavic are very reassuring to me, particularly since we’ve become quite friendly. I realize at this point how vulnerable and insecure I am, hardly the master traveler and linguist I may come off as sometimes, to myself if not others, whether intentionally or otherwise. Down deep I’m a scared little child. The only difference is I’ve been there before, lived my whole life there in fact, trembling before the vagaries of Circumstance and creating new gods to save me. Bottom line: I hate that sinking feeling when you’re stuck out of luck and there’s nowhere to pass the buck. I know it well.

The bus driver finally flags down an empty van and pays the van driver to take us on into town. Hell, we could’ve done that an hour ago. That’s what we would’ve done ten years ago without cell phones and the miracles they bring. So by the time we finally limp into the station at Tetova, Macedonia, it’s dark and cold and lonely. I’m really glad Mladen is there. Maybe he’s glad, too, but I don’t ask. Guys don’t do that. Problem is, the bus to Sofia leaves from Skopje, and that’s still an hour and another bus ride away, something I didn’t like in the original plan, and am now regretting. If you want to traipse the Balkans, bring a friend. You might need it. We persevere on to Skopje, where there’s a bus to Sofia at midnight. So we buy tickets and have time to kill; things are looking up. It’ll be Sofia by morning, an up-and-coming tourist destination, there and Bulgaria in general. But now we’ve got three hours to kill so we trade stories and talk trash and eat more oily pies, which Mladen explains to me is ‘real Balkan food’, as if I didn’t already know after living on them in Tirana. He also tells me that Macedonia has the best music in the Balkans, and good food, too.

At first I regret passing through without really stopping but the more I see of it, the less that Skopje agrees with me, apparently splayed out wide, unfriendly to walkers. There’s nothing worse for a backpacker than that. ‘Backpacker’ may not mean ‘hiker’ anymore, but it definitely means ‘walker.’ Going through twelve countries in two months, I’m entitled to a few quickie transits, aren’t I? Macedonia is the TAFKAP of countries, officially the ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’, FYROM, apparently to appease the sensitivities of Greeks for whom the concept of ‘Macedonia’ has entirely different connotations. I don’t know about the music or the food, but the women certainly seem to exude a certain fashionable sexiness that I haven’t elsewhere in the Balkans… or much of anywhere for that matter… and we’re in the bus station for God’s sake! But such things hardly interest me any more these days… yeah, right.

This is Cyrillic country now, everything written in the alphabet that the first millennium Orthodox monks Cyril and his brother what’s-his-name so methodically adapted from Greek to fit the Slavic tongue. If Albanian seemed foreign, this seems downright alien! Fortunately I’ve already got a head start in Greece, and the difference between this and that are less than the differences between that and the Roman alphabet, so my little brain’s already going to work on it. Unfortunately all the Slavic alphabets seem to have minor differences between them, so total mastery may never be complete, but still it’s nice to be able to read a menu, regardless of whether I can actually speak the language. People talk about the difficulties of Croatian, exclaiming, “At least they use Roman letters!” when in fact that’s the easiest part. I wish I could absorb a language acoustically as fast as I can its graphic symbols. That may be the one part of language that you actually can ‘pick up.’ Most things you can pick up from foreign tongues I wouldn’t take home to show Mom.

At least there’s a real bus station in Skopje. That’s refreshing. Tirana had nothing of the sort. ‘Muddy patch’ indeed! But our mignight bus is late and I’m freezing outside waiting for it. I mean FREEZING! I’ve been cold this whole trip, but this is ridiculous! Our bus finally shows up and we pile on quickly. Macedonia passes under our wheels, almost an entire country traversed in darkness. At least the border crossing to Bulgaria is civilized; they collect the passports then bring them back all stamped up and ready to go. Mladen had to go discuss something, but came back unperturbed. When the bus finally pulls into Sofia the sun is rising. Mladen and I say our goodbyes and I go for a cup of espresso. It costs less than the 3-in-1 Nescafe. It’s good, too. Things are looking up.