Escape from the City...

We decided to take the adventurous route from Ohrid to Greece, which routed us to Bitola on the Macedonian side of the border where we hopped in a cab that drove us across the border and into Greece. Our cab driver, however, was being very difficult and tried incessantly to convince us that it would be such an uncomfortable 6 hour ride from Aminteo to Thessaloniki on the "bad train roads" that he should drive us there for only 65 euro - seriously?! We weren't so keen on that idea, so we demanded that he leave us to take the train where we got on the mini train for inter-city transport (very posh, though) and were in Thessaloniki in 3 hours, for 7 euro. HAH

Thessaloniki is a really big city - a port town lined by a long seaside row of swanky cafes. We even found an english bookstore, which we were in dire need of, as Sarah reads so fast and between the two of us, we've finished all the books we have and are now carrying around 3 each just waiting to find a book exchange. Dinner was very tasty at a local taverna, but not so tasty at 1:30 in the morning...note to self, don't eat stuffed peppers that have been sitting behind the cafeteria counter all day...ugh!

The next morning we got up early and pranced back to the train station to catch the 11:38 train to Athens. But when we got there, we found that all the trains for the whole day were full. Unlike Italy, where they'll sell you a ticket anyway, we were stuck. Not really rellishing the idea of a 7 hour bus ride, we decided that we had to suck it up and take the bus rather than hang out for another day, so hot and sweaty we made our way to the next station. Luckily there was a bus leaving in just an hour, so we enjoyed some cocas and realized just before getting on that we should eat lunch...unfortuntately we weren't allowed to bring they gyros on the bus, so after only a few bites, we had to toss them out and board the bus with empty tummies.

The upside of Greece being yet an hour ahead (now 7 hrs ahead of the east coast) is that the sun goes down around 9pm, so when we got off the bus at 8:15 in Athens, it was only early sunset and we made it to the hostel with no problems. After a quick splash on the face and a change of clothes, we ventured out to explore the busy neighborhood of Psiri, but not before a bite to eat at Goody - quite the diverse menu fast food joint.

On Saturday, we took our time trying to see things while staving off heat exhaustion (mind you, 33 C is pretttttty hot) and visited the National museum, the flea market and held off on the Accropolis until as late as possible to avoid the high noon sun. But what a view!

We decided, that since we're already in the area, we might as well swing by Kosovo, because, Hey, when are we ever going to do that again??

We managed to pass an entire day in Podgorica waiting for the bus, and I will say this much - thank you America for providing toilets at all transportation hubs, because the "piss holes" provided in many of these eastern countries are not so pleasant (read: literally, just a hole in the ground, and often not too clean). We hopped on an overnight bus to Prishtina, Kosovo and were only briefly stopped by UN Border patrol who had us deboard the bus and bring out our lugggage so they could rifle through it (though they never seem to want to search through our backpacks at any of the checkpoints we've been through) and yet they did not stamp our passports!!! (we were very disappointed)

Arriving in Kosovo at 4 am - wow. We met the only other passenger who was a bit out of place, and spent the next 4 hours drinking tea at the cafe until it was a reasonable hour to call the hotel we had found in the guide book. It's not all that kind to show up to a guesthouse with no reservation at 4 am...

We found a room and took a long nap before hitting the town, so to speak. Prishtina is the capital city, and also the headquarters for all of the international organizations - seemingly every other car to pass by was a white Toyota 4Runner with UN painted on the side, or some other accronym for some other org... As it was Sunday, there wasn't really all that much to see or do, but we grabbed a sandwich at a cafe and were surprised to hear so much english being spoken. Just like the white cars, nearly every other person you pass seems to be there for some governmental purpose or other. And fittingly, we spent a good deal of the evening chatting with some Brits at the expat pub.

After Prishtina, we jumped a bus to Skopje, Macedonia - only a few hours away. It was our first experience with the cyrillic alphabet, and surprisingly we didn't have all that much difficulty deciphering street names and such. It was also our first encounter with really good Greek salad: thank God for good feta cheese! Skopje is a rather modern city, and our highlight was tracking down this restaurant celebrating Tito of the former Yugoslavia (picture a cardboard cutout) and former comunist paraphernalia.

In order to escape the super heat, we headed to Lake Ohrid which shares a shore with Albania. The weather was so much better here, and we stayed in a comfy guesthouse in this comfy town, walking everywhere for a day and a half. It was really relaxing to just hang out, eating greek salad (which we will not tire of) and sipping cocas (coca light... soo good!)

Montenegro is BEAUTIFUL! The mountains are looming and majestic at the same time, most covered with lush green encroaching on the sea: clear blue tranquil water. There are not very many tourists here, and in just a few days, we've managed (somewhat accidentally) to see much of the coast and now the capital city.

We took a bus from Dubrovnik to Kotor, circling aorund the bay of Kotor which looks more like a gigantic lake because the water is so peaceful and the shore is more of a gentle docking space than a beach. Our bus was stopped for an hour while they blew off a part of the cliff where they wanted to widen the road. We piled out of the bus and waited on the shore, the bus driver jovially faked pushing Sarah into the water!

We stayed in Kotor, an old walled city whose wall climbs up the cliff behind the town in an almost silly fortress, but we found the town really rocking on a Friday night. We stayed in this single lady's home who insisted on making us chai (tea) nearly every time we saw her, and when Sarah coughed she brought out a trove of vitamins. Needless to say, she spoke no English, and we no Serbian. The only real problem was that she didn't have any sinks that worked, nor a bathtub...so we haven't showered in 3 days...

We spend a day in Budva on the beach - also a fortress city but it is now very much a tourist town hosting a folk music festival starting this weekend. The beach was really refreshing though and we took advantage of at least some water to rinse off in.

On the bus back from Budva...oops...we went in the wrong direction and ended up 2 1/2 hours waiting to get back to Kotor. There was a wild lightning storm over the sea which was torrentially downpouring, which caused an accident, which caused us to wait again in the bus for about an hour (a budding trend...)

This morning we left bright and early to head to Podgroica, the capital city up in the mountains, to catch another bus. But upon arriving we found our next bus doesn't leave until 9pm tonight, so here we are passing another day in Montenegro. The people of this country - though we've had a bit of trouble communicating- are so warm and jolly, and the coast is amazingly beautiful!

We encountered only a small snafu on our trek from Italy to Croatia: we got on the wrong bus (3 times) between the Ancona train station and the ferry terminal (stazione marittima as we learned after a few failed attempts at direction). The ominously black sky opened up on us as we disembarked the second wrong bus....and the torrent was pretty bad. We were soaked through to the bone, and still had to find our way to the ferry. A kind Italian man who spoke not a word of english - which nicely complemented our lack of Italian - asked us why we were standing at that particualr bus stop, it was nowhere near the terminal. Then he helped us find the right bus and we managed to forge our way through the downpour to the terminal (Sarah had to go barefoot because flipflops and rain don´t really work).

The ferry was way more ghetto than our first experience in Tunis, but it got us to Split, Croatia the next morning, a little worse for the wear and very tired, where we promptly sought our hostel and had quite the surprise upon being led up a staircase to a very drunk woman´s private guesthouse (note: this is 7:30 am) before we realized that we were on the wrong side of the courtyard. The hostel was next door! We took a nice nap before we hit the town.

Split is a lovely town paved in white marble (which I quickly learned is the case for much of Croatia´s old towns) which can be quite blinding in the sunlight. The town was built within the walls of the former seaside palace of the Roman Emperor Diocletian in the Middle Ages. Way cool.

The next morning we took a hydrofoil to Hvar Island where Sarah & I met up with 3 girls from San Luis Obispo that we went to Jr High & High School with...we arrived early and ran into them in the town square just as they were renting a little motorized skiff to tootle around the islands. We spent the afternoon attempting to navigate via the postcard of the harbor that the boat guy had given us. Thank God Sarah knew how to deal with a boat, or else we would have crashed into some of the swanky yachts docked in the classy resort town harbor. Our only incidents here were that we dropped the little anchor a little too far off the coast of the island we hoped to sunbathe on, and found it stuck under a rock.....The next 30 minutes passed with numerous attepmts swimming down to try and release it, but found it was far deeper down than we had thought. After all rubbing our patron saint of travels: Sarah´s Nefertti pin, Michelle dove from the boat down at least 30 meters and released the anchor!!! Glorious day! Topped it off with an evening a cappella concert of Croat men singing in the Franciscan Monastery.

We found Hvar a really nice town - really really swanky with lots of civil servants vaccuuming the streets for trash which was depositied in trash cans that lowered beneath the sidewalk...woah. But this was also early in the season and we saw everyone fixing up their beach bars etc. for the crowds to roll in in the next few weeks. We found a nice quiet beach with empty reclining chairs and took a dip or two in the ocean. The construction is crazy, and we were both glad to have seen Hvar before it became the craze of the Adriatic and completely unaffordable/devoid of local flavor. We also had a run-in with a Borat impersonator...AWESOME!

An early morning ferry took us to Dubrovnik (it ended up being an 8 hour ferry - OI VEH!) where we have been for the past 2 nights. It is an amazing town with an unbelievable history as a powerful merchant town rivaling Venice in the middle ages (then known as Ragusa). Unfortunately, in 1991-2 the Stari Grad (old town - which is so beautifully situated on the water with an entire city wall intact which we walked around at sunset...breathtaking!) was bombed to shreds when the Serbian-Montenegro remains of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) attacked the city. Now it has mostly been repaired and returned as the tourism capital of Croatia, teeming with cruise-shippers, although we did find a nice local swimming hole on a rather tranquil bit of ocean cove where all the locals sit drinking beer and playing cards in their speedos between dips in the salty ocean.

Today we are off to Montenegro - the world´s newest country - which is just down the coast. Pretty sweet!

Our tour of Sicily took us to Catania and Taormina on the Eastern side of the island, before heading up to Sorrento (Pompei & Herculaneum) and then Rome.

Catania was an accident, as our train didn't continue to Taormina as we had thought (found this out on the train, of course) but we ended up in a great hostel and saw a tour of the city via a taxi from the train station.

Taormina is an incredibly adorable town on the top of a hill - winding streets, a myriad of gelato shops, pricey shopping and a Greek ampitheatre. It was a beautiful place, but our "hostel" was so far out of the way down and up winding streets, we were happy to be there only one night. The beach Isola Bella is down the hill, accessible via sky gondola, and was the first time since Tunisia that we could relax on the pebbly beach.

An overnight train (where we scored sleeper beds even when we only paid for seats!!) took us to Napoli, where we promptly got on another train for Sorrento. Don't really want to spend much time in Naples, please forgive me. We spent the rest of the day wandering around the preserved cities of Herculaneum and Pompei. The former is much smaller and less known, but they actually allow you to walk right into the homes and businesses, see the frescoes up close, and wander the streets rather leisurely. We did a little eavesdropping with a Senior tour or two (when between Sarah's little German and my French we understood a bit...)

Now we are in Rome, and leaving today for Croatia. We've certainly managed to meet some fellow backpackers and in fact spent a few days heading in the same direction.

Rome is so busy, but so beautiful! After the ruins we saw in Tunisia and Sicily, I'm really glad to see the true opulence of the heart of the empire. And also checked another country off the list - passed into the walls of the Vatican, even if only for a few snapshots. We're going to have to chow on some more gelato and pizza before we leave...not sure what kind of delights the Balkans will offer for vegetarians...