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Published: October 8th 2010
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After visiting the much talked about, yet slightly disappointing lake Orchid in Macedonia, all 4 of us hitchhiked to the massive Tikves winary in the South. for €5 we got a personal tour of the factory, 5 bottles of fine wine and a few shots of lethal 60% local rakkai. Hitchhiking back drunk in the evening was quite a funny experience. I’m not quite sure how I made it back to our hostel, but on our rides I kept on rambling on about how much I love the rakkai here, and somehow 2 different people gave me a 1.5litre bottle of homemade 60-80% brew.
most people say threes nothing to do in the capital Skopje, but I found it one of the best cities I’ve been too - a modern part with cafes and random sculptures everywhere, an old Turkish quarter with quirky shops and live music at every bar, and an enormous bazaar where they sell everything from homemade honey to shower heads.
from here me and David from Canada continued to Prishtina in Kosovo, the world’s newest country (we got quite a few looks from customs who didn’t seem used to seeing tourists here). it was quite
eerie seeing the hundreds of photos of people who died in the war here not too long ago. still this country is patrolled by thousands of peacekeepers who come from all over the world.
we stumbled upon a big film festival here, and for €3 we walked up the red carpet to see a film premiere attended by all the actors and a prince (we felt really out of place in our dirty clothes and trainers).
we took a day trip to Prizen where we saw a whole Serbian village which had been destroyed and just left. here the few remaining historical sites were guarded by troops to protect against vandals.
my intention was to hitchhike the 2700km from Kosovo back to London...however, this failed miserably. on our first day we ended up walking for miles along highways and sticking our thumbs out for hours to get small lifts. we had one really nice guy who, after buying us lunch took us 30km out of his way, but later on in the day we found ourselves in the middle of nowhere on the highway in the soaring heat with no water and no cars. we eventually made it
back to Macedonia and just got a night bus to Belgrade. it was funny crossing the border, as Serbia hate Kosovo and don’t recognise it as a country, we had to enter via Macedonia and they stamped over the Kosovo stamps in my passport.
From Belgrade I tried to hitchhike again to London whilst David tried to hitchhike to Berlin. after 4 hours of waiting and again being stranded on the highway, and a mentalist driver who made me steer the car from the passenger seat for a few miniutes, I finally got told off by a policeman who took sympathy and pulled over a bus to take me back to Belgrade. that night I met up with David, who had also completely failed to hitchhike out of this place.
feeling quite deflated I ended up getting a train to Budapest and buying a flight to Paris to meet a friend....only I got too drunk the night before and missed my flight. I got another flight home feeling a little bit stupid.
all in all this has been an amazing experiance, and i have met some incredible people. as expected my travel bug hasnt gone, and i
am already planning my next trip!
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