The first real drama of the trip unfolds

 Prizren, Kosovo, and what came next

Prizren was a little bit of a disappointment for me, personally. It is not the fault of the town; rather, it is that of my expectations. I thought I was going to get a museum experience that would give me further insight into the 1999 war between Albania and Serbia over the region. Prizren was the capital of the region for over a century. It is a much bigger town than Peja and in much better shape after the war than Peja. So I thought I was going to get a modern take on the conflict. No such museum exists. It makes sense, now. It would be too political. One side or the other would be against the implied message, no matter how delicately such a museum tried to present the facts. So in order not to create more tension, no museums about the conflict exist.

Prizren as viewed from the fortress.

We did go to an archaeological museum showing artifacts from the town dating back to the Stone Age, and continuing through the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Roman occupation, and the Ottoman occupation up to the start of the twentieth century when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. We also went to another museum that was dedicated to preserving the history of the revolution freeing the region from Ottoman rule in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. But there is nothing anywhere about late 20th century history.

Inside the archaeological museum, looking up through one the many domes.

The bell tower and the domes of the museum.

My favorite sculpture in the 19th century history museum.

We also checked out a few churches, including another Serbian landmark church dating to the 13th century. Again, we had to give up our passports in order to enter. Here, a Serbian tour guide gave us a very one-sided account of the Serbian claims on Kosovo. It was nice to hear the other side of the story. But a little scary too. The church had been mostly destroyed by fire, first by the Turks back in the 17th century, and then again by radical Albanians as recently as 2004. But UNESCO stepped in and helped to restore the ancient frescoes and the building as a whole. So now it stands in the middle of enemy territory guarded by police 24/7, and only half as glorious as it once was.

As per usual, we walked the town up and down. There are mosques on seemingly every street corner, surrounded by tourist shops and restaurants. Prices here are whacky. Some things cost next to nothing. Others are outrageously expensive. They tried to charge us four euros for each t-shirt or pair of socks at the laundromat. We decided to do our own laundry in the hotel sink. It is 95 degrees, so drying the laundry on the balcony is pretty quick. Too bad it is windy enough that we occasionally have to scour the block below for stray underwear that keeps blowing off the railings. 

One of the multitude of mosques in town.

The later it gets, the more crowded it gets. The square is absolutely packed with people at 11:00 and even 12:00 at night. Heavy beat rhythms are churning out of the speakers for a kids dance party on a stage by the river after midnight. And this happens on a Monday and Tuesday night here. We wonder what goes on on Saturday nights! Just as in Peja, the ladies are dressed up to the nines and every block is teeming with teens and twenty-somethings with somewhere to be. The happening late night scene is a sharp contrast to the litter strewn streets and dilapidated buildings. The town looks like very few people have any money to spare, but the people look like everyone is rolling in the dough.

Night falls on Prizren.

Just before sunset, we hiked quite a way up the mountain on the east side of town, to the ruined fortress, for excellent views of the city and the surrounding hills, and to see the sun go down over the distant mountains to the west. Then we clambered back down for a late dinner and some people watching. Prizren also grew on me over time, but it is still a bit too dirty and rundown for my tastes. Let’s move on to Macedonia, what do you say?

The fortress walls.

A tunnel built within the fortress walls.

Carol and the famous old bridge in downtown Prizren.

The many crazy electrical wires do not add to the charm of the city.

Having a beer near the old bridge.

The river walk.

Well, I don’t really care what you say, because we moved on in any case. But the problem is that we are not now in Macedonia as planned. We can honestly say that we did spend a fair amount of time in Macedonia, but we did not stay. “Why not?”, you ask. Well, I promised drama a few posts ago. It was simply a matter of time, but drama hit us hard in our collective head today. So buckle up, it is gonna be a bumpy ride.

First, this story works better if you happen to have access to Google Maps. And I know you do, because you are reading this on a device with internet access. So look up the route from the Monarch Boutique Hotel in Prizren, Kosovo to the “info point at Mavrovo National Park in North Macedonia”. If you have the route we took, it should say two hours and forty minutes or so. Add in a border crossing and let’s say three hours. The route we took is pretty direct. If you are routed towards Skopje, then you’ve got the wrong route. In hindsight, maybe you do have the correct route, but not the one we took. I ask you to follow along on the map with us, because it will help with understanding the issues we had. 

We left the hotel at 9:30 a.m. The idea was to spend time in the Mavrovo National Park and then drive to our next stopping point in Ohrid, a couple of hours farther south. So we walked the few blocks to where our beloved van, Luka, had been parked for the last forty hours or so. We loaded up, and we drove the crazy, tiny, traffic-packed streets of Prizren, until we got out of town completely by around 10:00 a.m. All was well. But not for long. Deep breaths…

(Switching to present tense to add drama to the narrative. Deal with it.)

The roads are pretty well paved. Nice work, Kosovo! We are heading into the mountains again, so switchbacks and tight curves are to be expected. But Michelle is handling them like a champ. We can do this. Three hours to go 100 km. Slow going to be sure (about 20mph on average, for the metric impaired) but we’ll get there. Stray dogs in the road, but they can dodge easily at this pace. Small towns come and go. One crazy town in particular, called Restelicë (go ahead and find it on the map, I’ll wait) has insanely narrow cobbled roads with ridiculous hairpin turns, and cows blocking the way as we climb higher and higher up the mountain. We avoid the parked cars making the roads seem even more narrow (remember, Luka is a very big boy) and the occasional chicken and the not so occasional cow, and make it to the top. Free sailing to the border. Let’s go!

The cows wander free on the roads in town.

One of many mountain towns in Kosovo.

The roads in Kosovo are great, so long as you aren't winding through a town.

By now it is 11:30. We are making great time. So long Kosovo! Now follow along with us on the windy road to a spot labeled Envorosko Bačilo. At this point we have reached the apex of our journey and are heading down, down, down toward the border crossing, which is plainly labeled by Google Maps. You can’t get any farther south in Kosovo than this border crossing. You will notice that there are five zigzag switchbacks on the way down the hill, but the border is after the third zig but before the third zag. So quite a bit up the mountain. There is flagpole with a Kosovan flag at the exact spot of the border. Also at this exact spot, the road stops being paved. This does not bode well.

Here is the border. Notice the lack of signs anywhere.

But we soldier on. We have been to many places where the roads are unpaved. That is just the way it is in much of Costa Rica, for example, and I drove those roads for months. We have come this far. It is about noon at this point, so that is two hours of the three. We knew it would be slow. Good old Google hasn’t changed its estimate. Luka is up to the task. It hasn’t rained in quite a while. Dirt roads be damned. We are in Macedonia now. We can drive like the Macedonians!

Macedonian roads lack pavement.

And are a bit more treacherous.

So we continue on. No border station yet, but that happens a lot. They don’t always put them right at the border. (Dear reader: please follow our path into the wild. Go past the Fairy’s Waterfall, which we never saw. Continue until you finally hit the spot marked “Border Police Strezimir”.) It took about a half an hour to get here on the rocky dirt road, but we made it! There are five metal 42-gallon oil barrels blocking the path. “Everyone give me your passports!” 

We finally reach the border station.

A man steps out of a dilapidated building and immediately starts yelling at us in one of the local languages to turn around. We cannot pass this way. We try to communicate, but his English is almost as bad as my Albanian. We are losing heart quickly. After a couple of minutes of this, he calls someone with better English skills, though still not good, to let us know that this is not a legal border crossing. If we continue on, we will be arrested and put in prison. We absolutely must go back to Kosovo. It even seems like he is telling us that one cannot cross from Kosovo to Macedonia, period. We are beyond distraught. No amount of begging, asking for mercy or asking for alternate solutions is helping. The guy on the phone tells us in no uncertain terms that this is our problem, not theirs. Then he hangs up on me. The guy standing there starts gesticulating wildly and we get the message. Turn the van around and go back from whence we came, or be prepared to lose our passports and our freedom. We get the message. Thankfully, we still have half a tank of gas, because the nearest gas station on the route is back in Krushevë, about an hour and a half away. More deep breaths.

(Here is where you begin to feel sorry for us, but you think to yourself, it could be worse. It is just lost time. But as you can probably tell by the size of this post, more is yet come.) We are all despondent. How could this have happened? We had no idea that what seemed like a legit border crossing could be nothing of the sort. Apparently the Google didn’t either. Back we trudged, at about 10 km/hr along the rocky road. After about twenty minutes of dead silence in the car, a Kosovo police car passes us going in the opposite direction. They stop, open their window, and ask us what the heck we are doing there. We tell them. They agree with the border guard. They drive on with very little conversation. So we do too. Well, until about five minutes later when a dashboard light goes off letting us know that a tire puncture has been detected and that we must stop the car immediately. Really?

Sure enough, the left front tire is completely flat. Fun times. We pull all of the luggage out of the back expecting to find the spare in a compartment beneath the “trunk”. Nothing. Okay. Don’t panic. It has to be here somewhere, right? Sure enough, the tire is firmly bolted to the bottom of the van. How do we get this thing out of here? There has got to be a wrench. Michelle and the girls each go for a walk in a different direction, to give themselves some space and to process. Carol and Mark and I desperately search the van for a lug wrench and a jack. I am crawling all around the van looking under all the seats, peeling back interior plastics panels, even unzipping the fabric from the seats. I spend some time trying to get the hood open, grasping for any idea. It is not in there. If there is a spare tire, there has got to be a way to get the tire changed, doesn’t there?

Ouch.

With passports, cash, and photos of the gimpy tire in hand, Mark and Carol start the long walk (we are guessing two or three miles) back to the non-border station to get help. (Did I mention that it was well over 90degrees?) After close to half an hour of scouring the van, I finally give up and plop down next to our luggage on the incredibly dusty road. Eventually Michelle joins me. We discuss our options, which are few. I am feeling guilty for not having done the appropriate amount of research to avoid the entire predicament. We all agreed to take this path, but I am the one who suggested it. I am the one who spent months researching our agenda, typing things into Google such as : Are Americans welcome in North Macedonia? Do you need a Visa to travel in North Macedonia? Can foreigners drive in North Macedonia? Do we need special insurance or other documentation to travel in North Macedonia? I did this for every country that we wanted to visit. I thought I was being thorough. I guess I neglected to ask if it is allowed to go into North Macedonia when coming from Kosovo. But I couldn’t look it up now, sitting in the dirt, waiting for a miracle, because none of us had even emergency level cell service, and hadn’t had it for a good two hours or so. 

It was about 1:00, maybe half an hour after they left, when Carol and Mark returned in a dinky car driven by an older gentleman who had picked them up on his way north. Where had he come from? Maybe the locals are allowed to use the border crossing? His was the first face we had seen, other than the three officials who had no sympathy for us, since we were on top of the mountain back in Kosovo. Was he to be our savior? As he pulled his car around ours, to park in the shade, his own tire pops. Now he too has a flat. Not a good sign. But he is cheerful despite the setback and pulls out a tiny pneumatic jack and a lug wrench in the shape of a plus sign with one of four different size sockets on each end. We find the correct size wrench and I am able to remove the tire from beneath the car after much effort. But we cannot loosen any of the five lug nuts on the wheel. We try hitting the wrench with a hammer. We try stepping on the wrench and kicking at with our heels. We even try loosening the nuts by pouring motor oil over them and greasing them up as best we can. The man doesn’t speak a word of English, but he is trying his hardest for us. It just is not happening.

Here is the spare tightly bolted underneath the van.

The old man and his jack. He sure did his best.

So we remove the jack from under our van and set about changing the tire under his car. This also is not remotely easy due to the fact that his jack does not fit under his car. But we eventually persevere after digging the hard packed rocky ground out from under the car with our bare hands, and with the hammer that was not designed for this type of work, to get the jack to fit. With much effort, his lug nuts do budge. When we finally succeed in changing his tire, he uses charades to explain to us that he will drive back into Kosovo and call for help for us. We thank him profusely and sit back down not much better off than before, watching him slowly drive off around the bend. He is gone, and he has taken his tools with him.

We are contemplating having to sleep in the van, rationing our snacks and our water. I am seriously considering getting myself arrested down at the station, simply to get figurative wheels in motion that may eventually help to get our literal wheels in motion, and at least get five of our group back to safety. It is now about 2:15. We are pinning all of our hopes on the old guy and his phone call to who knows whom, considering that the police don’t seem to want to help us. But with that thought, here comes another car moving north. It is the border patrol guy. He takes one look at our situation and says something about Kosovo, pointing behind himself, back the way from which he came (which if you ate paying attention, is not the direction of Kosovo) and drives off. Really? Was he the help that the friendly old guy had called for? We reach rock bottom. Michelle quotes Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” with “Could be worse, could be raining.” At this point I almost expect a thunderclap, followed by a deluge, just like in the movie. But truthfully, with the heat, the rain might have been welcome. 

Five minutes later, the same two Kosovan cops drive up. They stop. Somehow they avoid blowing a tire. We don’t know if they came because of the old guy’s phone call, or if they were just heading back to Kosovo anyway. But they stopped. And they helped. Their own lugwrench did not fit our lug nuts. Nor did they have a jack. But they had knowledge that we did not. One of them looked under the driver’s seat and magically procured a box that contained a jack and a wrench. We had had the tools all along. How did we not find them? I had looked under there. They were just hidden among the mechanism that slides the seat back and forth. Now I felt like an idiot, but at least a hopeful one.

To shorten what has been an awfully long story, we are able to change the tire with the proper tools. The police drive off and leave us to it after supplying some of their own elbow grease to the effort. But we get it done and begin the long journey back to the paved roads of Kosovo. We make it without another puncture, and continue on. We make it back to our favorite town of Restelicë around 4:00. There we hit a traffic jam. Stuck behind a vegetable delivery truck, that can’t make it past cars coming the other way on the narrow road, we wait. And we wait. Townspeople from all around are out walking the street trying to help direct traffic as the line of cars in both directions gets longer and longer. The cows aren’t as helpful. It is a complete shit show. We can’t believe that this doesn’t happen all of the time in this town. It would be funny if we weren’t so mentally spent, covered in dirt and motor oil, hungry as hell and worried that the gas stations might close at 5:00 as Google warns us they will. We need air in the spare. We need gas. We need a break.

Crossing back onto the paved roads of Kosovo!

Stuck behind the veggie truck.

The cows do not care if they are blocking traffic in town.

This guy out on the open road makes a lot more sense to me.

It takes something like twenty minutes, but we finally do get moving again and we get to a gas station at about 4:45. Luckily, I have fifty euros in cash as they don’t take credit cards. We drive on to the next town and try three banks before Mark finally is able to find an ATM willing to dispense money. We eat dinner at the closest restaurant and clean up as best as we can. Then we continue north, coming within about fifteen minutes of our starting point this morning in Prizren, before turning west and crossing into Albania instead. This crossing is pretty easy. They need a lot of paperwork for the car, but we have it all. We start driving away from the customs officer in his little booth, when Quincy asks if we have all of the passports. I count. I recount. Stop the car! This is a ten lane superhighway to make room for all the border gates. Michelle is not deterred. She hits the brakes in the middle of the highway about fifty feet from the agent’s booth. She walks back and collects the sixth passport from the agent who has nothing more to say than “scuzi”. Cars are zipping by, dodging our van. Michelle has the passport. Thank God we checked. 

(Okay drama mostly over, I am going back to past tense.)

I am writing all of this down, the morning after, in our hastily booked hotel in Kukës, Albania, just minutes beyond the border. Last night we got into the hotel around 8:00, ten and half hours after we left the last hotel, and only about what should be a 45 minute trip away from that spot. We texted the hotel in Ohrid. We wouldn’t be showing up.  No, not tomorrow either. Macedonia is dead to us. We will enjoy an extra day in Albania. We drank a beer. We played a game. Poor Carol had to work after all of that. But a new day has dawned. We did not have to sleep in the car on a dusty untraveled road in Macedonia. We are safe. All is well. Though we do need to figure out what to do with the blown tire and how to either get it patched or replaced. But not until after breakfast. Hopefully, we can move on after that and leave all of this drama behind us.

Back in civilization with a plate of melon that the hotel owner gifted us.