Bay of Bones Museum, Ohrid

Our next outing to North Macedonia was by car rather than bike so the border took us a fair bit longer this time. But not as long as the American motorcyclist who pulled up beside us – minus his registration plate! ‘lt fell off somewhere in Montenegro’, he explained to the irate customs officer. That I could well believe. On Montenegrin roads, I can imagine all kinds of bits and pieces get rattled off. Sure, Her Ladyship got well rattled in Montenegro and lost her nerve.

Anyway, the funny thing was, the biker had obviously managed to get into Albania without his registration plate. The North Macedonian customs officials, however, weren’t having any of it. For all I know, the poor chap is still there arguing his case…

I didn’t like the idea of visiting the Bay of Bones, it sounded very macabre to me. It turns out though that this is simply the name given to a prehistoric settlement on Lake Ohrid. And I mean on the lake. Late Bronze Age peoples apparently built platforms on a base of thousands of wooden piles in the water, on which they then built individual and communal huts. Sounds like a pile of work to me!

As we wandered through the reconstructed wooden huts, I was surprised at how comfortable-looking they were. Not bad for a 3,000-year-old interior design. All those cosy furs were a nice touch too. I was just enjoying snuggling into one particularly furry skin when I realised that the head was still attached. Yikes! Perhaps this is not my style after all!

The Oldies had a right old snigger at my expense, but at least I didn’t jump as high as Her Ladyship did when she spotted a viper swimming in the water around the wooden piles. And she’d called me a coward!

I’d never heard of underwater archaeology before, but I got a chance to observe it first-hand in the Bay of Bones. During our visit, a group of Swiss archaeologists were taking large plugs of mud from the bed of the lake for analysis. How on earth they manage to piece together a picture of an ancient civilisation from these mud plugs containing bones which were fashioned into tools, shards of vessels and other fragments is beyond me. They were basically assembling a giant multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with most of the pieces missing. Incredible!

I liked the pretty lakeside town of Ohrid very much. I won’t call it the Pearl of Lake Ohrid, I’m sure someone else has beaten me to it, but it is a gem all the same. The location is idyllic of course, on the north eastern tip of the lake, and it is obviously a popular spot with the tourists so there’s no shortage of attractive shops, cafés and restaurants. I was more taken with the typical Ohrid houses, though. They are quite lovely, and with each of the upper stories protruding progressively more, they remind me of overhanging cliffs. These are houses I could happily call home!

I have rarely seen so many churches in one town as I did in Ohrid, but I was still surprised to hear that there were supposedly 365 at one time, one for each day of the year. There’s nothing like that number now, but there’s certainly no shortage of them either. In fact, there appears to be almost as many churches as shops selling Ohrid pearls. Believe me, that’s a lot!

It was a bit of a hike up the hill in the heat, past the ancient Hellenistic amphitheatre to Samuel’s Fortress. If standing beside the Ohrid houses was like being at the base of a cliff, standing on the battlements of this huge fortress was like being on top of one. The views across the lake and of the mountains beyond are magnificent. Yet once again, I was amazed that I could feel quite so at home in a land-locked country.

Later, as we made our way back down the hill through the labyrinth of ancient houses, we came across this home-made pasta laid out in a back garden to dry. It’s nice to see old traditions being carried on. The Oldies wouldn’t let me have a nibble, the meanies. Yes, some things never change!

Looking back on the past week or so, I realised that we’ve crossed the border into North Macedonia several times now. Every time we return to Albania, the contrast with its neighbour becomes even more apparent. Albania is a fascinating country with a horrific history. It is partly a most inhospitable environment, yet it has the most hospitable people I’ve ever met. It is a country of huge extremes and I’ve been finding it harder to take every time we go back after an outing in a more ‘normal’ country.

I have been fascinated but shocked by it, amazed but overwhelmed by it. I have fallen in love with it on so many levels, but at the same time I’m not sure how much longer I want to be here.

It appears that the Oldies and I are on the same wavelength for once. I was just starting to wonder why we don’t just stay over in North Macedonia, when they announced they’d decided to cut short their stay here and move on to Skopje.

So it’s goodbye to Albania. For now. It is definitely time to leave, but I am also quite certain that we’ll be back.