Around the Balkans

1. Around the Balkans Macedonia, Kosovo, Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia

2. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans We are off to Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and back through Italy. On the way to Belgrade we will make a very small detour to Hungary to see an old friend in Budapest after traversing Germany and Austria. Maybe we will try to do a trip report after each country. Nous partons pour la Serbie, Macédoine, Kosovo, Grèce, Albanie, Monténégro, Bosnie-Herzégovine, Croatie, Slovénie et de retour par l'Italie. En chemin vers Belgrade, nous ferons un petit détour par la Hongrie pour voir un vieil ami à Budapest après la traversée de l'Allemagne et de l'Autriche. Peut-être allons nous essayer de faire un rapport après chaque pays.

3. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans The saga begins as we left Boullay-les-Troux on Thursday morning.We crossed the Rhine where there was no bridge and spent our first night in Ulm on the Danube.

4. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Ulm is known for the church (Munster) with the tallest steeple in the world

5. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans and as the birthplace of Einstein. [For a highly recommended layman explanation of the prospects for combining relativity and quantum theory in 10 dimensional space+time, see Lisa Randall's Warped passages] and find out the real expectations from the CERN Large Hadron collider].

6. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans In Ulm we stayed in the fishermen's quarter.

7. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Then on  Day 2 we entered Austria and had lunch on Attersee lake in the rain,

8. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans then drove along the Danube

9. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans to reach Melk in the rain with its enormous Baroque Benedictine Monastery.

10. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Day 3 & 4 was spent in Budapest area, again on the Danube.

11. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Our friend took us to Memento Park serving as an archive for no-longer-needed statues. Part of a continuing exercise in history re-writing.

12. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans The next day, on Sunday, our friends took us to the Lazar Equestrian Park where famous Hungarian horses make a wonderful show.

13. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans The place is near the Gödöllõ Royal Palace where Queen Elizabeth aka Sissi (wife of Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz-Joseph I) resided. Tomorrow we make our way to the Balkans...

14. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans From Hungary, we arrived in Belgrade under horrible rain and found a hotel in Stari Grad (old town), next to the impressive fortress on the Danube. But the next day was lovely. We walked a lot and paused at many of the cafes.

15. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans

16. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans It turns out that all the big museums were closed for Restoration. But we did find one on Nikola Tesla. He was a famous physicist who made important discoveries in electromagnetism at the turn of the 19th century (invented the electric motor, radio, x-rays, ...). He has a unit named after him (ie: a fridge magnet is about 1 milliTesla and the CERN Large Hadron collider has 9300 magnets each of 8 Tesla). The other Serb Physicist I know of is Milankovich. In the early 1910's he calculated the natural climate changes (ice ages) from the earth's motion around the sun. We now live in an age where natural factors account for only 30-60% of the global warming.

17. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans When we left Belgrade, we decided to make a long detour along the Danube through the Djerdap National Park to see the Iron Gate gorges where the Danube narrows to150m.  (last picture of the Danube, it went West, we went South). We had to skip Nis on the road to Skopje as the rain pour was awful and we were late. Nis is known for its strategic position controlling the passage to the south and for the tower of skulls (952 Serb skulls who rebelled against the Ottomans) - not destroyed during the Nato bombing.

18. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Skpoje in FYROM (ie: Macedonia to the non-Greeks) was just a boring city with recent buildings, although the central place is quite spectacular with its gigantic Alexander on a horse.

19. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans It was only the following day we discovered the Souk area across the Stone Bridge on the river (site of Albanian/Macedonian conflicts). 

20. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans In the meantime we had planned to take a bus to Pristina in Kosovo. 2 hour journey through pretty hills. The town, although a Unesco Heritage site, was not all that interesting. Most photogenic is the library:

21. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans The next day we arrived at Ohrid (the second largest town in Macedonia) located on a big and deep lake. This in Roman times was on the Via Egnatia to Byzantium. It is were Clement disciple of Cyrill and Method developed their Cyrillic  alphabet when it was a Patriarchate. Then demoted to Archbishopric in 1014 until Ottomans abolished it in 1767. It is therefore a place of very many churches. And more importantly, many quaint quiet cobbled streets in the old town.

22. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Long walk along the footpath under heavy load!

23. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Long walk along the footpath under heavy load!

24. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans As we left Ohrid and Macedonia, we headed straight to Corfu/Kerkyra, not forgetting to get a couple of wine bottles of the superb Macedonian grape varieties (Vranec and Kratosija). and some local Raki. It was motorway all the way in Greece to Igounimetsa (which I could not tell beforehand from the documentation). So we avoided one night in Ioamenina and caught the 14:30 ferry to Corfu. It is a 2 hour crossing. But the ticket lady said there would be a problem for the return as there was the annual 1 May strike for 4 hours in the morning. I chided her that 4 hours was insufficient considering the Greek crisis. On Corfu island we headed for the west coast (Paleokastritsa) looking for a place to stay 3 nights (2+1 we had gained). Unfortunately, the ambiance was not conducive for us: Mostly tourist type bars, restaurants and sleeping rooms. But the coastline itself is absolutely gorgeous. We went back to the main city Corfu to look for a hotel which we found in the old town overlooking the port. We wondered around and found a lovely local restaurant with locals and nice traditional music. Since we had seen most of the highlights of Corfu, we had to see if we could leave the next day (Sunday) considering the unknown problems of crossing into Albania at a tiny unmarked border crossing, which could be closed either because of Sunday or because of 1 May. It turns out the whole trip to Saranda on the Albanian coast was extremely simple but for a few kilometers of new unpaved road. Saranda is much bigger than we thought. Large hotels and apartments are being built everywhere! We managed to find one of the old ones on the Promenade. Remember when you could park anywhere and did not have to wear seat-belts or helmets? Remember when food and drink were cheap, when roads were empty and the country side pristine clean and you could smoke in restaurants? (and no GPS!) And everyone smiles and is welcoming. Well this is Albania!. [Although for how long? - The Troika is around the corner!!].

25. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans We stayed for 3 nights and went to visit GjiroKastra about 50km away through mountains with its old town (typical gray roofs) and citadel.

26. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans And also in that area we went to see the ruins of Antigonea where Pyrrus had built an enormous capital.

27. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans The next day we went to visit Butrint (10km) an important Greek and then Roman city. The setting of Racine's Andromaque.

28. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Other typical Albania sights are the little bunkers everywhere. Very hard to demolish...

29. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans The southern coast is very rugged but from time to time there are superb empty beaches.From Saranda we stopped at Appolonia on the way to Berat. Appolonia is an very large archaeological site but very little has been excavated. It is where future emperor Augustus went to study. Berat is another historic town with very specific architecture and a huge fort and city walls within which people are still living.

30. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans One big problem on the secondary roads and at entrances to towns is the enormous amount of serious potholes and slow vehicules.

31. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans We get to the capital weaving in and out of massive construction sites for new motorways. Tirana is a vibrant city with many tree lined streets and cafes all along the pavements. These cafes all have super confortable sofas or chairs with cushions.

32. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Today we are off to the North Albanian town of Shkodra for lunch and then on to Montenegro. A few definitions Balkans: (Geographical) Peninsula from southern Greece up to Danube/Save, (Cultural) Peloponnese to Moldavia. Peoples: Initially Illyrians/Albanians, Hellens/Greeks Then from 6th century: Slavs (Serb,  Croat & Slovene tribes from beyond Carpates & Caucase), 8th century: Bulgars - other tribe from north, then slavized. From 14th century: Turks from Anatolia with Ottoman colonization. Bosnians: Slavs islamized around 18th century. Macedonians: Mixture (as well known from french cooking)

33. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Christian Roman/Orthodox divide is line from Danube down through Bosnia (decided in 395).Ottoman/Muslim mainly south of Danube. Most places have both orthodox churches and mosques. Christian churches were permitted autonomy under Ottoman tolerance for 4 centuries. In general there were no forced conversions, but conversions happened because people had more rights if Muslim. Berat

34. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Montenegro. Ancient name Zeta. But Venetians who controlled the Dalmatian coast were impressed by the mountains dropping down spectacularly to the coast, called the area Monte Negro. This is the second country (Kosovo is the other) we visited that simply opted to use the Euro and not create their own currency - Wish them luck!!

35. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Arriving from Albania on the south coast to the beach town of Ulcinj mostly peopled by Albanians (and proud of waving the Albanian flag). Very little Cyrillic and many Mosques (one in construction about 78cm from the disco bar where we stayed the night). Overall Montenegro is 74% Orthodox (Serb & Montenegrins) and 18% Muslim (Bosniaks and Albanians). This is picture of Mosque from out bedroom. Linda talked one of the workers out of one of the wooden ornaments as a souvenir.

36. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans The rest of the coast is full of resort towns (Bar to Budva), and one where a whole island was bought for that purpose.

37. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Fortunately there is Stari (=old) Grad(=town) of Bar in the hills with its old fort.

38. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Then we climb into the mountains to the ancient royal capital of Cetinje. A very pleasant big village now, but with historic 19th century buildings.

39. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Then the spectacular descent through the Lovcen National Park with its 50 hairpin turns wide enough for one car and the breathtaking view of the Bay of Kotor (Bouches de Kotor is better) and its "Fjords".

40. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Since this is an expensive area, we had to chose a hotel 4km from the fabulous starigrad of Kotor.The hotel had funny beds by the pool.

41. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans The road around the Kotor Bay has many villages with Italian Renaissance style houses and more so in the walled city of Kotor.

42. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Now we wanted to explore the Hinterland. And up and up we went to 1500m (10C) and rain to Zabljak the entrance to the Durmatur National Park with deep gorges (nearly as deep as Grand Canyon). Now we are on our way to Sarajevo.

43. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans As we left Montenegro to Bosnia-Herzegovina, we drove through some wonderful scenery.

44. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans We entered a part of Bosnia-Herzegovina that calls itself Republic Serbska. No mention of B-H, testimony to the continuing nationalist sentiments. We then arrived in Sarajevo. A very multi-national city full of drinkeries and eateries in the old town.

45. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Famous giant chess in a park.

46. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans And still some remnants of the war 20 years ago.

47. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans After a night in Sarajevo, we went off to Mostar and its reconstructed bridge.

48. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Here is Australian Andy jumping off the bridge!

49. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Lunch in Mostar (local specialty is Cevapi).

50. À travers les Balkans / Around the Balkans Here is Australian Andy jumping off the bridge!