Globestroller

I spent February and March on a mega roadtrip, driving the entire way around Australia. I had grand plans to maintain a daily travel blog recounting all my wondrous adventures on the way. A large number of factors conspired against that (the main one being a not-really-very-surprising-in-hindsight lack of electricity to power my laptop in the National Parks where I did much of my sleeping). I kept copious notes, however, and so the plan mutated into one where I could write it all up when I was finished and blog it with hindsight.

That plan too fell by the wayside, mainly due to the overwhelming tiredness that seems to follow a “20,000km in 7 weeks” drive.

And so, with great sadness, I have finally accepted that I am unlikely to ever share in this forum the many delights of that trip. At some stage I might reawaken to the task with great enthusiasm, but for now I have resigned myself to merely extol the virtues of the most underappreciated Australian attraction. I did, of course, see many of the classic landmarks: Sydney Harbour, the Twelve Apostles, the Nullarbor, Cable Beach at sunset, Uluṟu, etc., but for the most part they were all rather underwhelming[1]. One sight, however, outclassed almost everything else. It was mentioned in none of my guidebooks. No Tourist Information Centre carried any leaflets singing its praises. None of the fellow travellers I met along the way recommended it as a “must see”. But, that it is.

Even getting there was an adventure. My quest was unexpectedly delayed by a day due to the entire town of Katherine losing power for three hours, preventing me from refuelling the van and necessitating another night’s stay before being able to set off on the hunt. After a 300km drive north, I knew I was close; but it appears on no signposts, and I had to drive right around the town twice before discovering it, seemingly abandoned, beside a filling station on a road out of town.

It has no information board, nor even a simple plaque to explaining its history. So I cannot share the “why”, or even the “how”. But I can, with complete sincerity, eulogise the finest of Australia’s “Big Things” – The Boxing Croc of Humpty Doo:

[1] Other than Uluṟu. It was all I could have expected and more besides.

The Britz office was chaotic. I don’t know if they were short-staffed, or there were more customers than normal, or if they’re just always this shambolic, but they made the whole business of renting out vans seem exceptionally complex. The general approach seemed to be that one member of staff (a different one each time) would suddenly notice me with a start and an “Oh, are you still here?” look, work out what I hadn’t done yet, get me to take the next step, and then tell me to “Now, just wait there for a minute”. They also seemed to pick customers at random: people who came in half an hour after me were on their way well before I was, and one hapless soul who arrived just before me was still wandering around hoping for someone to notice him as I was departing. Even without re-engineering their entire process they could make things ten times better just by telling you at each point what’s going to happen next: “If you wait for a few minutes, Gary will check your driving license and then give you a tour of your vehicle”.

To top it off, the directions they gave me for how to get out onto the highway were rather useless. They presumably give these same directions hundreds of times a week, so by now you’d think that they would be able to warn people that the road is not actually straight, but bends to the right, and if you make the mistake of going straight ahead at that point, you’ll end up driving into a series of dead-ends around the Qantas base. I expect this is just a classic case of assumed knowledge. There are signposts at the junction so it’s obvious which way you should go. Of course, I suspect I’m not unusual in not knowing what any of the districts of Sydney are called or which signs I should follow to get me out towards Highway 1.

Eventually I manage to make sense of my various maps and find my way out onto the Princes Highway and follow the signs south towards Woolongong. Very quickly I am warned about the dangers of Equine Flu and how, should I be transporting horses, I absolutely must not leave the purple zone (whatever that may be).

Even though I’m starting from the south of the city, Sydney sprawls out for much further than expected. The first 20km or so are all quite run-down semi-industrial outskirts, eventually turning into quite pleasant suburban areas with treelined avenues. It’s about 35km out before the city really fizzles out into open fields of trees, pylons, and telegraph poles. Shortly thereafter I’m a little confused by a sign that informs me I’ve reached the end of the 1 and am now joining the 1. With some reflection I realise that this is something like the journey from Belfast to Dublin that used to involve an A1 / M1 (northern) / N1 / M1 (southern) combination, although here the 1s are differentiated merely by differently shaped shields around them, rather than helpful prefixes. The new stretch doesn’t seem to quite be ‘motorway’ equivalent, as cyclists are still allowed, but the speed limit has risen 100km/h to 110km/h, which is quite a pleasant surprise after New Zealand where I don’t think any roads ever go above 100.

After a brief stop for lunch in Woolongong, I’m back on the road, marvelling at how many quite abstract road warning signs there are: i.e. signs that aren’t warning about anything imminent, but just warning me to take a break every two hours (“Stop – Revive – Survive”), or telling me, should I be a motorcyclist, how to handle bends in the road (“Plan your corners! Start wide – finish tight”) – with helpful diagrams, of course. Maybe I’ve just blotted them out, or familiarity dulled me to their presence, but I don’t remember the UK, the world leader in warning signage, having anywhere near as many signs as this. No doubt they will soon…

An hour later, but a hundred years earlier, comes Berry: “Where it all begins”. I was expecting it be a couple more days before I stumbled across a small town quite like this. I stop off in a small park, named after the pony that was high-jump champion of Australia between 1938 and 1955! Were I making my way much slower, then this would be a great place to stay the night. There’s plenty of shade, well kept toilets, and clean gas-powered barbecues. And indeed, even by early afternoon it looks like there’s quite a few vans already parked up for the night. But I want to be doing at least 2-3 times this distance each day, so after a quick visit back into the town for some supplies, I head off again, hoping that I’ll find somewhere else so pleasant further down the road.

Although my van is equipped with a CD player, I didn’t actually bring any CDs with me, so I’m hoping to get good radio signals for most of this part of the trip at least. The most consistent signal seems to be ABC News, so I spend much of the afternoon listening to the political wranglings over the upcoming apology to the Stolen Generations, and the new rules for junior football (of the soccer variety), where to make the game fairer to all players goalkeepers have been scrapped, and no-one is now allowed to score more than three goals per game!

Part of my plan is also to navigate my way by tourist maps. I have one full country map that shows major roads, but beyond that I’m reliant on local area guides that I hope to be able to pick up in tourist information centres. These tend to be better than the maps you’ll get in all but the most detailed atlases, so I’m stopping at pretty much every info centre I see, and picking up armfuls of guides. I’m also hoping to camp most nights in National Parks, so I’m hoping to find good guides to this too, as well as info on interesting things to see and do on the way. I have one slim all-country guidebook, but for a country so huge it can only list the major attractions, and I’m hoping to see more of the quirky off-beat things that probably won’t even make it into most of the single state guidebooks. As such, I’m extremely tempted by Mogo Zoo, purely as it seems so out of place. Mogo itself is just a tiny village (pop: 257!) and really has no business having a zoo. This would be like driving up the Antrim Coast and seeing a sign to Cushendun Zoo. But I still need to buy a pillow somewhere, and nowhere in Mogo looks plausible for that, so instead I press on and explore Moruya instead: another strange little town with lots of carved wooden statues, and, more usefully, a general store that amazingly enough has a sale on on pillows!

And then, another 15 minutes down the road, I pass through Bodalla, the self-proclaimed “Killarney of the South”, and discover a nice little forest park that is set up for overnight stays. It’s not quite as nice as the park in Berry, but it’s significantly bigger and there are quite a lot of vans parked up and people making their dinner. I pick a spot, work out how to set up my sleeping quarters, and then head off to explore the forest walk that’s signposted. It seems like it would be rather easy to drift off-track at any number of points, mainly because there isn’t really a track per se for most of the way, with the path seemingly having merely evolved over time through repeated walking. However, at several points along the way someone has crafted wooden steps at particularly steep parts, so there must be some level of official status to it all. Eventually I arrive at what seems to be a rather muddy and not very appealing lake, but a few hundred metres further through the trees it opens up properly into something much more pleasant indeed, with a little bench thoughtfully provided to sit and soak in the view.

I keep an eye out whilst trekking around for snakes, spiders, and other miscreants. My knowledge of Australian wildlife isn’t well enough developed to know what to expect where, but I’m happy enough for now to stick with a blunt “avoid anything that moves”. All I see on this walk, however, is an impressively large insect that keeps scuttling along the ground about 5 metres in front of me and hops out of range each time I try to take its photograph. Later, when sitting at a picnic table, reading a book, I feel a tickle on my left arm, and discover a red ant racing up towards my elbow, but as for anything bigger than an insect, despite seeing several kangaroo warning signs, today I’ve seen nothing but a solitary grazing goat.

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Sometimes a sign is just so fantastic that, despite my inability to take photos whilst driving, I just have to stop and reverse or drive around the block again, or whatever, just to get a shot.

This one just confused me on so many levels I couldn’t ignore it. At a purely grammatical level I was surprised that dogs kill “kiwi” and not “kiwis”. This called for some further research, whereupon I discovered that although Wiktionary only gives the “kiwis” form, the Wikipedia page on English plural has an interesting discursion on how words of Maori origin can be pluralised with or without an -s.

At a purely practical level, however, I’m completely confused as to what I, as a driver, am meant to do upon encountering this sign. It’s not like I’m travelling with a pack of dogs in the back of my car that I would otherwise have let loose at the first sign of a kiwi. And it can’t just be a simple warning that there may be dead kiwi(s) littering the highway, as it explicitly warns me to be cautious at night. Although the kiwi is generally a nocturnal creature, one would presume that a dead kiwi doesn’t burst into flames or disintegrate into a pile of dust once hit by direct sunlight, and thus a “be careful you don’t run over any dead kiwi” warning should apply at all hours.

So I’m left with the rather unsettling conclusion that I’m meant to be careful I don’t drive into the midst of a frenzied midnight kiwi killing spree, lest the bloodthirsty dogs, freshly exhilarated from the kill, turn on me next.

I need to find a way to take photographs of road signs whilst randomly driving around the countryside. Were I to have such a skill today’s entry would be a photoblog of all the great signs I saw in and around Te Puke. Instead I’ll have to photoblog without photos instead.

URLs for other people’s pictures welcomed so I can make at least some of these be links:

• Come And Taste Te Puke
• Merge Like a Zip
• We’ll take care of your hazardous waist
• Te Puke Holiday Park – now with backpackers!
• Pukeko crossing
• 448 Drink Drivers caught on our roads since 1 Nov 2007

Usually when someone makes reference to the “two nations divided by a common language” they mean the UK and US. They could, however, just as easily substitute NZ.

Dunedin is simultaneously familiar and yet strangely foreign. A significant proportion of streets, districts, parks, shops, etc are named after places in Edinburgh, which is, after all, the very city’s namesake (the Burgh of Edin vs. the Dun of Edin). They still even drive on the left here (albeit with metric distances and speeds and a really crazy “give way to drivers turning against you” rule). But they’ve evolved their own crazy version of English, where, for example, TV ads bemoan the fact that you can buy cigarettes in the dairy, you wheel a trundler round the supermarket, you can win a trip to a bach of your dreams anywhere in the world, shops have large “EFTPOS” signs in their windows, and radio programmes can talk for an hour about students getting their “OE” in London or New York without ever once explaining what that actually is.

They also have their own version of the Australian habit of shortening everything to two syllables: it took me much too long to realise that “Coro Street” wasn’t just a local soap (and, as an aside, the UK population should pray that no-one at the BBC decides to fill that newly created Neighbours gap with Shortland Street…)

And that’s all before you deal with the Maori influence (and have to learn how to pronounce place names like Whangarei and Ngongotaha), and the variety of words that have leaked through into everyday language.

I’m also reliably informed that calling yourself “George Street Normal School” is perfectly acceptable in many countries, but to me it sounds like someone trying to find an even more innocuous sounding way of saying “Special School”.

And it’s not just the language. I’ve also never quite worked out why you get your Fish And Chips from a Chinese Takeaway, or why soft drinks come in 600ml containers, and it’s taken me a while to get used to my toaster being inside a cupboard. And you can always tell you’re in a small country when primetime TV has ads for fork lift trucks. (I really want to provide a link so that everyone can enjoy the ludicrous jingle of “There is nothing like a Crown / For picking it up / And putting it down” but I can’t find it anywhere. Help, please, anyone!)

But there are some things that are fantastic here. A small example is that they have a TV listings magazine for intelligent people, that actually thinks nothing of running a 5 page article on an interesting topic. It’s not quite the New Yorker, but it’s certainly no Heat.

A common pet peeve of mine is also neatly avoided here in that they have at least as many warnings about drowsy driving they do about drunk driving (which accounts for a much smaller number of deaths but is much easier to detect and thus gets all the attention in most countries). Although I can’t quite see the UK adopting the slogan “If you stop a drunk driver you’re a bloody legend” any time soon.

But by far my biggest delight here has been airline travel. It’s as if it’s still 1988. When I rang for a shuttle to take to me to the airport yesterday I was first surprised that they didn’t ask what time I wanted to be picked up, but only what time my flight was at. Then I assumed they’d misheard me as they said they’d pick me up approximately an hour after the time I would have expected to arrive at the airport. But, indeed, no. You can still turn up 20 minutes before your flight, show absolutely no ID anywhere in the whole process, stroll through to the business lounge without anyone checking you should be there or having encountered any security screening at all, and even carry the Starbucks you bought downtown right on to the plane. It’s a classic example of something that has been slowly taken away piece by piece in most parts of the world, and even though you know things have changed, you’ve forgotten just how much so until you’re confronted so starkly with how it used to be. I suspect it’s as much to do with the relative isolation of the country as a deliberate plan to avoid the terrible creep, but the longer they can keep it up the better!

Those of you who chose Samoa or Tonga as my final destination in Marty‘s “Where Will Tony Die?” deadpool are out of luck (for now anyway). But they were good choices and either could have been a winner.

Unfortunately for you (but not, of course, for me), in Samoa the insects don’t carry many diseases. If they did, things could have turned out a whole lot worse as my blood appears to smell like the nectar of the gods. On the first morning in Apia, following an overnight night that was too short to get quite enough sleep, and after eventually arriving at my lodgings for the week (a feat made rather more difficult by the no-show of the pre-arranged shuttle they were meant to be sending), I tried to grab a few hours kip. Approximately 15 minutes after falling asleep I was awakened by some friendly staff knocking my door and asking if I wanted any breakfast. I shouted a “no thanks” through the door, and went to turn over to go back to sleep, but then realised that I couldn’t feel or move my right leg. I frantically raced through my mental list of insect bites to see which might cause this, but I was too tired and a little too panicked to get very far in that process. I managed to clamber out of bed and walk about the room a bit until gradually the feeling returned. Relieved, and hoping it wasn’t just a temporary recovery, I jumped straight back into bed and slept for another 4 hours. When I woke I had a large red lump on my leg, but could still move. Over the rest of the week that lump was joined by about 300 more, spread all over my arms, legs, hands, face, neck, and feet.

Your other opportunity in Samoa was some sort of suntroke related fatality. There only seemed to be two weather settings: aggressive thunderstorm or oppressive heat that burns every piece of exposed skin within 30 seconds. The sunburn I ended up with in Samoa was so bad that several weeks later, on the flight from Auckland to Dunedin, after a flight attendent threw hot coffee all over me, they thought they’d scalded my arms. But unless it causes skin cancer later in life (in which case you’ll need to check Marty’s small print very carefully), it was non-fatal.

Tonga came much closer, however. Everything went swimmingly until my penultimate day when I finally got around to going on an island tour. One of the stops on said tour was to explore some caves that seemed to be very popular with locals and tourists alike. Each of us was provided with a candle to light our way, apart from a German girl at the very rear who was given the only torch. The candles were almost entirely useless, but luckily I was right behind the tour guide and relied on keeping close enough behind him to match every step he took. This worked fine until we had to stop to wait for the others to catch up (who were also presumably not having much success with the candles and had to measure each step more carefully). Some locals were making their way back and needed to squeeze past us, so the guide asked me to step to the side to give them room. I made the mistake of assuming that he would only ask me to step aside if there was actually somewhere to step to – and promptly fell over the edge. I’m not entirely sure how he managed it, but the guide managed to grab my arm as I vanished and haul me back up onto the path. My candle seemed to take a very long time to hit whatever would have otherwise have broken my fall. Thankfully I manage to end up with little more than a couple of badly scraped fingers, two very large bruises just below each knee, and a noticeable limp for the next few hours.

From what I can tell New Zealand is significantly safer than most other places in this part of the world, so if I were allowed to enter, I’d be picking Australia right now. I hear a significant number of tourists die there each year…

My tour of the Balkans came to an abrupt halt at the start of October. I had planned to spend the next couple of months working my way up the Adriatic coast through Albania, Montenegro and Croatia to Slovenia. However this plan fell apart somewhat when Socialtext appointed a new CEO and summonsed the diaspora to Palo Alto. After some initial confusion as to whether this would apply to the non North-America based people, I had to hastily find a way from Охрид to California. This was much more difficult than I had expected.

Although Охрид is a major tourist destination during the summer (and rightly so), by the end of September most of the flights in and out have stopped. Retracing my steps and flying out from софия again would involve getting the whole way back up Скопје first. The only plausible flight out of Tirana was much too early in the morning to have any sensible way of catching it. Eventually I discovered that British Airways fly from Θεσσαλονίκη to London, and, best of all, depart late afternoon. That just left the problem of getting there. There are no trains or buses across the border between those points. And, as most Macedonian taxi drivers don’t have a visa for Greece, the standard advice is to get a bus to Битола, a taxi from there to the border, cross on foot, get a taxi on the Greek side to the nearest town, and then a bus on to Θεσσαλονίκη.

This would be considerable hassle at the best of times, and has far too much scope for something going wrong when catching a plane. Thankfully one of the hotel staff came to my rescue and arranged for someone he knew with a suitable visa to drive me there for a reasonable price. I started to get a little worried at first, as the drive to Битола took much longer than I had been expecting, but thankfully I had no difficulties at the border crossing this time, and once across the border we made up plenty of time, and I got to airport with almost an hour to spare.

My time in California didn’t go quite as expected. I’d arranged to stay around an extra few weeks to do some on-site customer research, but that ended up falling through (my long rant about this can wait for another day). I did get a lot of useful work done with Liz, though, and got to explore some more of California at the weekends (including stumbling across the rather bizarre Pescadero Apple Festival).

As per my plan to chase the light by flying south for the winter, I’d booked a round-the-world ticket onwards, rather than returning to Europe. As part of the crazy conditions attached to that, I was able to fly into San Francisco, but had to depart from Los Angeles. Thankfully it was a night-time departure, so rather than the hassle of arranging a connecting flight, I decided to drive down the coast instead.

Other than a wrong turn at Oxnard that cost me about 30 minutes heading back in the wrong direction, everything was going smoothly and I would arrive at LAX in plenty of time. Until I joined the 10 at Santa Monica, that is, and found myself in a crazy traffic jam. Apparently two different crashes had caused near-gridlock, so the four miles to the 405 took just over an hour, and then it was another hour for the next five. If the final few miles had been at the same speed I was running a significant risk of missing my flight, but thankfully the jam just suddenly disappeared in the that really strange way that sometimes happens, and I had open roads the whole way to the rental car drop-off.

And thus I find myself in the departure lounge, with several large glasses of Baileys and my last net connection for a while. Next stop Samoa, where I deliberately chose somewhere to stay with no internet service. Detox, here I come.

One of the most common questions I’ve been asked about living in Macedonia was how I coped with everything being written in Cyrillic. Well, actually, more often that not people asked me about things being written in Russian, or complained, when I wrote place names in the local language in email or IM, that they can’t read Russian – which is kind of like noting that in California all the signs are in French.

In Macedonia, of course, it’s even more egregious to call it Russian, as the alphabet actually originated here. I actually didn’t know that prior to this year, but it certainly helps explain why it’s so close to Greek.

Having studied both Mathematics and Theology at university level, I had enough Greek background to find Cyrillic relatively easy to pick up, but anyone who has picked up a smattering of the Greek alphabet is already 50% of the way to being about to transliterate effectively.

For me the hardest parts are glyphs that look the same in Cyrillic and Latin, but represent different letters. It’s much easier to learn what the unfamiliar characters look like than to train your brain to understand why so many shop windows and advertising hoardings are proudly proclaiming “НОВО!”

So here’s the 5 minute guide that’ll get you 90% of the way:

• Р: This is not a P – it’s an R, from the Greek rho. A ‘P’ is actually П (pi).
• С: This is actually an S. It apparently evolved from a Sigma, but it’s much easier to remember that the old СССР isn’t “CCCP”, but “SSSR”, which makes a lot more sense, really.
• В: This is a V. This is fairly common in other languages too, including Hebrew: lots of the names in the Bible aren’t really pronounced the way you were probably taught in Sunday School…
• Н: This is an N. I used to get confused between it and И, which is an I, but now I just remember all those aforementioned НОВО signs.
• У: This is a U. This one is easy for any fans of Тату.
• Ј: This is a Y. Actually it’s not – it’s a J. But it’s a soft J, like in lots of European languages that tend to confuse English speakers anyway, so it’s easier to think of it as a Y.
• Х: Again, thinking in Greek makes this easier. It’s a Chi. In practice it’s a little complicated as sometimes it’s a ‘CH’ and sometimes just an ‘H’. But it’s usually obvious from context, and even if you’re not sure you’ll be a lot closer than treating it as an X.

All the other characters that look like English (АKЕMOT) are all what you’d expect, so once you stop falsely transliterating the lookalikes, you’re well on your way.

• Ф is like the greek Phi, and is usually just transliterated as ‘F’, although sometimes ‘PH’ might work slightly better.
• Г is a G, but tricks people who only know Gamma as γ and aren’t familiar with its capital form.
• Д, thanks to Borat, now confuses people. To me it’s always been obviously a D, just written a little differently. For my part I got confused when I first saw a movie poster for “300“, as I was living in Estonia at the time and assumed the poster was in Russian, where З is a Z (not to be mistaken for Э which is a short E, but they don’t have that character in Macedonian so it’s not so confusing here).
• Л, according to my keyboard and most websites, is an L. But it’s hardly ever written like that (in Macedonia, anyway) usually it’s more like an upside-down V. Unicode doesn’t have such a symbol in the standard Cyrillic range, so I’m not sure what sign-makers use in its place (the closest I can find is U+2227: ∧, but it’s not quite right). A garage near my apartment is still proudly displaying an old ∧А∆А sign (which looks much more effective with proper typography).

Occasionally you’ll come across a few other strange characters that you’ll have to learn later, but this subset will get you remarkably far.

Curiously, Macedonian doesn’t include one of the iconic characters regularly used in faux-Russian: Я (ya). This is a very common letter in Russian as it’s also the word for the first person pronoun (“I”), but doesn’t exist in Macedonian at all. This is why the capital city is spelled Скопје whereas the neighbouring capital, which is pronounced very similarly, is written София.

Within a few weeks of moving to Скопје I was able to transliterate most street signs etc fairly quickly, which helped in finding my way around. And even without being able to translate, lots of words are rather obvious once you’ve converted the letters. This sometimes goes awry though: the first time I took a slug from a carton of Млеко to discover that even though it looked like a milk carton, and ‘mleko’ sounds close enough to ‘milk’, I was actually drinking yoghurt.

And I still can’t see the T-Mobile ‘е-Ваучери’ signs without thinking that there’s some sort of hook-up with eBay…

Having entered Greece in rather strange circumstances, I was a little concerned as to what might happen should I travel back to Скопје through the same border point, just in case the frustrated waving me on was under some sort of “Well, he’s only a stupid tourist and he’s unlikely to be back any time soon” belief. So I decided to travel up to софия for a few days, and then go back across that way. Eager readers may remember that that’s how I entered Macedonia in the first place, but that time I only got to spend a few hours being driven around the back roads of софия, rather than actually getting to experience the city.

As Greece and Bulgaria are both in the EU these days, I expected the border crossing to be a relatively simple affair. In this I was completely mistaken. The train sat for well over an hour and half at the border. As best I could ascertain there were only about 10 passengers, so I’ve no idea what was going on, especially as I was tucked away in a compartment in the first class cabin with no other passengers. I didn’t actually buy a first class ticket, but somehow the train station in Thessaloniki managed to allocated me a reserved seat in the first class cabin on a second class ticket. Both of the ticket inspectors who examined it during the journey did a visible double take at this, but as I was sitting in the correct car/seat combination there wasn’t a lot they could say.

I’d pre-booked an apartment for a few days in the centre of софия, and there was meant to be a driver waiting for me at the station on arrival, but the delay at the border meant that by time I got in it was after midnight, and the driver was nowhere to be found. I rang the woman I’d booked it through (although I’m pretty sure I woke her up), and after she’d ascertained that the driver had gone home for the night, she offered to pick me up herself. She explained she was nearby, and so would meet me outside the McDonalds at the station in 10 minutes.

This sounded much simpler than it actually turned out to be. I walked the whole way around the outside of the station, and couldn’t see a McDonalds at all. The one remaining taxi driver claimed not to know where it was (although if I were feeling particularly suspicious I’d think he was trying to sabotage my lift so that his hanging around waiting for the last train wouldn’t have been a complete waste of time, particularly as his price also dropped by €5 at this point…)

With a time restriction in place, I couldn’t just keep wandering around on my own hoping to find it, so I tried to find somewhere else who could tell me where it was. Of course, after midnight that’s not a trivial thing to do either. There had been some workers down where I’d gotten off the train, so I tried to retrace my steps back in that direction, but got hopelessly lost by virtue of all but one of the entrances to the station being locked for the night. Eventually I found the right combination of steps to descend, back into the bowels of the underground part of the station, and the right steps to ascend again, back to the track where the train was. However, by now there was no-one to be found. So I went back down into the station and wandered around hoping to find someone. Eventually I found some cleaners, but they spoke no English. I hoped that simply looking lost and asking “McDonalds?” should suffice for them to be able to at least point in the right direction but the looked completely confused. Over the next 5 minutes, growing increasingly worried that my lift would disappear again, I repeated the charade with a variety of night workers, all with the same result (or lack thereof).

At this point, as I passed the bottom of a stairway that led up to one of the tracks, my mobile phone managed to get a signal, and helpfully informed me that I’d missed 4 calls. Checking my messages I discovered that the woman picking me up had arrived at the station to discover that it was all locked and so couldn’t even get to the McDonalds, even had I been able to find it, and she was waiting for me outside by the front entrance. My next adventure was trying to find my way back to there. In my quest for anyone who spoke enough English to understand the work “McDonalds” I’d gotten completely lost underground. Eventually, after about a further 15 minutes of increasingly panicked wanderings, I found my way to the front entrance: but, unfortunately, the wrong side of it, where the heavy duty chains made it clear I wasn’t going to get out that way any time soon. The woman picking me up, on the other side of the door, looked remarkably exasperated and she berated me for not knowing that her suggestion to meet at McDonalds made no sense if the station was locked and just waited for her outside instead! She had no suggestions for how I could manage to find out which sets of stairs and doors would lead me back across, down, round, up, and around again to her side. So I set off on further exploration on the understanding that if I hadn’t found my way out in 10 minutes she was calling the police to come get me out.

Thankfully I made the right guess fairly quickly, reached somewhere that looked familiar, and made it out in just over 5 minutes this time. As we walked over to her car, the lone taxi driver, visibly deflated, clambered into his, and drove off. And I still had no idea where McDonalds was.

I recently had my first awkward border crossing (other than entering the US where immigration staff are notoriously amongst the most aggressively obnoxious in the world), crossing from Macedonia to Greece. Interestingly it was on the Macedonian side of the border, rather than the Greek. As with most border crossing by bus in this part of the world, the driver collected everyone’s passports and took them to the security checkpoint, whilst we all waited onboard. 5 minutes later he came back to get me off the bus as the border official wanted to talk to me. Shortly thereafter I learned one of life’s great lessons: Never interrupt an immigration officer to explain you only speak English without at least triple checking that they’re not already speaking English!

With the language confusion out of the way and both of us speaking somewhat slower for each other’s benefit, we got down to the meat of the matter. He wanted to know the where I had been staying in Скопје:

• I rented an apartment
• What is its name?
• You mean its address?
• No, its name!
• Erm? The name of the agency I rented it from?
• No! The apartment’s name!
• Ummm. I don’t think it actually had a name.
• Well, where are the papers?
• What papers?
• From the apartment!
• I don’t have any.

This went on for quite a while, with neither of really having a clue what the other was talking about, before he eventually got completely frustrated and just waved me through in despair.

From talking to a few people afterwards it seems that the problem came about through my failure to register with the local Police within a few days of arriving in the country. For most tourists this isn’t an issue, as the hotel they’re staying at takes care of it all for them, but because I rented my own private apartment I needed to do that myself. But the border guard was assuming that when I said “apartment” I meant one attached to a hotel, and wanted to know which one so that someone could take issue with them for not filling in my forms. It seems to have been beyond his experience for a shortish term tourist to actually rent like a local. I’ve no idea what might have happened had he realised it was actually my fault I hadn’t registered, rather than some sloppy hotel clerk.

After that the Greek border checkpoint was remarkably simple. Of course it helped that I have an EU passport, so they barely gave me a second look, unlike the Macedonians on the bus who were all treated with grave suspicion and their visas double checked. Relations between the two countries are so bad that even a Schengen Visa isn’t accepted for entry to Greece if you have a Macedonian passport.

Humourously one of the first things you see once you actually make it over the border is a large “Welcome to Macedonia” sign (remember, this is going from Macedonia into Greece!) The dispute over naming is, of course, the primary fight between the two countries, with Greece even threatening sanctions against Canada recently for officially recognising Macedonia under that name).

Unfortunately I wasn’t expecting the sign and we were past it before I could get my camera out. Please leave a comment if you can find a photo online!