Wow! – That is the only way to describe today, we drove the 80km across the Vikos–Aoös National Park and it took us 5 hours, not because of the difficulty of driving but after every turn we stopped to take more photographs. We then headed north up the motorway towards the border with FYR (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) as the Greeks call it or Northern Macedonia as designated by the EU.
We are now staying in a proper Greek B&B, single beds, not much space, hand held shower but very clean. For the previous three nights we were in luxurious accommodation with a huge bed and a flash bathroom, this allowed us to do a weeks washing so we now have a weeks supply of clean underwear!
I am having a bit of a love hate relationship with my smartphone. It has Google maps which on our walks in the mountains was brilliant. For reasons of national security the Greeks would not publish any maps of Greece, by 1990 this became a joke so the mountaineering magazine got hold of copies of the maps and illegally published them in monthly instalments. If you wanted a map of the Pindos range you asked for the relevant back copy of the magazine. The reluctance to make the maps available might be because the quality is awful, imagine trying to plan a walk with a map whose scale is 10 mile to the inch!
Google maps is no better but at least on the phone it pinpoints where you are, if you walk from village to village as we did there are well waymarked paths so it all comes together very well.
Today we wanted to cross the mountains, Google maps gave me the choice of the quick route (A roads) or through the mountains but it kept on trying to force me onto the “easy route”, this must of happened at least 10 times, the phone nearly got thrown down the mountainside!
Between the mountains and where we are staying next to a lake in Prespa we stopped off in Kastoria, a very picturesque town (pictured below) with a great many Byzantine churches and we suspect in season, a great many tourists, but today it was fine.
When they built the motorway through Macedonia there were a great many accidents with cars hitting bears, particularly at night. As you can imagine this created a very high profile bad news story, the environmentalists were up in arms about dead bears and the motorists were none too happy, hitting a bear at 80mph is not good for the paintwork. The result is that apart from warning signs every few miles there is a 8ft high, double fence along both sides of the motorway, I suspect paid for by the EU. It is nice and shiny, my guess is that in 10 years time it will be full of holes and the bears will be back in the road.