We left our heroes on a cold morning trying to hitchhike from Florina to Bitola. Turned out to be quite easy. We got our first ride before even leaving the town of Florina. A student took us to the university at the edge of the populated area. From there we walked for perhaps over an hour before a friendly local gave us a ride all the way to Bitola. He spoke both Greek and Macedonian, but no English or Turkish.
It isn’t all that crazy to expect Turkish out here. There are Turkish-speaking villages just over the border in North Macedonia, and in fact the Macedonian border guard spoke Turkish. Crossing the border was so easy we didn’t even have to get out of the car!
We were dropped at the bus station in Bitola, and immediately a bus was leaving for Ohrid. The next one was about seven hours later so we left Bitola right away even though we had wanted to see the Atatürk exhibit at the local museum. At Atatürk’s birth house in Thessaloniki we had learned that he attended a military academy in Bitola (aka Manastır), something I hadn’t realized on my first visit to Bitola.
Our original plan after Thessaloniki was to go to Kavala and hop on ferries to İzmir (Çeşme?). Bektaş somehow learned that one-way tickets from Skopje to Antalya were going for 70 euro. Heck, that’s less than we’d be spending on ferries, and isn’t Oliver staying in Ohrid now? We could visit him as well! Turns out the flight tickets were only 60 euro, and Oliver said, yes, come visit. He was waiting at the Ohrid bus station for us.
I visited North Macedonia only 18 months earlier for the first time and went to both Ohrid and Skopje. Somehow I’ll try to make this blog a little different from that one. I might fail, however, so you can stop here if you’re tired of picturesque Ohrid photos.
