Let it be clearly understood that I have never really done any research before I embark on any form of journey. Aside from academic articles or back issues of National Geographic from the 1960s-80s, I have never owned a Lonely Planet or done any research on any country I have been to. I usually buy a map, and pore over it for hours in a café with my sleeves rolled up and, using my finely tuned geographer’s intuition, I decide where I am going to go based on what I think makes sense and what—to the rational western observer—should make sense. This is how I ended up in Strumica, Macedonia.
Something you don’t know about Strumica is that it is the Vegetable Capital of Macedonia. Even the Sally Rosa Guide to Europe never tipped me off about this. But don’t feel like less of a person for missing out on that little nugget of information because it would appear that the majority of the Macedonian border patrol staff is also unaware of Strumica’s magnetism in this regard. In fact, do not believe anything a Macedonian border guard tells you if you’re crossing into Macedonia from Bulgaria by foot at dusk in mid-February. If he or she tells you there is nothing to see, it is merely because Macedonia is so shrouded in mystery and oft-forgotten that residents themselves seem to forget why it makes a nice travel destination. What I did learn from them, however, was that Strumica is also the Mardi Gras capital of Europe—or at least the non-littoral Balkans, but that's really just semantics at this point.
While journalists and academics have written at length what can be described as “what is wrong with the Balkans” I myself can really only think of two things. The first, and arguably the most important, is that they have not embraced train travel. In fact, it’s rather difficult and slow to transit the Balkans by rail, and something I would only advise if you have an extra 7 hours every day to spend waiting in the train carriage for any number of reasons. I assumed trains would take me everywhere in Ex-oslavia, which was not true, and I was expecting any bus rides would be as cheap as borscht. Well, much like borscht itself these days*, the buses in Macedonia were most certainly not cheap.
The second problem is that for many in the former Yugoslavia, they have a bit of an inferiority complex which is sadly not necessary at all. As such, when I inquired in Strumica if there were apartments I could rent or people who had rooms to let for the night, they hastily told me that things were getting better and that there were hotels now, assuming that I could easily afford 20 euros for one night. Well, luckily, I could afford 20 euros in this particular stage of my trip, even if the room came without a breakfast. Unfortunately, the first impression I got from Macedonia is that they were in such a rush to shed their communist past that I only caught a few faded glimpses of Tito’s socialist paradise.
Actually, I have no idea what I was really expecting from Macedonia. So little, in fact, that I simply bought a bus ticket to Štip and assumed that it would be easy for me to find either a hostel or a university dorm, or even an apartment to sleep in. On arriving, I discovered the town woefully unprepared to deal with the outrageous demands of a native-English speaker. I spent only a few hours in Štip, but enough to decide it is definitely worth spending the number of hours I devoted to it. It had a central fortress on the mountain above the town, and I suppose the Wikitravel entry would do it better justice than I ever could with words. As the sun was setting and the rain closing in, I realised that there was little hope of me finding a place to sleep, so I set off for the grand metropolis of Skopje.
*No joke. The price of borscht, especially in Grand Forks, BC, has not felt any of the effects of the economic downturn. Not to say that it’s not worth it, but I suppose we should be reevaluating this phrase, if anyone besides me still even uses it.
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