It’s been a few weeks since I last posted! Hopefully, I’ve managed to distil the last few weeks into this post! Apologies if it feels like a rush or not my most detailed writing but I’m typing this in Belgrade a day after we finished our cycle!
Salzburg was initially a stop partly of convenience. We knew we needed to get to Vienna to fly to Sofia in Bulgaria, but wanted to break the journey up. Salzburg looked to make sense geographically. Salzburg ended up being a sleeper hit for me. There were stunning mountains, we went on a zipline and found some cool bars (and beer halls) along the way. I also enjoyed their modern art museum.
Next stop was Vienna. This is the place we had the most suggestions on what to do and where before we arrived. We spent the first day exploring the city, going to churches, cathedrals, and a photography exhibition. We even went to the opera! Well… we accidentally booked a 90-minute lecture on the upcoming Wagner opera about to play there…which was entirely in German. There were a few songs intermittedly and a small English section, but we both still enjoyed it. The next day we went to Schönbrunn Schloss, had a fancy cake and then our first quiet night in for a while as we had an early start for our flight to Sofia.
As we landed in Sofia, we could immediately feel the difference. From everything being written in the Cyrillic alphabet to the architecture, it felt good to be somewhere culturally different! We spent our first evening in Sofia on an accidental craft beer bar crawl after a Spanish man in a cafe overheard us talking in English and suggested that’s what we do (he used to live in Birmingham, so knew how to get Brits engaged in a local city!) Highlights included: meeting the brewer of the beer the first place had when he happened to come by to drop somemore kegs off, going to a bikeshop/craft beer shop and playing “Which can art are you drawn to?”, Which can art would you hangout with?” and “Which can art would you get as a tattoo?” in all the places we went. The next day, we went on a “Balkans Bites” free food tour of Sofia, an amazing way to see the city! We tried a selection of Balkan/Bulgarian foods, my favourite being ‘ajvar’, which in very simple terms is baba ganoush with roasted red peppers. Continuing our walking tour extravaganza, the next day we did a free history walking tour of Sofia. Interesting, but perhaps 20 minutes too long and not much walking!
We both felt like we’d barely scratched the surface of Bulgaria, and it’s definitely on our “would go back to” list. We then took a bus (more of a minibus) to Skopje the capital of North Macedonia. As a city, Skopje has the most statues I’ve seen in what’s a relatively small centre. A mixture of Greek looking marbles, late 1800s rebels overthrowing the Ottomans and former Yugoslavian/Soviet style ones. All mad and tons of questions. Up the next morning for (another) free walking tour this time of Skopje! The tour was probably our favourite out-and-out walking tour. Partly because the guide was knowledgeable but also because he had some genuinely helpful local tips such as which ATMs don’t charge a fee for international cards, which buses to get to locations outside the city and how to tell if a taxi driver is overcharging! My favourite part of the city was the Turkish Bazaar that led up to the old fort. It felt like there was always something happening there and the hustle and bustle made the city feel more alive than in the brutalist new town.
A final day in Skopje before our next adventure (which I think deserves its own post in a few days) meant we took a bus to get a cable car to “The Millennium Cross”. Which we’d found out from our guide is the 10th largest cross in the world and overlooks Skopje itself! Our last night saw us having a last explore of Skopje before going back to our appartment to prepare for our 10 days of circumnavigating the country on a 400km+ bike packing trip…