Falling in love in Macedonia!

The plan was following: We take a train to Prilep at 14.30, we reach Prilep at 17.30, then we go straight to Markovi Kuli Mountain, and from there to Monastery Trskavec. Since none of us knew the path to Trskavec, we decided to modify the plan, and take the earlier train- at 6:25 in the morning.

So there were 5 of us: me, Titel, Basia, Mateo, and Ice Tea. A nice group of internationals with Polish- Romanian- Canadian- Lithuanian flavor J.

The trip by train was cool- thanks god we had very comfortable places (inside it looked more like a bus not the train actually), because we were forced to spend there more than expected 3 hours… The train broke down, before reaching Prilep it started to move back towards Skopje, than again in the direction of Prilep. Finally it stopped somewhere on the way, where we were waiting for maybe 2 hours for- as we realized later- this funny yellow wagon, that took us to Prilep. Hurray!

We had some food to finally start the hike on Markovi Kuli at 3p.m. It was great, I challenged myself as I almost felt from the mountain… We were running all over the place like in the treasure hunt, taking thousands of photos. We hit the road as it started raining and we didn’t want to walk in the dark.

The hike was AMAZING. The place looked like from another planet. The mountains are unusual, haven’t seen anything like that in my life. Huge rocks in the color of green seemed like stones put here and there by a giant. Some places we associated with Mordor, and we felt like Frodo going with the ring! Or with the fogy fields from Sherlock Holmes story about Baskerville’s Dog. Hilarious, brilliant, awesome experience! This is Macedonia I would recommend everyone to see and feel!

Before it begun to getting dark, we reached the Monastery Trskavec. It was much bigger than we expected, and much more beautiful. We were greeted by Bernardino dog; then we met 4 men staying there. They were guests too, but seemed their stay is much longer than ours. We drank the tea, participated in the evening prayer and had tavce gravce (Macedonian meal made of beans) for dinner. The Monk that lives there was still in Prilep; so we didn’t wait for him, we just went to our room.

We got a guest room, with 6 beds. Sleeping there was a super cool experience- we slept under 3 blankets; we had to wake up in the night to put some wood in the stove. Like in middle ages. Simply amazing.

In the morning we finally met the Monk, who speaks perfect English by the way, we had a breakfast, shoot some photos (I guess we already had thousands of them), and hit the road. Though we were really hoping for a nice, sunny weather, we were walking in the fog again. In 1,5 hours we reached the cross on Markovi Kuli. You cannot imagine, how tasty ‘pasteta’ was there, at the top!

For more than an hour we were running all over the place (the mountain is really great- I believe that there are still plenty of spots to be discovered by us!)- like Japanese tourists with our cameras and at 15.30 our mountain experience finished. At least for me- I am staying in Prilep for LC visit and guys caught the afternoon train.

Thanks guys for amazing weekend! Thanks Macedonia for your beauty!