Ope, there goes a month. 

I left off in Istanbul, crossing the border into the adventures of Eastern Europe. 

I was very excited for this change. The Balkans are a region of the world I have had interest in for a long time, and on the edge of that exploration I had a growing excitement about what I would find.

I left Istanbul with an American I met there. We had walked much of the city together and had a similar timeline for leaving the city, and so we took a bus to the capital of Bulgaria; Sofia, where she had a service program with a local animal shelter.

Sofia is an interesting city. It is tucked below beautiful Balkan peaks, and spreads out with post soviet architecture, as well as some influence from Turkish and European culture.

This was a great introduction to the Balkans. With a good mix of the post soviet energy I have grown accustomed to, and western feeling of Europe that felt almost foreign to me, I found myself settling into a new phase of the trip. 

It was also a good stopping point as I prepared for an upcoming service program in Sarajevo, Bosnia.

The program was something I had been planning for a while. It was a chance to work with refugees (mostly Syrian) who were tying to make their way into the EU. This felt personally important to me as my family were some of these Syrian refugees, fleeing war in their homes to relocate to Armenia. It was also a continuation of this theme I have been chasing, which I would loosely define as ‘studying diasporas’ including my own family’s diaspora(s) and other current examples.

I had been communicating with the service program for months about the details of the program itself, and had worked out details about the best timing for them and for my travels. As I worked my way west the only time restraint I had faced was that I had to make it to Sarajevo by the 25th of march.

On the day I left Sofia, plans changed. 

I got out of the city and began hitchhiking (doing more hiking than hitching) when I got an email on my phone from the program in Bosnia. The email informed me that they were all full for the foreseeable future.

This was a let down. I had had a growing excitement for this part of the trip, and had been planning around it for so long that this came as a bit of a wrench in my plans. The whole next month + became an empty slate of unplanned time, and this program I had been excited about for a long time was suddenly not going to be a part of my trip.

That being said… I started to adjust quickly

The replanning began as I turned around to spend another night in Sofia.

The replanning involved a couple different factors, but the one that felt the most relevant in the moment was that I was not done exploring the Balkan area. I started to make my way towards the Albanian coast, knowing I would pass through some of the most beautiful parts of the southern Balkans on my way.

The first stop was North Macedonia; A commonly forgotten about, but beautiful country to the north of Greece, and directly west of Bulgaria.

North Macedonia, for such a seldom trafficked area, is a beautiful little country. Part of its charm is definitely that it sits off of the beaten path, nestled into rolling green foothills that lead into beautifully subtle mountain peaks. The mountains do not have the young, aggressive quality of the Cascades, or even the height of the Caucuses, but they have their own impressiveness to them.

I spent almost a week in the capital city of Skopje. The city itself is one of the weirdest places I have been, with a mix of truly ancient pieces of history, and new buildings that are meant to carry this same feeling and depth of age, but were built recently on a low budget. This leads to entire parts of the city feeling almost like a movie set that could be disassembled within hours, while other parts of the city seem so grounded in history that they would be simply immovable.

After spending about a week exploring the capital and the surrounding areas, I was ready to move on. There was more to explore in Macedonia, I am sure, but I could no longer suppress my excitement to get to Albania. I caught a bus to the capital city Tiranë, and decided to plan my next moves from there.

Tiranë is a beautiful small city, with the most European energy I had felt yet. For the first time the streets were flooded with people speaking Italian, and some other western european languages. Even Albanian itself is the first language I encountered in the Balkan states that I thought sounded much more European than Russian.

Unfortunately, on my third day there I got sick again. I could have seen it coming, the whole hostel staff was sick and I had quickly made friends with them. It was a much easier bout of sickness than I had dealt with in southern Turkey, but it still immobilized me for a short while. I decided it was the perfect time to really settle in and establish a plan.

It was also when I let go of this central theme I had been holding onto so fervently. I decided that since this service program had bailed on me, I could open my mind to the idea that this is a much more open trip, an open ended kind of travel that I will never experience again. And with that in mind I started to make new plans.

For a while I considered taking a ferry into Italy to explore from the south of the country up to Rome and into the mountains. This would have been an amazing route, ending in the Alps, a range of mountains that I have wanted to see for as long as I can remember.

I added to this the consideration of changing the route entirely, and flying to meet Hugo (who I met in Turkiye) on his trip through India and Nepal. This, again would have led me to another mountain range that haunts my dreams.

By this time I had realized that there were no bad options.

The last consideration came from the early parts of my trip. I kept hearing about Morocco; It’s amazing beaches, markets, food, and an entirely different twist on the arabic culture that I was experiencing.

When I looked, the flights were cheap.

In the end, surfing won out over mountaineering, and I booked a cheap flight to Morocco.

In my last days in Albania, as I started to feel better, I went on a few hikes, exploring the mountains (and some caves!) around the capital city, and getting intel for my return to the area.

My plan, moving forward is to explore overland, from Morocco back east in the direction of the Caucases, hoping to end my Journey in Armenia once again.

This time I will not take such an extended hiatus, I’ll be back soon.

D