Balkans. Day 19: Ohrid – Pejë (Kosovo)

The day starts early, around 5:45 am. After breakfast and leaving the room, I walk the 2km to the bus station and get there just in time for the bus to Skopje at 7:15. Ohrid has a real bus station with ticket office and everything works just perfectly.

There is one hour between my connections in Skopje and I try to ignore my surroundings as much as possible in order not to let the terrible station destroy my enchantment for this city. Every time I have to spend time in a train station or bus station in the world, I ask myself how come these places are such hopeless, sad, and ugly locations. Who decided that stations, exactly these places where you are obliged to wait and spend time with no escape, have to be terrible? Would it really be so hard to create  waiting areas that are not an insult to the human soul? A tree, a bench, a roof? But no. There seems to be some kind of international agreement that stations cannot be pleasant places but need lots of draft, dirt, darkness and hopelessness. Be it in Saarbrücken, in Paris or in Skopje.
On the one hand the door to the world, a place of endless possibilities and freedom. On the other hand pure hostility. Maybe an obstacle every traveller has to overcome? A first test if they are prepared for the inconveniences of the journey and the strange new worlds they are going to?

Anyway, the station is not even that bad, and the bus to Pristina is on time. We drive through the somewhat bleak landscape between Skopje and the border and start the crossing process to Kosovo. The choreography is slightly different here. The bus stops at the Macedonian border, everyone get out and stands in a line to show their passports and vaccination certificates and get back into the bus. Then we drive for 100 meters and repeat the same process at the Kosovo border. The ceremony, as well as the whole drive, is accompanied by girls in glittery dresses singing desynchronized Albania songs in the VHS television in the bus.

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Astounded and happy to hear that Kosovo seems to be one of the few Balkan countries that own a train, my plan had been to take the train from Pristina to Peja. But once I get to the station and ask, everybody seems confused about my will to take a train. “No train” I get as an answer, and get into a bus. And in fact, the bus leaves immediately off to Peja.
Like a river, drop by drop, bus by bus, the day flows by. Kosovo looks very green and hilly at first, then very flat and brown with the same kind of housing and structures as in Albania. Monuments of war heros on the side of the road are no rarity.

Much earlier than expected and half dozed off I get kicked out of the bus and find myself standing in the middle of a very lively and sunny station with my backpack and very confused. I have no Internet and cannot find my hostel on Google maps. My intent to sit in a bar with Wifi and check it out calmly fails when I walk along a few bars and there are exclusively men sitting there. It’s not that there are no women on the street but apparently they don’t go to bars, and in that case, neither do I. In my confusion, I decide to ask a Taxi driver. There are three of them and one speaks German (in general, nobody speaks English but most people speak German here). I show him the name of the hostel but he has never heard of it, neither the name of the street. But he puts me into a Taxi with one of his colleagues who doesn’t speak any English nor German and sends me off. “It’s probably Camp Hotel…” “No, it’s not Camp Hotel.” “If it’s not one, it’s the other, just go with him.”
I do so, and of course it’s still not Camp Hotel when we get to Camp Hotel. I use the drivers phone and we have to go all the way back because it’s on the other side of the bus station. That wasn’t foreseeable at all.

Roughly following the map, we arrive in a residential area, and even the three people on the street, two taxi drivers and a whole community in a bar that we ask on the way cannot help to find the place. Even when we are standing right in front of the house on the address, it is impossible to tell if we’re right. No sign, no clue that this house like all the others might be a hostel. But it is. After ringing three times, somebody opens the door.

Apparently Astrid (a man in his 40s) has forgotten his password for Hostelworld, where I made my booking, and cannot enter the page since three months ago. But I’m lucky and the room is still free. The house stinks of smoke and the guy won’t stop talking (he also knows German), the promised bathroom doesn’t exist. But, all together, I can be happy that the hostel exists and it will have to be my home for the next three nights.

With all these complaints, one might think: private room with bathroom, what is that anyway? Since when do we travel like this? Well, my first excuse for not sleeping in the usual 12 person dorms, is Covid. And the second one is that I’m 30 now and I can afford a “Deluxe Private Room” for 14€ a night.

Once I get rid of the very talkative host, I head off towards the center because I have still some day left and want to know where I am. At first the roads are busy, fruit stands, mini shops, kebab places, coffee shops, noise, cars and people everywhere. Then I enter a pedestrian zone and suddenly feel like I’m on some bazaar in Turkey. There are hundreds of lightbulbs hanging over the street and one shop next to each other, all of them selling the same fake Nike, Prada, Adidas hats, shirts, shoes and sweaters. The only disruption are the smoking Quebaptore places that prepare grilled Quebapa (Chevapcici). It seems like Quebapa, Döner and Pizza are the only foods offered in the city.

The further I walk, the quieter and more sympathetic becomes Pejë which hasn’t convinced me so far. There are a few squares and pedestrian zones with shops and coffee shops spread all over the city at places that, viewed in isolation, seem almost picturesque. All in all it’s a very ugly city with no old buildings left and poorly reconstructed. I see a big mosque and some more monuments for war heros, amongst others one very big one for a general of UÇK, the Kosovo liberation army. Unlike in Bosnia, there are no half-destroyed buildings or anything of the kind. I don’t know why, but I had expected something new and different from Kosovo and must admit now that it looks pretty much like what I’ve seen from Albania (which actually makes total sense).

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Back in the hostel I try cooking something but the existence of a kitchen was another lie in the description of the, so I am content with some leftover potatoes from yesterday and canned tuna for now. As a revenge for the missing kitchen, bathroom and other mistakes in the description, I steal a tiny cucumber. Evil me.

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I want to point out, as a general notice, that a those descriptions I write here are mere personal impressions I get by visiting a very limited area of these countries, meeting a very limited number of random people and making very personal experiences. Of course I know that Albania was completely sealed off from the world until 1991, Kosovo was in war until 1999 and these are still some of the poorest countries in Europe. I cannot even imagine what most of the people I encounter have experienced during their lives. I am in no place to judge just after a few days of visiting over any of the people who live here or decide whether they are friendly or unfriendly or less or more organized. My descriptions are subjective descriptions of personal experiences at a specific point in time and place, in which I try not to exaggerate and generalize but neither conceal my thoughts and that is what they should be understood as.