Day 25: Tirana-Debar (89 km, 1960 ↑)

Day 26: Debar-Ohrid (68 km, 520 ↑)

Day 27: Ohrid-Edessa (105 km, 931 ↑)

Tirana was a nice city that we would have enjoyed during the weekend as well. But on Tuesday we continued our journey to North Macedonia.

The first stage to Debar was going to be the one with the highest total elevation gain so far. We started around eight o’clock and would soon after we left Tirana climb more than one thousand metres.

The traffic was alright today. Tirana was busy, but not too stressful. And for the rest of the day, the roads normally had a quite wide shoulder to cycle on. So we didn’t have to worry too much about the traffic today.

When I planned the route originally, I did not realise that it included a four kilometres long tunnel. Upon further research, we found out that it was not open for cyclists. So we had to take the old road over the mountain instead.

As always, we took some coffee breaks on the way. Around four o’clock we passed the border between Albania and North Macedonia, and half an hour later, we reached our first stop in North Macedonia, a small town called Debar. There was not too much going on there, but we had a nice dinner and went home early.

The workday in Debar was a debarcle, you can say. Electricity disappeared around 10. We first didn’t notice and could continue working with our PC batteries. Internet was still working for some reason. But my PC battery was empty after a while. Our host recommended to go to a bar. You could hear diesel generators running here and there. But it seemed like the cafés only had their coffee machines powered, but nothing else. People were sitting in the dark in the cafés.

The electricity came back eventually, and we could finish our working day. After two days in Debar, we continued towards the next town in North Macedonia, Ohrid. It was another working day, though, so we finished work a bit early and started cycling at 3:15 PM. The weather forecast predicted some rain, but we were lucky, and it was not raining too much on the way. It became dark before we reached Ohrid. The last one hour we cycled in darkness.

Ohrid is situated at Lake Ohrid, a big lake in North Macedonia, and it’s a tourist destination. In Ohrid we stayed for one night, and then we continued to our last stop in North Macedonia, Bitola.

The ride to Bitola was pretty challenging. It was raining in the morning in Ohrid. We went to the bakery to have some supplies for during the ride, took a short photo stop at the lake, and then left into the mountains.

Originally, we had planned to cycle the Trans Dinarica cycle route to Bitola, covering a distance of around 100 km and 1600 metres to climb. But due to the rain, we chose a more direct route, 30 km shorter and half the metres to climb, which was challenging enough because we got warm during the ascent and cold during the downhill rides despite our rain jackets.

In Bitola, we stayed in two separate apartments for the first time, which cost 20 € each per night, which was a luxury we allowed ourselves. We did watch the Hannover-Schalke game together though and admired the Muslic team’s determination.

On our ride to Edessa, we left North Macedonia and reached the Greek border after 15 kilometres. Already before, Udo had his third broken spoke during this trip. Therefore, right after we crossed the border and could dial into an EU phone network again, we googled bike repair shops and found one in Florina, which we called and asked whether they could repair a spoke during the same day. They confirmed.

Florina meant a little detour of ten kilometres, but the mechanic was very friendly and repaired the wheel within one hour, that we spent enjoying a coffee by the river.

After we continued our trip, we had two unfriendly encounters with sheepdogs. The first pack, Udo had already passed, but I had to get off my bike and had a heated argument with them. And the second pack, I passed before Udo, and we both had to shout and explain that we only wanted to pass by.

Due to the delays, we first reached Edessa after it got dark. In Edessa, we enjoyed a nice salad and souvlaki dinner.