After the night in the truly dreadful Brahm's Hotel in Skopje (read yesterday's post), the five of us were ready to embark on the finally part of our journey. Having been told that we wouldn't be able to leave Skopje and that the border was closed because of the ongoing conflict, which we had witnessed first-hand the day before, we were determined to push on. We'd come so far and to turn around without at least trying would have been to give up...

So we boarded the White Land Rover Defender 110 and were on the way.

I know I keep banging on about the white Land Rover, but all will be revealed in a few minutes if you keep reading.

Paul (another English Guy), one of the Americans and I were squidged on the bench seat behind the driver and front passenger seat and George (the boss) and the other American was in the front, with George driving. I am not sure how it happened, but George did keep muttering "I think it is this way", but to all intents and purposes it actually showed that we were lost and before we knew it we found ourselves on a dusty dirt track.

Lost we stopped and asked a middle-aged lady. One of the Americans spoke a smattering of Macedonian and from what he gleaned we should carry on the way we were going and "cross the river". All seemed simple enough until we were confronted by three forks in the track.

George had no idea so he asked us to guess which way we should go. I remember suggesting one particular way and the others expressed differing opinions. I don't know why, maybe it was the narrowest or seemed more in line with the direction we were trying to go into. George, of course tried the other routes first and each led to a dead end and so we returned to the junction point and gave "my" route ago. We were bumping along quite nicely when suddenly there was a river in front of us and the most rickety bridge I have ever seen in my life. It was made up of small logs and little else and from my perspective it seemed to be narrower than the Land Rover.

George, being George, just put his foot to the floor and accelerated over it. It is important to emphasise at this point that George is probably just about the best driver I have ever seen in my life. Before we knew it we were across and I looked behind half expecting to see the bridge collapsing behind us - as demonstrated in the AI-Generated image, which does enough to create an idea of what I feared. The bridge did hold somehow and to this day I still don't know how.

Almost immediately we encountered an asphalt slope, to call it a slip road would be an exaggeration, and still going fast after speeding across the bridge we found ourselves on a large well paved highway. George immediately said that it was the road we had been looking for and even chuckled slightly and said I had been right all along!

So now it should be plain sailing or so you would think? Somehow we had found some obscure way out of Skopje that the authorities hadn't closed down and crossed the river. Suddenly, to the side of the road was a military Land Rover, not too dissimilar to ours other than its markings (although it might have been a 90 rather than a 110) and we were flagged down. George brought our Land Rover to a halt and opened his window. 

Would you believe they were British soldiers and after asking us how we got out of Skopje in the first place because it should have been impossible they reiterated what we already knew - that being that the border was shut. They did however also add that because they were British and so were we that they wouldn't be the ones to stop us. Finally, they added that they would see us in about quarter of an hour once we'd reached the border and came back.

We duly thanks them and set off again.

Then the most remarkable of two things happened - and yes this is the point where our white unmarked Land Rover becomes incredibly relevant. 

Firstly it must have only been a couple of minutes later that we came across a road that merged with ours from the right and coming along it was a combined convoy and NATO (Green / Military / APCs etc) and UN (while some with a large UN sign and some not) vehicles and before we knew it we found ourselves in the middle of it and just carried on driving.

Then secondly, as we approached the border, the NATO vehicles suddenly peeled off onto a small branch road on our right and we found ourselves in the middle of a UN-only (apart from us) convoy. I have since reasoned that NATO probably had a base that straddled the border to minimise border crossing issues. 

The convoy now approached the border one and at time and we carried on. When it was our turn our Land Rover was approached by a Turkish policeman / border guard who was working for UNMiK (the United Nations Mission in Kosovo) and he asked for our passports which George handed over. He never even opened them. He counted five and then he counted five people in the vehicle and waved us through.

It was one of the easiest border crossings I had ever experienced in that part of the world and I have always believed that it was because the Turk had assumed we were part of the UN mission and just passed us through. We were foreign, in a white Land Rover that pretty much blended in and to all intents and purposes were part of the same convoy.

A Miracle? Who knows? But definitely remarkable.

Almost immediately after crossing the border we saw a convoy of a lot of Nato heavy equipment including Main Battle Tanks, parked against the side of the road facing the other we. We all speculated that NATO were preparing to go in hard if the peace talks failed and this might have been one of the reasons the border was closed, so nobody would see it coming.

Of course this is all conjecture.

The rest of the journey passed without incident and after a brief stop in Prishtina we travelled on to Klina which was going to be my home for the next several months.

One last thing, that same night I was watching the local news and they kept playing the same story again and again. Macedonian armed forces had stopped a car at a checkpoint in Tetovo, and asked the two ethnic Albanians who were inside to get out. It turned out that they were father and son. One of them reached for something or had something in his hand which the armed forces mistakenly identified a grenades and shot both of them dead. It turned out to be a mobile phone and there was a lot of anger and personally and slightly fearfully I saw it as a further escalation of the crisis.

Fortunately that never happened and NATO was able to enforce a peace that has held ever since, even if a lot of tensions remain, although they are more between the ethnic Albanians and Serbs in places like Mitrovica in Kosovo.

Tomorrow we will look at how I left Kosovo for the last time and that meant yet another (last) Balkan adventure.

As always, stay safe and well my friends.