Our last day in the bus started out uneventfully as we left Hotel Ibis in Skopje ontime, bound for the Bulgarian capital again. As we made our way along the highway, Biliana gave us a present of a Penguin tours "buff" that Bronnie and I modelled in the bus and as we made our first toilet stop at a servo, still inside North Macedonia.

As we were about to reboard the bus, the starter motor failed...oh no. Apparently, if there is a breakdown in Bulgaria, Penguin will send a replacement, but we were still about 30 minutes away. Oh no. So, Boris went to work along with a local mechanic to get the bus started again. While we were waiting, we went up the road to a nearby restaurant to pass the time and have lunch. It was actually quite a nice place and a chance to chat to some of the other tour members (US and kiwi). Learned a bit about how things work in their countries. Biggest surprise is that in the US there is no legislated minimum time for holidays in a work year and plenty of companies don't. Same with sick leave and health insurance which for a family is typically about $1000/month. This covers pretty much everything though. They also have district funded school systems that not only arrange curriculum, but also resourcing and teacher salaries! Yikes.

Anyway, after a 3 hour delay, we were eventually back on the road to Sofia, via our final set of border crossing police, although the bus had to remain running! Back at the Hotel Budapest (on Sofia) and we were put in the same room! As soon as the bus arrived and we said thankyou and farewell to Boris and Biliana, everyone dispersed very quickly. We had dinner in the restaurant and chatted to Paul (US, recently retired child psychiatrist) and the kiwis (Chris and Anne-Marie). They have 4 more of these tours throughout this region booked back to back. They travel permanently at the moment, with a winnebago in Florida as the closest to their residence! Strange.

As we near the end of the Balkan section, some further thoughts. It has been really interesting to observe the effects of political struggles/power on an area, and also the net negative effect of still relatively recent socialist/communist political regimes. I watched an interesting video about a university lecturer who applied this to a group of students by averaging their scores on the first task. It came out as 8. Those who had scored lower and hadn't worked hard thought it was great, those above were pissed. Same experiment on test number 2, but everyone worked less, so the average was 6. By test 3, the average was 4/10 and everyone failed the task. Interesting idea well executed to make the point.

Another lasting memory will be the smells of the Balkans. There is a distinctive aroma of the people, rooms, restaurants. Here goes. It's like a combo of stale cigarette smoke (they are only about $4-5 a pack), onions, diesel particulate/oily funk, body odour and humidity. It's a smell that you get used to and is something reminiscent of Australia of our childhood, but with the onions and body odour in the mix.

Lasting flavours are of the importance of meats and hot metal plates with not necessarily many vegetables. They do serve salad though. Our favourite foods were the Burek/pie with yoghurt sauce, the cevapi and pita style/pide bread with kasmak (cultured butter cream) and the local beers were extremely refreshing. We survived the bus without catching any viruses, despite a few of our fellow travellers getting a bit of a cold along the way. We loved the random stray dogs and cats in the region, leaving lasting memories. Tomorrow, we fly out of the Balkans via Frankfurt en route to Marseilles.