Well, irony of ironies, despite the snow that almost prevented us getting to England, & despite the thickly iced Alps we flew over, & despite the fresh fall of snow in the UK this week closing schools, making tobogganing a temporary national sport, there was no snow in Macedonia. At All. The whole week. Zip. Nil. Nowt. Europe has been in the grip of snow except for a little pocket of warm weather 5000ft up in the Macedonian mountains
It rained instead. Difficult to ski when there’s no snow. So we didn't. Difficult to find things to do in a ski resort with no snow. We hadn't brought swimming costumes, sports clothes, nothing. I had one play to read for school, which I finished the 1st day.
We did find small patches of snow to have snowball fights & we walked, forded streams turned into mini raging torrents, visited a waterfall etc.
Turns out this was the first time in SIXTY years that there had been no snow in Mavrovo this Christmas/New Year week. Bad timing. Bad luck.
To add insult to injury, the night before we left, it snowed. And snowed. And snowed. From nothing, we went to 18cm of snow. The resort was transformed into a wonderland overnight. So we decided to stay & ski for half a day then travel home.
But despite the fact that the shops rented us ski gear, the lift operators were not going to let us on the main chair lift WITH skis. In case we skied up there on the snowy mountain. After half an hour they did let us up with skis (I think the ski rental boys had a ‘word’ with the lift operator boys & they came to an agreement.) But once up there, there were no drags or button lifts open so you could only walk up slopes, (hard work) or ski back down (on a black run) and then pay to go up again etc etc. I had skied it last year, but not really what I wanted to do on the first run of the holiday on an unpisted black with heavy fresh snow on it. My husband & son of course did. My son is already beginning to leave me behind, certainly in terms of ‘bottle’. So that was that. I walked up & skied down one slope & skied half way down before hopping back on the chair lift, before the scary bit started.
The only similarity with last year was that the journeys were equally ‘eventful’. On the way, our friends in the other vehicle had just had a roof rack made & fitted for this trip. This was its 1st rd test. It was stacked with food & bags. They were behind us so we didn’t get to see the entire roof rack lurch & lean to one side as the struts holding it buckled under the weight & wind resistance.
Very fortuitously they swerved off the rd right into a little garage, where the guys there obligingly sawed up an old metal window frame & braced the legs with a support. This is Albania in microcosm. The initial work was poor quality & shoddy but the ‘fix it’ was real ‘make do & mend’ resourcefulness. And worked very well.
On the way back, we were battling the snow, icy roads & treacherous conditions we hadn’t had all week. Another example of this Albanian resourcefulness; we saw a normal 2 wheel drive Albanian car going up the very icy pass, with a guy lying on the bonnet of the car. We gathered this was to weigh down the front & stop it skidding. Dangerous but ingenious…. The Albanians coming into Macedonia were driving in their usual mad dash way. We don’t have enough snow in Albania for anyone to know how to drive in those conditions. (Bit like Britain in that regard I guess. Only in the UK people slow down to a crawl. In Albania they speed up)
We saw accidents, cars skidding into each other, 2 crashes; we skidded ourselves right at the start, almost into 2 parked cars at one point. It was quite hairy until we went into 4WD then it was fine. Our fellow drivers in their Land Drover (of wobbly roof rack fame) hadn’t managed to get the right 4WD because the manual was in German. We didn’t know they were having problems & they clearly had forgotten I speak German… though whether, once translated into English I would have any clearer idea of what to do, I'm not entirely sure...So they had an anxious drive home. The scenery though was stunning.
So that was the ski holiday that wasn’t.
