It was home to Alexander the Great and Mother Theresa but Macedonia is now a tourist destination.
Konstantin’s first words to us were “Macedonians welcome guests at midnight the same as at mid-day. They welcome with spring water, bread, cheese and salt, fruit and brandy. They kiss three times – for life, for death and for honour.”
He was fair-skinned, dark-haired and handsome and, like most of the people we saw in the streets of the towns, dressed in western-style clothes.

Konstantin, like everyone in the towns, wanted to practise English . Their own language is, to say the least, complex. “It is not like Serbian”, he said “Or even Slav”. “More like Bulgarian”. “I see”, I said, “Quite so!”
In town there was little sign of those round Balkan hats or women’s headscarves that you see in pictures supposedly showing the typical local dweller. These were the preserve of the villages.
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For the adventure travelers out there, Macedonia offers a treasure trove of little-visited destinations to discover all on your own. Guidebooks barely cover Macedonia, the land-locked country in Eastern Europe, so even visiting the main cities might feel like an off-road adventure. Here are a few ideas to really get out and see the country when you visit. It might just seem like you have the whole place to yourself.

Any part of the country outside Skopje and Ohrid. These two cities are about all that is covered by guidebooks or articles on what to do and see in Macedonia. There is the whole rest of the country ready to be discovered. Albeit, it is one of the smaller countries in the region. Hotels, bed and breakfasts, historical sites and others catering to tourists are eagerly investing in the tourist business, bringing new enthusiasm to little-visited towns and cities.
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