Ohrid is a beautiful lakeside tourist town in Macedonia that I took a lot of pictures in even though we only stayed here for 4 nights. It is on Lake Ohrid, which is a lake that is on the border between Macedonia and Albania. One third of the lake is actually in Albania. The beach town of Ohrid only has about 40,000 people but it is one of the bigger tourist destinations in Macedonia. It has a lot of old buildings and churches with many of them being scenically next to the lake shore. The buildings remind us of the old Turkish buildings that we saw in Antalya, with a small footprint on the ground floor but a larger 2nd floor and an even larger 3rd floor. The town also has a hilltop fortress and an ancient theater. We seem to see those in every town… We are now having some great early summer weather so it made our stay feel even better and it is going to be tough to leave.
We didn’t actually do much here except walk around. There aren’t any blockbuster museums that were mandatory attractions. We did walk up to the old fortress and did a lot of walking around old town. We saw the old buildings, the old theater and went in several very old churches that were filled with ancient frescos. The waterfront walk was very popular with locals and tourists. Everyone seemed to be out enjoying the warm weather. The lake water wasn’t quite warm enough for swimming but a lot of people were still hanging out on the rocky beaches.
I did get in a bike ride one day. I need to get myself back in biking shape for some bike touring this summer back in the US. I have a long way to go. Ohrid is a great place for some fairly flat rides along the lakeside. I only rode about 15 miles but that may have been because I kept getting distracted looking for birds.
You can see all the attractions in Ohrid in 1 day but we were still happy to have had 4 nights in this town. We ate some decent Balkan food and very reasonable prices and got to experience a beach town for the first time since we were in Turkey in April. We enjoyed ourselves but are ready to move on. The next country is Albania. We are going to start with a few days in the capital city of Tirana.