walk in snowy mountains

on Friday started to feel a bit ill, in the evening arrived in Struga for Vesnas&Kristin's goodbye-party. It was raing cats&dogs that night. And during the night the operation Planinska Bura was replaced by a real Planinska Bura with big wind, thunderstorm and snow.
Next morning I felt a bit better and decided to go to Vevchani, other people were going to Ohrid. Inese joined me. We missed the bus by 1 min and hitchhiked a car to Vevchani. The village was very quiet and empty. we went to some kind of park with springs, nice place. there was snow on the trees and inese was taking pictures. then some guy came and said that it is forbidden to take pictures here and he works for municipality as some kind of guide. he convinced us to go 5 min on the other side of the mountain to some little church with springs, very beautiful view... i was doubting because i did not like the guy and other side of the mountain looked very far. ok, but we can go for 5 min up, no problem. but then it was 5 more min and 5 more min and then it was too far to turn back. but we were going just up further in the forest, more and more snow. climbed some 3 hours at the end. up there was total winter, lots of snow, dry snow you could not make balls and real frost.
crossed the mountain river some 5 times. i got really pissed off with the guy and was almost killing him at the end and it did nto feel good at all being so far from civilization when it is getting dark and i dont see any light and village. but the biggest crisis was just 5 min walk to the village when i did not believe his 5 min at all (he wanted to make fire to warm his hands before going to the village...for me seemed stupid to do it. just 5 min away from the village where he said was a restaurant and taxis). but this time he was right, it was just 5 min away but the restaurant was not working and the village was quite deserted...
so we walked down and it was getting dark. there were some guys with a small zastava in the village and they were soon coming down but the car was full and they were driving like fools on the ice. we walked to another village and a nice lady let us in in the house and made some coffee and gave us blackberry juice. and our batteries were killed by the frost very fast. but somehow with 3 phones we managed to call the stupid guys friends who finally picked us up from there by car. first 1 km we were going slower than walking because the guy was very very afraid to drive on the icy road. but we got back to Struga and it was so great to be back! warm! safe! alive! no mechki & volki (bears & wolfs)!