28 September 2023, Tetovo, 36.79km
Hotel Yal 1500 den [R486]

Today we cycled 37km due west to Tetovo, built in the foothills of the Šar Mountains and divided by the Pena River. With a population of around 73,000, it is North Macedonia's fifth largest city.
We are supposed to be headed east toward Bulgaria and Turkey, but the few things we want to see in North Macedonia lie in the west, so we will loop east later.
We rode the old road which runs parallel to the motorway and which climbs mildly for much of the distance between Matka and Tetovo. During a roadside cappuccino stop, we met a local English teacher who with two or three colleagues was taking a coffee break from his school day. Charl and I had been talking about it likely being safer to ride the wide shoulder on the motorway than the narrow old road and asked the teacher if this was allowed. He said probably not but that 5 or 10 Euro would allay the concerns of any cops we might encounter! Corruption has been a common theme when discussing Balkan governments with the populace... 
Macedonia is one of Europe's poorest countries. Poverty is, of course, relative and one does not see here the kind of poverty associated with Africa so in general it looks OK to us. However, the many unfinished buildings tell a tale, as do the second-hand cars imported from west Europe. 
There are strange contradictions: government excesses in Skopje, new overly-elaborate buildings plonked seemingly at random in odd locations, lovely mosques and churches, new residential buildings with clean modern lines, lots if casinos, an excess of car washes. 
Our penultimate leg was through an industrial world and it was beside a garage servicing cars that we broke for lunch at a tiny place with a few tables on the sidewalk. We ordered _burger_ but were served _burek_. We obviously did not get our pronunciation quite right but were happy in the end with our delicious meat-stuffed phyllo pastry, a nice change from ubiquitous burger. 
A factory labourer, taking his daily coffee break at the same restaurant, talked and talked through our lunch. In his early-50s, he is married with three grown children and a couple of grandchildren. He had hoped that when North Macedonia joined the United Nations in 1993, it would be possible for him to find better-paid work elsewhere in Europe. Due to lengthy disputes with Greece* and Bulgaria over the country's name, flag and history, North Macedonia has yet to be included in the European Union. It was very sad to hear him talk of waiting 30 years for an opportunity that never came. 
Our last leg to our pre-booked hotel was oddly through odorous farmland...
This evening we walked a couple of hundred meters to stock up on odd sods from a nearby supermarket and encountered a beautifully painted kindergarten - magical. 
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*"... in 1945 [Macedonia] was established as a constituent state of communist Yugoslavia, which it remained until its peaceful secession in 1991. The country became a member of the United Nations in 1993, but as a result of a dispute with Greece over the name "Macedonia", it was admitted under the provisional description "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia". In 2018, Macedonia and Greece resolved the dispute with an agreement that the country should rename itself "Republic of North Macedonia". This renaming came into effect in early 2019."