FYR of Macedonia Travel Answers

Hi Dabs. That's the route I'll be taking after Euromeet but I'll have a whole week to play with. I haven't as yet done any serious pre-planning and so will be interested to see what replies you get. I can't see flying Skopje to Sofia as being that much faster than taking the bus and the bus certainly will be a lot cheaper. Bit of a long-winded bookmark LOL ;)

I'll have a look at Nis, we don't have a lot of time but it may be an option if I can find a bus connection from Ohrid to Nis and then from Nis to Sofia. I'm looking at the bus schedule from Skopje and regrettably once I switch over to English all of the schedules disappear. I think this is the Sofia schedule but is there any indication of how long the bus takes? And then I still need to get from Ohrid to Sofia, is there a schedule for that somewhere? http://www.sas.com.mk/index-Sofija.html And I've looked on the timetable for buses from Skopje to Bitola and I can't find any, what am I missing?

I've come across exactly the same problem with both Sofia's and Skopje's bus station sites. I can find the departures, but not the journey times. I suppose the way to do it is to look at the Skopje departures and then look at the Sofia arrivals and see if you can work out which bus is which and extrapolate from there. Bulgarian online bus timetables tend, in my experience, to be very unreliable so far as pre-planning goes and it's easier to just get there and then wing it. BTW I can read cyrillic and so can use the non-English Sofia and Skopje bus station webpages but that doesn't make the timetables any more reliable!!

There are no direct flights between Skopje and Sofia. The shortest route by air is 4 hrs 15 mins via Vienna.

Might look at that one Paul - Vienna is on my list of places to visit and would make an intersting digression. Nis is under consideration - not a place I've thought about but maybe I will.

Hi! I've made the bus trip between Sofia and Skopje a couple of times. Thatisindeed the schedule you found. The first column is the time of departure, The second is the name of the company, and the last indicates it runs daily. Any of the companies is fine, they are all respectable. Depending on the time of day you choose to go, and the day itself, you might end up in either a full-size coach bus or a mini-van. The price is the same, no matter what type of bus. I just came to Skopje from Sofia, and the ticket one-way was 32 lev, approx 27 USD. The time length of the ride depends on what size bus you get and how busy the border check is. The mini-vans can go faster than the coaches. The border isn't terribly busy as a rule, but you never know. In general, estimate about 3 hours for the trip, maybe 4 for a good cushion of time. I highly recommend Sofia! I love it. Plovdiv is also beautiful and often there are concerts in the Roman amphitheater on the weekends in the summer.

3-4 hours? It was slightly over 5 hours and cost 1040 mkd and we lost an hour for the time change. Easy to buy the ticket, plenty of seats, bathroom break halfway through. Will write up a proper tip when I get home