8 August 2002 - Péc / Peja

Leaving Prishtina, I head west to the town of Péc/Peja (Serbian/Albanian), which nestles under towering mountains.

The west of Kosovo saw fierce fighting in 1999.

In the middle of nowhere, one often finds large and vulgar monuments to Kosovo Liberation Army "martyrs".

In streets across Kosovo, you find horn-hooting wedding processions.

Péc/Peja has a crumbling old bazaar area with some nice but war-damaged mosques.

There is a large Turkish building, where apparently something politically-significant happened once.

The central hotel, the Hotel Metohija, has been taken over by KFOR as a command centre...

...and the Italian troops obviously wanted their sand-bag enclosure to be pristine.

With all hotels but one taken over by the International Community, the one remaining charges monopoly prices, and is thus best avoided. I avoided it by heading up the mountains to Montenegro.

The mountain is incredibly steep, and soon all of Kosovo appears beneath me.

For two hours, I did nothing but climb the 10% slope.

I still failed to get there by midnight, and even the next morning I was nowhere near the top.