It’s night. Technically I’m on a Flixbus; in reality it’s a white minivan with a makeshift Flixbus sticker. I’m crossing the border between North Macedonia and Albania, near Qafë Thanë. The trip from Skopje to Tirana was advertised as six hours, but with the border checks it will take closer to nine.
Flying in the Balkans is never really an option: it means pointless layovers, dead time, and a long trajectory to cover a distance that looks reasonable on paper. I had considered an executive car—more comfortable, faster—but in the end I chose the bus, drawn by the idea of sharing the journey with other passengers. In reality, there are only five of us.
Three of us boarded in Skopje. Besides me, a Russian woman who lives in Rome and came to Macedonia to sell a cat. She speaks Italian, with the confidence of someone who has crossed many borders by bus. She travels with a half-charged phone and a few cash bills, no credit card. The other passenger from Skopje seems Southeast Asian. Since getting on, he has kept his headphones on and hasn’t exchanged a word or a glance with anyone. The two who boarded in Tetovo speak Albanian. They are dressed simply and carry half-empty backpacks. I wonder where they’re coming from, what they’re doing on this night bus, whether they’re heading home. They get off near Elbasan.
And then there’s the driver, an Albanian. He ate a full McDonald’s meal on the bus before we left Skopje, and while he seems friendly at first, he really isn’t. He belongs to a different world, one of people who know borders not as passengers, but as daily routine: kilometers, waiting, checkpoints, improvised dinners.
A few kilometers before the border, the journey changes rhythm. The driver stops at the last service station, asks for our documents, writes our details on a slip to hand over, and returns them fifteen minutes later. When we get to border control, there’s a long line of cars and trucks, a dog sniffing inside vehicles, people standing along the road waiting to move forward.
Used to Schengen crossings, this feels strange: caught between Albania, sealed off until the fall of Hoxha, and North Macedonia, born from the breakup of Yugoslavia. We’re outside the EU, outside Schengen, and you can feel every kilometer of it.
After about an hour of waiting, the driver pulls over again and asks for our documents, presumably to hand them to the police. I don’t understand anything he says, or what they say to each other. I just follow their gestures. At some point I realize how vulnerable I am: without documents, waiting, at a nighttime border that feels remote. “It’s normal,” the Russian woman tells me. But the sensation is odd.
For a moment, your journey is no longer yours.
We still don’t have our documents when the driver pulls the van into a warehouse with peeling walls and cold lights, built for inspections. At the back, a small table with a policeman examining papers—not ours, I think. They make us get off, luggage included. As they open my suitcase, I notice posters listing prohibited substances. I know mine is clean, and hope the same for the others. For a moment I curse not taking a private car.
The van is positioned over an inspection pit, wheels on either side of an empty trench. The structure is old and worn, built to check undercarriages with flashlights for illegal substances, or people.
The wait stretches on. The border becomes a movie playing in slow motion: every movement reduced to the minimum, controlled, monitored, authorized.
When the driver finally reappears with our passports, I breathe out.
Night distorts borders, making them heavier, colder, more absolute. Everything felt less like standard procedure and more like a pause button. But then, without warning, the barricades lift, and Albania begins. The border, so important just minutes ago, simply dissolves into the dark.