08-Aug-2003 -- Me and my girlfriend devoted our summer hollidays to visit the three confluences in Macedonia, and this was the first we attempted. Macedonia maintains an excellent public transportation system, so it was easy to reach Sveti Nikole, which lies south the confluence point by bus. We asked in the shop at the bus terminal for means to reach Kokosinje, a small village, which was according to our map just about 3 kilometers away from the confluence point. Once we had explained why we, two foreigners without any knowledge of the macedonian language, wanted to visit a village in the middle of nowhere, consisting of some thirty houses and inhabitated mostly by elderly farmers, Daniel the shopkeeper agreed to go with us, and organised a taxi, which would bring us to Kokosinje, and pick us up when we had finished our task.

Though the last part of the street to Kokosinje was in a terrible state, it took us not more than twenty minutes to reach it. From Kokosinje, according to my GPS, we had to hike about four kilometers into the small mountains behind it. Daniel had warned us to be very carefull, because in the mountains in the area are populated with a great variety of snakes, some of which are dangerous to humans. The hills were covered with high sunburned grass, small crooked trees, and red dust. Despite the great heat, and our axiousness to avoid the snakes, we made good progress, until we came to a valley which we virtually could'nt traverse. The slopes on both sides were very steep, and thickly covered with thistles shrubs and boulders. We decided to leave our backpacks behind, and try get around it, although this meant detour of at least three kilometers. We managed to avoid the valley, but lost almost an hour and ran out of water.

When we came down the last hill befor the confluence, we were very startled to see, that there was a small farmhouse about two hundred meters beneath the confluence. The old women living there, supplied us with water, gave us some food, and listened in disbelief to our explanations which daniel translated for us. She sure thought we were insane, but was very pleased to have visitors nonetheless, as her farm could only be reached by some mud track, and the next neighbours live a couple of kilometers away.

When we finally got to make the pictures at the confluence, we were already in a great hurry, because we had very little time left to pick up our backpacks and get to the meeting point with the taxi back to sveti nikole.