Rain was forecast until 9am, so I breakfasted at leisure in the rather-nice-if-has-seen-better-days Hotel Lazur. Almost out of habit after the last few days or cold & wet - I layered up before setting off. No rain before or after 9am. In fact a clear crisp morning - and as I laboured up the first long slow hill (dead straight as well, maybe once a Roman road?) I quickly overheated and had to de-layer. The border crossing into North Macedonia was unproblematic on both sides. The North Macedonian side steeper than Bulgaria - but blissfully 10km downhill through thickly wooded hills before turning off and up (10 to 17%! but only for two kilometres) a forest valley to the Monastery of St Joakim Osogovsky, where I am staying the night. My room large light and comfortable - part of a newish but sensitively done complex built in the last couple of decades for visitors. Apparently there are now now no monks resident in the Monastery. Th first church - little, and taller than wide - was built in the 12thC - dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The monastery was on a well-travelled thoroughfare - and used by Muslims as well as Christians. In the 16thC it was for a while a mosque before reverting to being a church. It was badly damaged during the 17thC Austro-Ottoman War. Its original frescoes are long-lost - with rather crudely-coloured and rendered new ones now covering its interior walls & ceiling. A second, larger church - dedicated to Saint Joakim Osogovsky, was built in the 19thC just next to the old one (after all - why have one church when two would do?). The frescoes - to my eyes - even more blatant than the first, but the iconostasis's wooden panels and gilded doors carved into imaginative figures including a unicorn. Sat in the warm sun in the early afternoon. Maybe I should have cycled further today . . . . . Later, after an early supper of beans & sausage - a trio of Bulgarians - Angio, Alejandro & George invited me to join them - and plied me with Macedonian grappa. Angio runs slot machine & gaming parlours in Bulgaria and the Balkans. Alejandro says he is an artist - but claims to own many properties. George works for Angio. Quite a complicated conversation - with their limited (but still pretty impressively good) English and my non-existent Bulgarian / Macedonian. They assured me soto voce that North Macedonia is really part of Bulgaria. There was not a conspiracy theory that they weren't enthusiastic about. Biden defends the Ukraine because his son has business interests there. Putin is trying to make a fairer new world. Covid vaccines are a trap to keep us all under control. The EU is a mafia designed to exploit all in its purview . . . . I tried, without success, to steer the conversation onto soccer and royalty, and drunk an agreeable excess of grappa. They concluded - having heard where I have worked - that I must be a CIA spy.