North Macedonia Paperback / softback -

Born in London, of Welsh and Malay Chinese parents, Thammy Evans has travelled and lived abroad for over 20 years, especially in China and southeast Europe. Professionally, her career lies in the field of political analysis. Her first overseas trip was to Malaysia at the age of eight, and she has been dabbling in numerous foreign languages ever since. Among her many other travels, her most memorable are the Trans-Mongolian Railway from Tianjin to Moscow in 1991, mountaineering in Bolivia in the summer of 1999, and doing the field research for her second Bradt travel guide Great Wall of China in 2005. Despite many forays to far-off lands, she feels most at home in the southern climes of wider Europe and has lived and worked in Macedonia for five years. She and her family now have a small stone house by the sea in Istria.This edition has been updated by Philip Briggs, one of the world's most experienced and prolific guidebook writers. He has been associated with Bradt since 1991, since when has written or updated guides to around 20 other destinations, many of them pioneering the way to places that were then practically uncharted by the travel publishing industry. While researching this new edition of Macedonia, highlights of what was his first visit to the Balkans included the lovely old lakeside city of Ohrid and nearby monastery Sv Naum, the historic crater-enclosed town of Kratovo, and the sun-drenched vineyards of the Tikves Valley. Philip still spends at least four months on the road every year, usually accompanied by his wife, the travel photographer Ariadne Van Zandbergen, and spends the rest of the time battering away at a keyboard in the sleepy South African coastal village of Wilderness.