Seven lanes open, and the queue still has no end. At the „Bogorodica“ crossing toward Greece, drivers waited for hours this morning - some report as much as four hours under the scorching sun. And the official figure? Thirty minutes. The gap between what people on the ground see and what the bulletin says is a story as much about the border as about trust in institutions.

The kilometre-long queues built up early in the morning, when all seven exit lanes out of the country filled with cars. Drivers stuck in line say the standstills are unbearable, that traffic crawls and the wait drags on for hours. One of them claims he has been at the crossing for four hours already.

The Automobile Association of Macedonia, on the other hand, published a completely different picture this morning - that at „Bogorodica“ and „Dojran“ the wait is about 30 minutes, and at „Tabanovce“ for entry about 20. The explanation? The AMSM bulletin was issued at 6 a.m., and the situation on the ground then changed drastically. Possible. But when a citizen waits four hours and the official report says half an hour, it's hard not to ask whose number is closer to the truth.

The cause of the jam is familiar: a weekend, the summer tourist season and tens of thousands who from our country and the whole region head for the Greek beaches. Every summer the same scene - Halkidiki, Thasos and Paralia beckon, and the road to them runs through hours of roasting at the border.

The advice to drivers is to count on longer delays and set off early, ideally in the early morning or late night hours when the pressure is lower. Until then, „Bogorodica“ remains summer's bottleneck - the place where the holiday begins with patience, long before the first beach.