Six in the morning on the Macedonia promenade. Crews from the public utility "Ohridski Komunalec" are collecting plastic bottles, cups, cans and paper left behind by the night's gatherings of tourists in central Ohrid.

They work so the town is clean and tidy again before the new tourist day begins. Down at the Small Harbour, at the very same time, some of the young crowd is still there - singing, music, sweeping and celebrating all in one frame.

The utility points out that this is not unique to Ohrid. Almost every larger tourist centre that hosts concerts, festivals and mass events over the summer faces the same challenge. And they appeal to visitors and residents to help keep the town clean.

The appeal and the bin

Here it is worth being fair. The sanitation workers do their part flawlessly - from six in the morning, every day of the season, so the guest who wakes at nine sees a tidy promenade and assumes the night was quiet.

The problem is that an appeal to conscience is the only tool still in use. And in a town that in August takes in many times more people than it has residents, conscience is not infrastructure.

How many bins are there along the Macedonia promenade per hundred metres during the season? How many of them are emptied during the night itself, rather than only in the morning? Those are two numbers that are never published - and they are precisely the ones that determine how much gets picked up off the ground at dawn.

If the bin is full at midnight, the bottle ends up next to it. That is not a question of culture - it is a question of an emptying schedule. And that schedule is written by the municipality, not the tourist.