One thing that’s still true is that their land is definitely mostly mountainous. In fact it’s about 70% mountainous and I think we ended up driving through most of those mountains.
After reading about and experiencing Albania, I have so, so much to say about the country that I’m going to need more than one blog entry to do it. So, this is just the first of at least 2 entries.
By the way, if you want a commercial flight to Albania, pretty much your only choice is to land in Tirana. It is the only international airport in the entire country. The name of the airport is Nënë Tereza or Mother Teresa. Although Mother Teresa lived most of her life in India, she was born in what’s now Macedonia to ethnic Albanian parents.
Whenever I told anyone that we were going to Albania, invariably their reaction was “Is it safe?” Now, I know the movie Taken starring Liam Neeson was all about Albanian sex traffickers and that everyone who’s seen that movie thinks Albania is dangerous. From what I had read, though, I was pretty sure it was a safe country to visit.
I started to get a little nervous, though, when we got to the airport and there were all kinds of armed police officers escorting 3 guys to the plane. We had to take a bus from the terminal to the plane, so the men were escorted onto the bus. They were let off first so that they could be escorted onto the plane. I never saw them again so all ended well until we got onto the bus in Tirana to take us from the plane to the terminal. A police officer got on and called out a name. The woman standing next to us got off the bus with her young daughter and they were escorted to a waiting police van. I have to say those two incidents were a first for me in all my travels and luckily that was the worst of our “safety” issues for the week. If you have any interest in traveling to Albania, have no fears. I felt safe the entire time we were there.
However, safe and uncomfortable are two entirely different things. There were several instances where I felt uncomfortable, but not because I thought anyone was going to harm me. In Albania, it is very common to see groups of men sitting at tables outside or inside a restaurant, having coffee or whatever. That in itself is odd because in the U.S., you just don’t see groups of men sitting outside a café having coffee. But in Albania we saw it everywhere, all the time. The problem is that they all stare, hence the uncomfortableness. I don’t know if they stare at everyone or if they were just staring at us because we were so obviously tourists, but it did make me uncomfortable. You just have to move past it and ignore it.
We arrived in Tirana the afternoon of April 11thand rented a car at the airport. Because Albania borders Macedonia, we had decided to make a quick stop in that country, so that was actually our destination after we landed.
The GPS that we use in Germany has maps for most countries in Europe, so we figured we were all set for using it in Albania and Macedonia.
What we quickly found out was that the estimated travel times on both the GPS and on Google Maps were way, way off for most of the places we wanted to go.
It unfortunately took us twice as long to get to Macedonia from Albania as we thought it would. Had I known that ahead of time, I would have booked two nights in Macedonia instead of one, but live and learn.
Driving to our destination in Lake Ohrid, Macedonia involved us driving through the city of Tirana, which is both the capital and the largest city. Saying it was quite an experience is an understatement. I’m glad Sean did all the driving because I don’t think I could have handled it. Just know that street signs and rules of the road are mere suggestions in Albania. You have to be as aggressive as they are behind the wheel if you want to get anywhere. Traffic lights may or may not work – most of the lights we saw did not work – and even if they do work, people disregard them. Double and triple parking is the norm on already narrow streets.
Sean soon realized that going with the flow was his best bet. If he tried to use his signals or yield the right of way it didn’t work nearly as well as just doing what everyone else did.
In addition, people tend to walk in the street even when there are perfectly good sidewalks available, so that adds to the driving difficulty. They also just dart out into the street when they feel like it so you have to be on the lookout for that at all times.
And then there’s this.
Look, here’s how close one of them was to our car at one point.
“You’re the one who wanted this damn cow, now you’re the one who’s gonna walk it!”
“If you don’t walk that cow right now, you’ll be eating it for dinner tomorrow!”
“Aw, mom, I walked the cow YESTERDAY!”
OK, you get the idea. We had to find some way to amuse ourselves while waiting for the cows to get out of our way.
Wild dogs are another concern. Sometimes they’re alone but sometimes they’re in packs. On our first day of driving, there was a pack in the road and as we were trying to get through, one started running alongside our car and barking ferociously. It was actually kind of terrifying, so I guess I have to take back what I said about feeling safe the whole time I was in Albania. I definitely did not feel safe while our car was being chased by a wild dog. Seriously, I don’t know what I would have done had I been on foot or on a 2-wheeled vehicle or something.
Some of this chaos might be due to the fact that until 1991, there were only about 600 cars in the entire country of Albania. All of them belonged to officers of the communist party. When the communist party was eliminated in 1992, cars started to become more common but it’s still a relatively new concept.
Here’s something we noticed all over Albania.
In the case of multi-dwelling units, sometimes one or more floors would be occupied despite the building being unfinished. Sometimes the units had electricity and sometimes they didn’t. I’m guessing running water was probably hit or miss as well.
Albania is a very, very poor country. It’s the 4th poorest country in Europe. The average monthly income is the equivalent of about 250 Euro per month. That is exactly what we paid for 5 nights in a huge apartment in Saranda, Albania. For the tourist, Albania is a very cheap country. For dinner at a more expensive restaurant overlooking the Adriatic, Sean and I paid the equivalent of about 30 dollars for both of us. That including a big salad for two, an entrée each, a drink each with dinner and coffee after dinner. 15 bucks each for all of that. If you go inland it’s even cheaper than that.
Driving through Albania, we saw people literally living in tin shacks in shanty towns. I didn’t take any photos of the towns because I thought it would be kind of rude, but if you Google shanty towns in Albania you can see what I mean. It was really very sad and just made me think how fortunate we are.
OK, I’ll move along to our travels to Macedonia for now and will save more of the information on Albania for the next blog entry.
Upon leaving the gas station I saw this.
A short time later, we crossed the border into Macedonia.
Our destination of Ohrid in Macedonia was only about 30 minutes from the border.
Because we had arrived so much later than expected, we went out for a walk immediately after checking in.
One of the restaurants we passed by had this restroom sign on the wall inside and it was visible from the street.
Oddly, the following morning I was reading a travel blog about Iceland and a photo with that same sign was posted in the blog. I guess it’s not original as I thought it was. I just once again thought it was funny to see an English sign like that in a non-English speaking country.
This square is where we ended up in the car while trying to find the hotel.
This little girl made me smile.
We walked through the sprawling outdoor market for a while even though a lot of the vendors were shutting down for the evening.
I took this photo through the window of an ice cream shop to show you how cheap everything was in Macedonia.
By this time it was getting dark and the sun was setting over Lake Ohrid.
We were pretty tired after our flight and our unexpectedly long day of driving so we had dinner in town and then went back to the hotel.
At this point I would like to introduce a new feature to the blog called – drumroll, please – Libation of the Day. I figured that the word libation is included in the name of the blog and I should start focusing on that aspect as well as the locomotions aspect.
The next day we got up fairly early and had a nice breakfast at the hotel. We were the only 2 at breakfast and everything was individually made to order. You had your choice of eggs, omelets, bacon, ham, sweet or savory pancakes, coffee, juice, toasted bread and butter, honey or marmalade.
We then went out and wandered the town a little more.
We ran across lots of these.
We took a walk down by Lake Ohrid.
If you’ve read any of our other blogs, you may have seen a comment or two about how amused we are by watching tourists pose for photos. I thought I’d join in on the fun.
And here is probably the oddest thing I saw in Macedonia.
After we checked out of the hotel, we took a little drive up into the hills.
This little church is the church of Saints Constantine and Helena.
After our short look around, we started our drive back to Albania.
We had some more gorgeous views of Lake Ohrid along the way.
One of the things you can’t help noticing in Albania is that there are concrete bunkers like this one all over the place.
At one point, Albania discovered 16 tons of chemical weapons, including mustard gas, in bunkers near the country’s capital. The United States gave them 20 million dollars to destroy the weapons.
Since I mentioned Enver Hoxha, I’ll tell you a little bit more about him. His paranoia resulted in Albania being a country that was pretty much completely isolated and cut off from the rest of the world. Needless to say, this did not foster an environment of tourism. Fewer than 10 years ago, Albania hosted only half a million or so tourists each year. There are now about 4 million tourists each year, a huge increase in such a short time.
As we were driving along, the roads kept getting worse and worse. By that I mean basically unpaved. That’s part of what contributed to the travel times being so much longer than we thought they’d be. It took forever to drive over those unpaved roads. Even when we were lucky enough to get some paved road for a while, it would invariably just end abruptly and go back to being unpaved.
We just enjoyed the scenery as we were plodding along.
We saw colorful houses.
Sean was doing a great job of navigating the perilous road until we got to a particularly muddy spot.
And then this happened.