Albania

I know there were people in our group that disliked Albania quite intensely, but I was the total opposite – I loved it. From the moment we came across the border it was weird and fascinating and completely unlike anywhere else that we’d been.

We had a minibus to travel to Tirana from Lake Orhid. To those of you under five foot six this will sound like an excellent turn of events; those who are over (or who were there) will understand my pain.  I don't do grinning and bearing things very well.  I do do passive-agressive very well.  I feel that it's important to know and recognise my strengths.

Border crossings on this trip have been incredibly painless, in comparison to the Middle East, and this one was just the same.  It was amazing how completely different the landscape was, as soon as we entered the country.  I was vaguely aware we were high up when we were at Lake Orhid, and we only drove around the corner to get to the border (well, it was an hour or less).  When we crossed the border, we drove along the flat for a few minutes, then turned another corner and found ourselves at the top of what looked like a cliff.  We spent ages going up and down mountains, around these hairy corners and with really sheer drops off to the side.  I should also mention that Albanians are bloody terrible drivers.  They drive where they want, when they want, and I have no idea whether they even have many road rules, but if they do, people just ignore them anyway.  They even had a police officer directing traffic at a set of working traffic lights.  It was absolutely hair-raising.  Also, the landscape was very dry and yellow, where almost everywhere else we'd been had looked quite lush and green, even Sarajevo which was desperate for rain.  And the final, most wierd thing of all - they have these little bunkers absolutely everywhere, which were built by a past leader who was totally terrified of... something.  Nobody's quite sure what.  Invasion?  War?  These bunkers hold four people each, and enough were built to house the entire population of Albania at the time.  We heard a few very different estimates  of how many there are - anywhere between 60,000 and 700,000 could be right as far as I know.  They're made of solid concrete, and are half underground, and they're round with straight walls and dome roofs, so they look a bit like mushrooms.  And they are EVERYWHERE.  I saw them all through fields in the country, in people's yards, even on fence lines, with fences built over the top of them, and in the middle of the city, just randomly by the roadside.  They're apparently so solid that they're almost impossible to remove.  The story goes that the chief engineer was made to stand inside one while it was subjected to a full tank attack, so that they could make sure they would stand up to anything.  It did.

So weird.

We somehow made it to our hotel in Albania.  The driving really is pretty catastrophic.  It was pretty bad up around Russia and that area as well, but not as congested and uncontrolled in the cities.  Getting across any intersection, whether you're in a car or a pedestrian, is taking your life in your hands.  Part of that is probably to do with no Albanian being allowed to own a car until 20 years ago, when the communist government collapsed and the borders were opened.  There were only 400 cars in the country until then, and they were only for use by government officials.  So the roads they have were definitely not built to deal with the amount of traffic that they are dealing with, and there are traffic jams in every direction at any and all times of the day.

I quite liked the hotel we stayed in.  It was old and big and cool.  Our room had beds in two seperate rooms, with a door between, and a bathroom.  It was quite nice to not go sleep facing someone across the room.  They also still have problems with their electricity supply, and the power cut out twice before 1030pm that night.  Only for a few seconds each time, but it was also only the hotel that lost power, the street lights and all the buildings around us still had power.

We didn't do an awful lot in Tirana either.  There definitely weren't many tourists there, by the looks we were getting from the locals.  They weren't hostile, just curious.  We obviously stuck out for whatever reason.  The English there was still relatively good, everybody managed to make themselves understood.  The city was very hot and dirty and so smoggy.  That was a real shame in Macedonia too, it was quite smoggy, even at the lake.  Tirana was full of ongoing construction work too, like Scopje. 

Sara isn't allowed to guide in a lot of these places, so we all walked into town together and she pointed us in the direction of the sights, and then we took off by ourselves pretty quick.  Kylie, Kat and I left the group behind after the first mosque, which we walked past and said oh that's interesting, and the rest of the group then spent close to fifteen minutes inside of.  I lost patience pretty quick there.

There were only one or two things to see, so we walked down the main street and saw them.  The first was a big triangular building, which had originally been intended as I think a museum, but it didn't really work, so it is being used as something else but I've unfortunately forgotten what.

The only other thing we felt particularly inspired to go and see was the Mother Theresa roundabout, which, as we discovered, is literally a roundabout.  One of the buildings around it may have contained more information, but we didn't discover it.  I didn't even bother to take a photo, I'm sure most people have seen a roundabout before.

However, Tirana does have some very pretty parts, around the centre of the city.  These seem to mainly be the parts that were closed to the citizens for years, and only used by the government officials.  It's over an area of maybe nine blocks, and it's now the main restaurant area.

We went for a drink at the Sky Bar, a rotating bar at the top of one of the hotels.  It moves pretty slowly, it goes around only about once every hour.  There were nice views from up there though.

The town is completely surrounded by mountains, and it's hard to get a feel for how high the mountains are from a photo.  The city is almost completely flat, but it's growing up the hills.  You feel like the rest of the world might not exist outside of those mountains...  which probably wasn't a good feeling for the people who lived there twenty years ago.

We only stayed one night in Albania.  On the way to the border the next day (back in our squishy, legs-in-the-aisle style minibus) we stopped at Kruje, a town that's built almost vertically up the side of the mountain.  It's also very pretty, as most of these places are, and again the roading and driving were terrible.  In Kruje, we visited the local ethnographic museum, which was in a 250yr old Turkish house, and was actually pretty interesting.  It still had a lot of original decor, furnishings, machinery, and tools, and you get a guide included in the ticket price, who was very good.

Then we wandered through the souvenir shop-filled alleyways, back to the bus.  There was another museum, which was about the local hero, but according to the people who went, we didn't miss much by not going.

When we stopped at the border, there was a bunker that we could go and visit, which I think was probably the highlight of our time in Albania for a few people!!

Me in the bunker!  You just can't really see me...