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...

Macedonia

We only had one afternoon in Skopje, but I thought that was long enough. It’s very cute and pretty, but there is a hell of a lot of construction work going on. They seem particularly keen on building things that look like they’ve always been there – lots of classical architecture. To their credit, even the construction is beautifully lit at night.

Also, they’re building random statues like there’s no tomorrow. In some places there are two or three within a few metres of each other. In the main square there’s a great big fountain, which is beautiful, and which we all assumed had been there for ages. But actually it was brand new, it’d only been there a month or so, and it’d only started playing three days before we got there. We were kind of wondering why so many people were so interested in it, when there didn’t appear to be too many tourists. They even had recorded music to go with the fountain, the kind of thing you’d play at concert band. The funniest thing about it was that the music played for about two minutes and then cut out. The first time I heard it I thought something had gone wrong with the speakers. But no, that’s just what happens. Then the fountain plays the rest of its circuit to the sound of silence, and when it gets back to the start the music starts again. You’d want to get yourself committed to the psychiatric ward if you worked anywhere near that fountain. The music played every seven minutes, exactly the same music every time. We sat and had a drink and people watched for half an hour or so, and by then we knew the tune.

There are very few tourist attractions in Skopje. We walked down the main pedestrianized street, past Mother Theresa’s picture (the Macedonians claim she was born in Skopje, the Albanians claim she was born in Tirana), to the museum. The museum has a clock on it that stopped when the museum was bombed. And that was about it for tourist attractions. It did fill in a good fifteen minutes though.

Skopje was the first town with a Turkish area, which had heaps and heaps of Turkish cafes. We went across the river to there and had dinner, then walked back and took lots of night photos of the new fountain and the surrounding square and buildings.

The pretty fountain.

And my favourite, the spewing lions.

Next we had a day and a half at Lake Orhid.  That was fantastic.  We were all worn out from being on the go all the time, and we all really enjoyed having somewhere beautiful to blob out and look at the water and swim.  When we arrived, Marsha was in her togs and in the water before most of us had even put our bags down.  The lake was really big, maybe about the same as Lake Taupo for all my NZ friends, and surrounded by mountains.  I liked that a third of the lake was in Albania.  And it was really calm and we had beautiful hot sunny weather.  A few people got pretty sunburnt, namely Cameron who managed to roast his belly pretty good.  There was also a nice little town but it was really very touristy.  We spent most of our time at the beach, being shown off to by a group of Macedonian guys.

And that was about it in Macedonia.