Albania

Our route out of Montenegro is a backdoor road to a small border crossing at Muriqan and we literally had to take a goat trail again to accomplish this task. Along the way the road turned to gravel, donkey’s had broken their tethers and were wandering around, and close to the border, Montenegrins’ were displaying Albanian behavior by dumping their trash and rubble just off the road into Albania.

Now Albania was a communist dictatorship for quite a while and it’s apparent that everything was very poor. The road network was terrible and according to some most travelled by horse and cart. In fact we saw a lot of horse and cart traffic still. Our friends Mike and Ruby reported terrible roads in 2006 when they went through, but some recent reports were more favorable so we had picked a route and wanted to get to southern Albania in 1 day. On entering the country some of the first practices I saw were farmers dumping animal manure into a water source just outside Skhoder. They dumped it there because the road facilitated an easy dump of an embankment.

Next, chaos on the roads. As we drove people had pretty much disregarded any rules of the road, vying for position whether they were in their lane, you were in front or behind or were going to turn.

We were told about the great A1 roadway, a stretch of autobahn road that would take us quickly to Tirane. That was true for what was still in place but some is damaged to the point people are now driving down the other side where they can find passage. And on our side I was travelling at 110 kph when a pothole opened up and I could do nothing to avoid it. It was so jarring I worried about damaging a rim, fortunately that didn’t happen.

As we looked off to the side both of us saw the same thing, an eastern European Morocco in many practices. When we stopped 2 gypsy children came out of nowhere ( maybe a pothole) and began pestering us for food. We had by this point decided to actually drive through so we were sharing 1 banana and a granola bar that was our ‘lunch’ at 3:45 pm. So we weren’t about to give it away.

Everywhere you looked you could see they dumped their garbage into gullies, and there were many ½ built or vacant buildings all over. One industry that has cropped up is the Car Wash (Lavange). Borne from all the exotic cars that have surreptitiously found their way to Albanian shores , there is a need to wash them, since half of all roads are gravel and ½ the people who live adjacent to these roads under construction turn a garden hose onto their stretch so that they can keep dust down, so you go wet, dry wet dry for miles and miles. The bike is  filthy at the moment.

Just outside Vlore we were told by a local that the new road SH4 was new and good so we decided to take it to Girokaster and then perhaps go down to Sarande that way. Well about 45 kms into the 130 km stretch the road turned to gravel, then worse, like an Alberta forestry road after washouts, then worse with trucks there to repair them hung up or broken down in the middle preventing larger vehicles from getting by without falling off an embankment or hitting the vehicle that was stuck. Honestly it was that bad. We picked our way through, encouraged by small amounts of pavement that only left us in 4-500 meters. In fact some of the drop offs were so bad I nearly hung the bike up on them, and then you would get 6-8” high ridges running parallel to your direction but squeezing you off the road unless you jumped them, which we did. By Girokaster (110 kms) we decided we had had enough of Albanian hospitality and would head instead over the border into Greece, which we did. Originally a 410 km day turned into 500 plus kms, and easily ½ on gravel or broken roads.

We have now since been rewarded by heading quickly this morning down a beautiful high mountain Greek road to the shores of Kanali near Pervaza, where we have an idyllic 4 star hotel on the beach with everything imaginable including a Greek breakfast for 55 E. We could never leave!

View from our 4 star hotel outside Pervaza