Balkans 5. advancing into Albania

 

covers 12 - 14 April 2024

can you think why anyone would
want half a pedestrian crossing ?

Montenegro and Albania very sensibly have a single crossing point with the two booths barely ten feet apart instead of the two miles or so which we experienced between the Croatia exit and Montenegro entry buildings. Of course we didn’t know there was only one crossing point when leaving Montenegro so on clearing the first checkpoint we accelerated past the Albanian desk and had to be called back. The vehicle documents passed muster though and we were through with no difficulty. How pleasant.

After only a few miles we drove into the city of Shkoder looking for somewhere to park and have a coffee. First impressions weren’t great, parking was along all the roads but it was jam-packed. We’d seen lots of cafes, all with older men sat outside smoking and watching the world go by. We finally found one towards the northern edge of the city with parking opposite so we stopped there. Of course we provided some interest value pulling up in our motorhome and managed to order two coffees without the use of any commonly known languages. Coffee was thick real expresso served with a glass of water for one euro per cup. After that we drove a little north out of town to see a glorious old Ottoman arched bridge before we headed back to Shkoder and a delightful campsite although we did pass a far from delightful shanty town alongside the main road on the edge of the city.

the old Ottoman bridge at Mesi

Our campsite was owned by a teacher of English (a compulsory subject in Albanian schools) and her husband, an artist. The land and the big house on it had been owned by his family but had been confiscated by the communists. He had managed to get it back in the 1990’s. The house had a good restaurant serving excellent wine made on the premises from their own vines and we bought several bottles to take away with us. This site, uniquely in our experience had a fifty foot or so high metal tower with a spiral staircase which rocked a bit and gave us a fifty foot high view of the rivers nearby. Very odd.

that viewing tower on our campsite

The currency here is LEK which fortunately for us is currently exchanging at very close to 100 LEK to a Euro and therefore easy to convert in our heads. If only it was that simple. A quoted price of 300 could be 300 LEK or 300 Euros and context lets you know which. For instance two coffees might be 300 and you would know that it wasn’t 300 Euros. However 3 might be 3,000 LEK. It’s a bit like handling Italian Lira when they were 3,300 to the pound. They only quoted prices in thousands and gave very small change in sweets. The Albanian language is another matter entirely. It has 36 letters and is distantly related to Greek, Serbo-Croat and Italian. It has two dialects, basically split between the north and south of the country which are allegedly quite different. We have read that a foreigner speaking any Albanian doesn’t have to worry about the pronunciation because it will be drowned out by the exclamations of amazement that a foreigner is even trying. Here’s a lesson for you. What do you think of falemindert, pershendetse and mirupafshim. Me too. They are thank you, hello and goodbye and no I don’t know which dialect. Happily for us the compulsory teaching of English in schools means that pretty well all the young people speak English passably to very well indeed. We manage to be understood sufficiently by older Albanians with our mixture of pointing and charades which passes for multi-lingualism.

the SW fortress part of Rozafa Castle, Shkoder

Rozafa Castle, looking SE past the church and across the main section or second courtyard

The next day we cycled up to the inevitable and impressive but basically ruined castle which had expansive views in all directions from 500 feet or so up. The cooling breezes were welcome here even though we were on the top by 09.00. Then into town which in the pedestrianised centre was far from third world. Lots of young fashionably dressed young men and young mothers with well dressed children, very different cafes to the one we’d stopped at the previous day and very busy. The older Albanians were much more conservatively dressed and many of those were very small people, around 5 feet tall. Games with small brass dominos were very popular among the older men (only men) and were taking place at every picnic table we could see. It was cafe culture on steroids here in the centre of town and with so many pizzerias I imagine daily consumption could be measured in square miles. Apparently Albanians are noted for the quality of their pizzas. Not a lot of people know that.

looking S from the castle over the confluence of three rivers. 
our campsite is down there on the right 

Shkoder's cafe culture on a Saturday lunchtime

While Montenegro felt like a European, Mediterranean sort of place, first impressions for us was that Albania was very different with a more eastern, almost third world country feel to it. It was very agricultural. There were lots more people working the land by hand, hoeing fields, collecting hay with pitchforks. We’ve seen small flocks of a dozen sheep and a single goat with shepherd all on a single 30 foot diameter roundabout and single cows being walked along roads. Outside the cities I’ve never seen so many wheelbarrows being used to transport various goods around. There are also a fair number of donkey carts to be seen and a huge number of small ancient and rusty brown tractors on the country roads being driven by small ancient and rusty brown Albanians. Only men though.

Driving here turns out to be freestyle and I don’t mean it crawls. If a driver wants to turn around, stop or double park, they just do so with apparently no realisation that anybody is anywhere near them. Overtaking is ‘daring’. Cyclists cycle whichever side of the road they want to and that includes on roundabouts. Shall I just say that assertive driving is somewhere between useful and essential although we tend more towards a laissez faire style.

gentlemen are encouraged to ensure they have paid for their fuel
 before they attempt to leave the forecourt

moving up through the foothills of the Accursed Mountains

                               time for a coffee,  I've been slaving over a hot keyboard

I said in a previous blog that we planned to visit the Accursed Mountains which lie along Albania’s northern border. Our Bradt guidebook describes the route up from Shkoder as having “a series of increasingly steep and alarming hairpins leading to the Qafe-Thora pass at 5,500 feet”. That’s fine but then it said that for the next fifteen downward kilometres the road is equally taxing and “rough despite government promises of asphalt”. That’s not so fine. Of course we went up but not a long way past the pass and found that the road was now paved the whole way. In fact the newer surface and road width was much better once we started the serious climbing. On the way we drove past a prison with homilies in English stencilled on the walls inside the outer barbed wire fencing facing outwards so the prisoners couldn’t see them. One example was “just because a person does a bad thing, it does not make them a bad person”. Somebody must have thought this was a good idea. Once past the prison and on to the proper mountains, the views were truly spectacular and as an added bonus, bathed in warm sunshine. Walking in these mountains would definitely be strenuous.

at the Qafe-Thora pass 5,502ft

near the pass

the view from our lunch stop

on the way back down

Now if anyone asked you to name a famous Albanian, my guess is that unless you were politically knowledgeable and said Enver Hoxha (the dictator who ruled Albania for decades), the most common answer would probably be Mother Teresa. Unfortunately you would be wrong. She was born and brought up in North Macedonia, the next country we hope to visit. The Albanians claim her as their own because she had Albanian ancestors. Somewhat surprisingly though, pictures of her or tee shirts with her name on are just not to be seen. The most common woman pictured isn’t even Taylor Swift but Frida Kahlo, whose picture is seen in every souvenir tat shop. What a Mexican artist has to do with Albania I can’t tell you. There is however a statue of M. Teresa in Shkoder which our guide book describes as ‘larger than life’, so still small then.