The best kept secret
Me and Alona decided to do a seven week summer backpacking trip. We choose to go to Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia Hercegovina.
As time crept in towards our trip our excitement started to boil over. We talked to many people about our trip telling them of the blogs we had read and the pictures we had seen. Yet people were not always too supportive – I know it comes from a good place – the question of safety was brought up a lot. Why are you going there? Is it dangerous? Just the two of you? Have you not heard of what those countries are like? We decided the best thing to do was to stop telling people and just hope for the best.
Alona had planed everything down to a T and made sure we always tried to arrive in new places during the day and had mapped out destinations close to each other so time in transit would be short. We were confident of all the places up to Greece, after Greece we would be going to the land of the Balkans for the first time. This is what a lot of people questioned us on. Especially when it came to Albania.
After the first half of our trip which ended in Athens, we had stayed one night in Corfu. It's hot and I mean hot, people were fainting on the street! After our night in Corfu we went to the ferry terminal to get a ticket to be wizzed across the sea to Albania. At the ticket office there was a border check, so we handed over our passports and through we went.
Once we were through we sat on the floor and looked around. To my horror there was very alarming signs everywhere saying thing such as: please don’t take a machete, a knife, a gun or a jack hammer on board and our bags were not even checked at border control!
Horror filled me as the words of my friends echoed through my head, where we really going to go through with this?
I decide not to tell Alona about the signs and just Instagram it instead.
Once people started moving we followed suit and we were led to the world's smallest boat that somehow managed to fit in around one hundred people. As the boat started I could see the fear in Alonas eyes as she pretended she was fine. The water was choppy and we were rocked more ferociously than expected. As Albania came into our vision, we could see unfinished communist-style buildings that had been left to decay, tall hills and a lot of countryside. First glance was pretty barren.
As we got off the boat we decided to get some money get WIFI to sort out how to get to our accommodation and much to Alona's dismay I ordered two large beers – just to take the edge off.
The waiter was fantastic craic asking where we where from and smiling away, extremely friendly! After we paid and wished him a pleasant day we went off in search of our accommodation. We followed Google maps and were faced with a mountain of stairs, as we trudged up them we heard a man shouting.
‘WAIT STOP!’
We both turned to see a small sixty year old man shouting from around 10 steps down. He was slightly out of breath and looked like he had just ran up the stairs.
‘WAIT! I will carry your bags for you its very hot.’
We thanked him kindly but said we were ok. So far Albania was nothing like everyone had said.
After walking for a good twenty minutes in the direction away from civilisation, round windy roads and past more unfinished communist buildings we got there. We were greeted by a very friendly old man who asked if we were scared of cows. Taken aback we said no and he took us into the building. Half the building was abandoned and falling part. We went into a room that was swan themed and he showed us through the window. There was cows in the garden and he told us that’s the only thing we need to be scared of. At this point I believed him. We put our bags down and off we went to explore.
We climbed on some of the old half built buildings. We later learned that after the collapse of communism people believed the land belonged to them and they started to build there own houses which the government stopped and the buildings were left unfinished.
And my love for bannisters was born.
Oh by the way the food in Albania is amazing and cheap. We ate like kings and it’s the best of food. Having worked in a fish factory for a while I am now a completely unentitled fish snob – Albania passed!
Alona order for every meal there five small fish with head and bones on them! She developed a very bleak system to deal with this. It consisted of taking all the fish flesh off and hiding the head and bones under a napkin. We got some very weird looks and the waiters sometimes laughed at us. (Fair, we supposed.)
After we had been in Sarande for a while it was time to head to the capital – Tirana. We found out the bus left at 5 in the morning or 9 at night, you couldn’t buy a ticket in advance you were just to show up there and hope there was a seat.
We left our accommodation at four in the morning and there was only a slither of light, on our way we saw lots of people sitting on crates playing chess and drinking coffee!
We go to the bus stop and there was four other people there who were staring at us. It was rather off putting and we shuffled closer to a tree for some sort of tree-inspired escape plan. We hoped we would get a seat. The bus itself was more of a mini van, we went on and more people stared at us. Alona took a single seat by the window and I took the last seat up the back. Infront of my seat was a very alarming pole sticking out about 20 cm in front of my head, there was no seat belts and the seat beside me was broken. I tried to sleep but the idea the bus braking and the pole being there stopped me. The bus journey was around six hours. I managed to fall asleep eventually and when I awoke there was a very handsome man asleep on my shoulder, I have never been so still in all my life! This horror lasted for about an hour till he woke up and of course I pretended to sleep!
The bus had to stop a few times for smoking breaks and coffee – they're mad on the coffee - and to let sheep past. I peered out the window at the sheep and there was two boys were laughing at me, but little did they know I was not phased by this as I grew up in a small village in rural Scotland. Albania and the highlands of Scotland had more similarities than they knew! As we drew into the capital and into a very, um how to put it, rustic bus station we were greeted by twenty men smacking the side of the bus. Alona, god knows how, slept through this entire ordeal.
Tired and hot we went to find where we were going to stay, we ended up walking about five kilometres in the blistering heat. We noticed all the buildings were brightly coloured and some had positive messages written on them. I really liked it, it was different. We got to our apparentment and went out for more beautiful food.
The next day we got a tour guide to see all that we could of Tirana and to try to get more understanding. The lady explained to us the buildings were coloured brightly because in a beautiful space people will want to look after it better. She showed us all the street art and buildings and the park where everyone was drinking coffee and the giant square in the centre that was hard to get across as the heat bounced off the tiles directly onto your face. She said it has been built in the winter and the residents had dismayed at how exposed they where once summer arrived.
We relaxed and chilled over the next two days. After that we went up to the North to Skodra.
We were a outside the main town in a quiet village, it was very close to the sea and there was only two resturants. We were over half way through our trip and decided just to take in the beauty of the place and we went for a boozy lunch that then turned into dinner too! While we were there we watched as a digger gave other digger a bath using the sea water!
After we had finished dinner we decided to go to the second restaurant for some more wine. This sounds extravagant but it's 3 euros for a whole litre! We know that Albania is a more conservative country (especially in the North our guide has said) so we didn’t want to be drunk. We ordered half a litre of wine to share and the waiter look mortified (even though that is only a glass each!) but brought us the wine regardless,. Then he came back over a few minutes later with a plate of green things. Alona investaged them first by trying to bite into it, smelling it and just looking confused. To our embarrassment the waiter came over and asked if we knew what it was, we sheepishly said no and it turns out it was a fresh fig! We have never seen one before, we must have looked so stupid!
The next day we woke up thirsty around five and we had ran out of water (you can't drink the water there) so we hopped on two spindly bikes and started cycling to the town. The sun was rising and reflecting off the sea, and to our amazement everyone was up and about exercising! We kept cycling past the joggers, the walkers and the people having coffee after about a 10km cycle we had made it to the town. We found the first place we could for water and a snack we watched the people bustle past us and looked around the town.
As we backed our bags to move onto Montenegro, we went of our last coffee in Albania and for the first time on the trip the great feeling of sadness took over me, I didn’t want to leave beautiful rustic Albania behind. I had loved every single second of it! I loved the way everything was so simple, so beautiful, I loved the abandoned buildings, the food, the people and how friendly kind and helpful they were, I loved all of it!
As I told Alona how I was feeling she said she was the same, we laughed at how scared we had been on the boat and how foolish it was to order those beers before we had checked in! We also couldn’t believe what people said about Albania compared to how it really was.
