Leaving Tirana was more challenging than I had thought. The few trains that there are, are slow and very limited in destination. The buses are mysterious. I looked for one to take me to the south and had no luck whatsoever. I went back to the hostel and found out where I needed to go. There is a parking lot that serves as the bus station for long distance buses and I had to be there at 6:00am. I spent the day catching up on processing photos, planning future travel, relaxing, and then went to bed very early.
I found the muddy parking lot at ten to six. The 6:00 bus didn’t leave until 6:20 because there were only six people on board. For the best legroom, I took the seat next to the back stairs. The back door was even with the front of my seat and my feet stuck out over the stairs, so that I had to scrunch them back whenever anyone came in or out. This was a good spot for several reasons. First, the legroom. Second, the door was poorly weather stripped so I got fresh air. And third, the bus often drove with the door open as shown in this picture. This was very cool.
This was also a very good introduction to Albanian buses. This was a long distance bus that would take over eight hours. I would have expected a fairly direct route. Oh no. Not at all. We stopped at every street corner on the way out of town. If someone was standing or walking on the side of the road, the driver honked at them and the driver’s helper hung out the door asking if they were going in our direction. It took a good half hour just to get out of town. They wanted to fill seats and worked hard to do so. We even picked up school children at one point, taking them only about a mile. The bus was only eight euro to go a long way so I had no right to complain. Not about that anyway.
The first four hours were normal other than the time when the driver stopped, got out, bought ten kilos of potatoes, a watermelon, and a piece of sheet metal, all while everyone sat and watched him from the bus. We stopped for lunch in the mountains and it was nice. The last four plus hours were more exciting. Think about Christmas as a child…bear with me now…remember shaking your presents to try to guess what was inside? Now imagine if you were a tiny person inside one of those presents as it was being shaken and being violently banged against the sides of the box. That is what the bus ride was like. I have a bruise on my arm from slamming against the window frame so many times. It was exhausting on my neck muscles to keep my head from flopping around. There were times when I was completely lifted from my seat. Even better, we were on what I would have called a bike path, high on the steep mountainsides, where even the thought of two-way traffic seemed ridiculous, although, scarily, it happened. I questioned whether the driver had a healthy balance between his desire to be on time and his desire to continue living. There were times when, as I looked out my window, I was sure that the tires were somehow floating magically over the abyss because the road was nowhere to be seen. It was an exciting ride.
I have to say that the people in Albania are great. Everyone that I met was very friendly and eager to be helpful. The driver’s helper on the bus was thrilled to meet me even though he could hardly speak English. The people in the hostel were fantastic and intensely curious about American culture. The people in the stores were courteous. It was a nice change from tourist heavy places. And there is little crime, other than organized crime, in the country and I always felt safe.
At first I didn’t understand, why, in such a poor country, there are so many luxury cars. In Tirana I think the percentage is even higher than in the United States. There is a large organized crime syndicate that could account for some, but not that many. After talking to a few people I discovered that Albania is one of the main places that Europe’s stolen cars end up. So even though it is a poor country, they can afford to get around in style.
