Day 267 Bus Riding as an Extreme Sport

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.

Day 266 Albania!

Oh Albania, land of mystery. It has not been that long since outsiders have been allowed in the country. What do you know of Albania? Hmmm? After seeing my illusions destroyed in other Slavic countries, I threw out any expectations of Albania. Getting there proved more difficult than I thought though.

I had to take a bus to Ulcinj, Montengro and then supposedly wait for a minibus to show up to take me across the border to Shkodra. When I got into tiny little Ulcinj, there were no minibuses to be seen and it was about 2:00 in the afternoon. I figured that if I waited around for an hour or two and then took another hour and a half to get to Shkodra and then wait for another minibus to go several more hours to the Albanian capital, Tirana, I may be arriving late at night in a city of which I have no knowledge. So I took a taxi. I bargained the driver down to 25 euro for what turned out to be a two-hour trip. Not a bad deal I think. I had to pay 10 more euro at the border for visitor taxes and I got my first look at the ubiquitous Albanian pill boxes.

Pill boxes are round, dome topped, concrete, mini-bunkers with a slit in the front and an open back. They are arranged in a line of sight formation with a larger command bunker thus eliminating the need for complicated communication systems. I saw these things all through the country and there must be hundreds of thousands of them. They are everywhere. I guess it is not surprising for a country that has been invaded so many times.

Upon crossing the border, my first impression of Albania was a strong smell of horse manure, pigs in the road, garbage, and half crippled old people. But that was just the first mile. After that, it was lots of garbage and road construction. I saw a large castle looming above Shkodra and would have liked to see it, yet the need to find a room for the night was more pressing.

In Shkodra I lucked out and was able to jump out of the taxi, walk across the street and into an already full minibus. The normal problem with minibuses is that they won’t go until they are full. I took the last seat and we were off. I was dropped away from the center of Tirana and it took me a bit to decide which way to go. There was a big roundabout and several ways looked promising. Fortunately, I picked the right way and ended up in the large central square, from which, I knew the directions to the hostel.

On my walk to the hostel I saw the last thing I expected—the giant smiling face of George W. Bush. On the pyramid-like exposition center, which children were climbing and sliding down, was a huge banner with the US and Albanian flags, and the oversized noggin of the president of my country. Despite this, I kept going to the hostel. The people at the hostel were very friendly and spoke some limited English. They did tell me that they were happy that Bush was going to be visiting the country next week. Apparently, the United States has been very good to Albania ever since Woodrow Wilson. Go figure. I had no idea. Albanians like us. Weird. The cleaning woman was so excited that I was from America that she went and found pictures of her daughter, living in Hartford, CT, and showed me all of them. They were not particularly interesting pictures as much as it was interesting to see how excited she was to show me. It was a fun experience.

One interesting thing about the country was the custom of hanging stuffed animals or scarecrow men on houses and buildings. The intention is to ward off the evil eye. The effect is a bit spooky as an outsider since even cute fuzzy cuddly wuddly stuffed bunny rabbits take on a whole new dimension after they have been exposed to the elements for a few months. Sort of a Stephen King dimension. And the scarecrow men are just plain spooky to start with. I was told that people don’t really believe it anymore and they do it out of tradition, much of like our “knock on wood” habit that is based on scaring away evil spirits.

On the advice of the very friendly hostel staff, I went to a traditional restaurant and had Tevé mishi which is a clay pot of braised veal and pickled onions. It was fantastic. I started with a Tirana Biere, tsatsiki, and toasted bread and finished with some Albanian raki, a grape spirit. I left with a happy tummy and a good buzz. There was a big jazz festival nearby that would have been good if I wasn’t so tired. I dropped early.

There is not much to see in Tirana so I intended to leave the next day. If only I could.