"Adventures" is a little bit of a strong word to use for my Albanian leg of the journey given that gun stories appear to be a thing of the past, but I needed an alliteration and due to my vocabulary pool being as dry as some of the sandier sections of the Sahara, I figured it'd have to do. I also read on a cycle website about a dearth of blogs on Albania, so thought I'd have to dedicate at least one post to my (albeit short) journey through this very beautiful part of the world.
I was a little worried about entering Albania. I'm not really sure why. The Albanian's I'd met in Kosovo had been prefectly nice and fine and not threatening in any way, and even in countries where I've been informed by the media beforhand that I'm likely to be strung upside down and have my throat slit while the locals hold out my still-beating heart in front of my plucked out eyes, I've met wonderful people. So really, an absence of information on Albania should have been a good thing. Maybe it was the report of Dervla Murphy getting robbed of her belongings by a group of little people (they were 5-yr olds according to the person telling me the story; I haven't read it for myself). Or maybe it was the Macedonians who I'd met in...Macedonia...that had, shall we say, "reserved judgement" on their Albanian neighbours.
So there was a little concern lodged there in the back of my mind as I cycled away from Mitrovica (40km north of Pristina) in the sunshine. Well, as I cycled away from the appartment of the daughter of a friend of the family in Mitrovica in the sunshine(she's a human rights observer for OSCE: a "pillar" of the UN as I learned during my time there). As I reached the city limits of Mitrovica the heavens opened and I got a severe soaking as the thunder clapped overhead and I wondered why I'd got so drunk two nights previously that I'd been too hungover to leave yesterday and so now found myself cycling through some relatively inhospitable weather.
I guess I should probably write a quick note on Mitrovica itself. If separation and bitterness was absent elsewhere in the short section of the Balkans I'd been exposed to up to that point; it was evident in Mitrovica...sort of. People weren't throwing rocks at each other and hurling abuse, but the city is divided by the river, with Serbs on the North (with minority Albanian groups) and Albanians on the south (with minority Serbian groups). I was free to walk and explore both sides, encountering nothing but friendliness, but things would probably have been different had I been from one of the two main ethnicities inhabiting that fair city. A fairly non-descript bridge joined the two that has seen some of the worst riots in the country in past years, but only hosted a couple of UN personal when I toddled over. Foreigners working there tended to have a preference for the northern Serb side due to the increased quality of night life present (though technically they're not really supposed to socialise up there [due to security issues]; so keep it on the hush hush!).
So there I was cycling out of Mitrovica, my body protesting to the strain, rain pelting down, and not really knowing what awaited me in the next country. I guess you could call it a good day. I camped in a forest that night.
Why should I mention that?
At night, when I was younger (I'm not talking two years ago here, give me some credit, it was a little bit longer; at least five or more), I used to tiptoe past my parents' bedroom door to get to the toilet. It wasn't because I was a considerate son and didn't want to wake them up, it was to avoid the two-horned-helmet-wearing viking, complete with battleaxe, that I envisaged lurking round the corner ready to decapitate me. I guess you could have said I had an active imagination.
Now, I stride to the bathroom without a care in the world but the remnants of my active imagination still lurk in the depths of forests where every little scuffle and scurrie outside is a red-eyed, four-legged evil lizard-shaped monster ready to tear into my tent and start devouring my toes. I still wake up in the morning, but it's not quite such a restful as sleeping in an olive grove.
I crossed into Albania near the town of Djakovo (Kosovo). There are two border crossings within about 20km of Djakovo; a southern one and a northern one. The southern one was marked on my map; the northern one was not. "Road is bullshit" said the Albanian man working on the fruit stall just outside of Djakovo. He didn't know much English, but I figured that the use of the word "bullshit" indicated that it was going to be a dirt road. I'd figured that beforehand, but had wanted to see Northern Albania, so was ready to take the hit. However, the new option of an even shorter, non-bullshit road proved too tempting and I found myself cycling towards the border crossing that was absent from my map.
"Albanian border officials are amongst some of the most corrupt in the world", I read somewhere on the internet. Elsewhere, I'd read them trying to charge 10 euro to enter the country when the official tax is one tenth of that sum. I got handshakes, smiles and a request for 1 euro before discussing amongst themselves the best route I should follow to the town of Puke (that's the way it's spelt, though with two little dots over the e). They then got the man most proficient in English to point me in the right direction.
The road down from the border was flawless. I descended into a lush, green valley with high mountains off to my right. Men were cutting grass in the fields with scythes and donkeys and carts were travelling along the road. I continued towards the town of Bajram Currie. Outside the town, the road branched with the bypass of the town being the better surface. I went with the smooth road. Big Mistake. I was not to enter a town with a bank or a shop for a further 90km and so had no official way to change money. "Towns" marked on the map were either a cafe with an electric substation (where I did actually manage to change money with the man in the cafe, before another patron bought me a coffee), or a cafe with a collection of small houses clinging to the steep hillside, spread over a large area.
I crossed the lake (a big one in NE Albania where one can catch a ferry to Tirane [the capital]) by the town of Fierze, which I had passed through before even realising it.
That's where the asphalt ended.
35km of dirt roads followed where my average speed dropped from 16km/hr, to around 9km/hr. I have a feeling that in one year's time, the road will be good, workers by the side of the road were building walls and drainage channels, but for the time being it's not! I camped on a small level bit of ground near the town of Dardhe (where I'd manged to buy some bread in a small cafe/hotel there).
The road the following day was good, with a smooth surface and almost no traffic. I hit the main road that runs from Kukes in the east (near the main border crossing with Kosovo) and Shkoder in the west. It was a mixed bag up until the town of Puke with about 50% being perfect, laid within the last year, and 50% being poor to criminal (for someone who used to work in an Asphalt plant at least!). From Puke to Shkoder the road was about 70% good to 30% poor to average. I camped near the top of the final downhill to the plains.
Good road to Shokoder, poor road out of Shkoder. It runs for 36km to the most beautiful border crossing location I've come across.
Kosovan clouds
2 men attacking a bunker with a sledgehammer. These bunkers dotted the surrounding landscape on my approach into, and through Albania
