Albania - Part II

10 december 2021 - Amsterdam, Nederland

It’s been a while… to the say the least. I’ve been back in the Netherlands for almost 5 weeks now but somehow couldn’t muster up the courage to finish writing this Albanian adventure. So many stories to tell and I didn´t know where to start, but there cannot be a part I without a part II so I tried to summarize as much as possible of what we’ve seen and done in the (many) words below.

I ended my previous blog with the city of Berat and the Albanian coffee culture. It seems quite appropriate to go from drinks to food and to a rather special restaurant: Mrizi I Zanave. This is a hotel/restaurant/agrotourism farm located in northern Albania and not far from the main road from Berat to Shkoder, our next destination. A reservation is highly recommended as people come in large numbers from all corners of the country (and the world) to eat at the restaurant and we were glad to have booked a table in advance because the dining room was packed. The restaurant is affiliated to the slow food movement (same as my lunch spot at the former Yugoslavian footballer’s place in Bitola, Macedonia) and they source their food according to the ‘farm to table’ concept, which simply means that the food you get served comes directly from their farm surrounding the property and local farms in the area. You can actually visit the farm and they have a little shop selling some of their products and local artifacts. The lunch was absolutely delicious, there is no menu, you just sit down and enjoy the never-ending plates of tapas style dishes and big meat plates that are served. Everything from styling, to service, to food is perfectly done and the attention to detail is really amazing. Not only the food wat excellent and a great way to taste traditional food on a ‘higher’ level than we have had so far, but the whole experience was really worth is. If anyone is ever in the area north of Tirana or anywhere in Albania really because this place is worth a detour, I would strongly recommend a visit and perhaps even a stay at the hotel as food comma is a risk after a lunch or dinner here!

After a small walk around the farm after lunch, we got back in the car and continued our road trip to Shkoder, a city in the north of the country on the shore of Shkoder lake, which borders with Montenegro. Instead of taking the highway – that is the road marked as highway, it all depends on perspective – we decided to take the small countryside roads to enjoy the ride and see a bit more of the countryside. Once on these back roads we finally experienced the ‘bad’ roads that we expected all along. It was actually quite fun trying to avoid the potholes and bumps, a different but not horrible experience as we were in no rush and could enjoy the views at the same time. We arrived in the rain in Shkoder, which made the city look quite desolate but we were quite surprise however by the architecture of the city. It’s faded and old baroque style houses that look sort of charming mixed together with undefined modern-ish architectural style buildings makes it unique compared to the other cities in Albania.

We ended up spending 3 nights in Shkoder and after seeing it in daylight and with a tiny bit of sunshine we did warm up to this town and its cute city centre, but it took some time (to me Shkoder is a direct association with rain now). Although Shkoder is considered a city, a morning is enough to visit all the highlights, including a small but really interesting museum dedicated to Albania´s first and most famous photographers’ family giving a glimpse of the old Albania through portraits, street scenes and journalistic type of photographs. After this visit, we both felt that this museum was going to make it to one of the highlights of the trip, not only because of the quality of the exhibition and how it gave further visual insight in the history of the country and how people used to live, but also because of the very modern architecture of the building’s interior which is in complete opposite to the exterior facade with its baroque twirls and pastel colours.

An Albanian city wouldn’t be complete without a fortress, so of course Shkoder also has its own pile of old stones on top of a hill: Rozafa Fortress. Another fort (6 out 7), another climb up but this time we could drive up and park the car right in front of the entrance and the visit was cut short by the pouring rain and the slippery stones. And to be honest, we had had our share of fortresses and were starting to wonder where our collective fetish or focus for old stones comes from, why do we glorify everything that is old so much? As soon as you mention a building is over a 100 years old you hear ‘oh’s’ and ‘ah’s’… what do we admire so much? The architecture? The work put into it or the fact that is has survived for this long? We couldn’t really come up with an answer, but perhaps this was one fortress too much and we couldn’t see past the old pile of stones. Or perhaps it was the rain. Or our mood because of the rain. Too much rain. Fortunately, it stopped raining when we drove to lake Shkoder and tried to drive as close as possible to the Montenegrin border while following the shore of the lake. We stopped at one of the many pebbled beach to enjoy the view and tried to imagine how nice this would be if the sun was shining.

One of the reasons for us to visit Shkoder was to use the city (and the hotel we were staying at) as a base to explore the Albanian Alps, also known as the ‘Accursed Mountains’, which I already had the chance to discover hiking on their Kosovar side. The most popular hike in this region and the one we had planned on doing is the one between the two mountain villages of Valbona and Theth, which takes between 5 and 7 hours depending on your pace and the weather and should offer incredible views over an ocean of jagged mountains (words of the Lonely Planet, not mine, as I’ll already disclose that we never got to see the mountains… well not in their full splendour at least).

Our journey to Valbona began very early on a Saturday morning while the rest of the world still seemed asleep. With the breakfast package from the hotel in hand and a small rucksack packed for two days, we were picked up by a van at 6.30am in front of our hotel and after a very windy and bumpy road through the mountains, we were dropped off 2 hours later at a lake shore pier to step aboard a ferry for a 3-hour boat ride to Fierze. According to all the blogs I had read on this part of Albania, this ferry ride was one of the highlights of travelling in Albania: enjoying the beautiful fjord-like lake with dramatic mountains as backdrop while being transported from one place to another. Well… we spent the hours on the boat sitting inside the tiny passenger cabin as close to each other as possible for some warmth, admiring the raindrops, fog and at times a glimpse of landscape. I’ll spare you the details, but in short: endless rain, freezing wind, windows that didn’t close, bare ankles because fashion was more important than warmth (big mistake) and a growing feeling of ‘why did we think this was a good idea’. All in all, this was far from the ideal boat ride we expected, but in the end the pouring rain transformed into a light drizzle and we still got to see some of the view and even in this gloomy weather it was absolutely stunning, let alone with the sun out.

Once at the ‘port’ in Fierze, we had a warm cup of tea in a café/hut and stepped into another van for an hour drive to the village of Valbona where the driver dropped us in the middle of nowhere telling us that our hotel was a 5-minute walk. The rain had stopped and the prospect of a nice warm hotel room was enough to make us start walking down a trail that should lead us to our hotel without any further questions. We ended up walking for 45 minutes up and down a very slippery and muddy path through the woods – beautiful woods in full fall colours of orange, yellow and red – to eventually find our hotel, but fully closed and dark and no one answering the door or the phone. After 5 minutes of cursing and me blaming myself for this hiccup (I was the one who had booked the place), we decided that we hadn’t come this far to let ourselves be defeated and walked to the main road, which we knew would in the end bring us back to another hotel we had seen from the minivan. Fast forward to a few hours and another couple of hiccups later, we were laying on a bed of hotel (different on than planned however), but it was warm, they prepared food, were friendly and we even enjoyed a small walk to discover the area before it started raining again. A real adventurous day; let’s keep it to that :-).

After a good night sleep in a warm bed – so much more appreciated when you’ve been cold all day – we went for another short walk in the morning to make up for the fact that on this Sunday morning we should have started our big hike to the village of Theth (described as one of the most remote village in Europe) where we would have slept one night and then travelled back by van to Shkoder on Monday. Instead, on this Sunday we were travelling back directly back to Shkoder in the exact same way as the day before (1h van – 3h ferry – 2h van on bumpy road) because the weather forecast was so bad that hiking in the mountains was strongly discouraged. Especially when equipped only with sport shoes and a light rain jacket. It was a real disappointment that this part of our trip did not go as planned and I’m sure that there are many more beautiful hikes to come and that being able to adapt to unforeseen events forms part of the beauty of travelling, but as we boarded the same ferry again – with long socks and an extra layer this time – there was no other feeling than disappointment (and cold, again) and I was very happy that we were both equally honest in sharing this. Once back in Shkoder and after a warm shower we had a very large beer in a bar to drown our sorrows and went back to a restaurant we had been to before for a hearty and comforting Albanian meal. At this point we were able again to have a laugh about this shared misery, which in the end we will remember as much as if we would have done the full trip as planned. Something about the beauty of adapting to change…

After our adventures in the mountain, it was time for the last leg of our journey: Tirana! We decided to take our time driving down to the capital and visit the Rodon peninsula on the way. Since we so much enjoyed our little adventure on the small countryside roads when we drove to Shkoder, it seemed like a logical choice to take some more of these back roads since we weren’t in a rush. You might feel it already, this was the wrong choice. We forgot to factor in that rain turns potholes into lakes and dusty roads into mud paradise. Long story short, after fearing for our life on the narrowest bridge ever (I’m not even sure it was built for cars) without railing – to quote my mother: ‘this is the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life’ – driving through those pothole lakes I mentioned before (we kept reassuring ourselves that the tire tracks we saw were proof of other vehicles having crossed the lakes as well) and slipping with wheels spinning in the mud, we ended up having to backtrack because someone told us the road ahead was inaccessible. Again, I’m glad it wasn’t my turn driving because I’m not sure I would have gotten us out of that mud. It was quite funny how we both were saying that we weren’t scared to get stuck and hiding our skyrocketing adrenaline but afterwards admitted to each other that we were both really afraid not being able to get out of the mud because we were in the middle of nowhere and didn’t know where we could have found help and our white sneakers wouldn’t have survived a walk to the closest farm… Rain and cold is clearly the main theme of this second Albanian blog, but don’t get me wrong, it was still a lot of fun and made it perhaps slightly more adventurous! When we finally made it out of this muddy hell and arrived in the most random village ever, we felt as we had conquered the Everest. We stopped at the first coffee place we saw because we just had to get the stress out of our bodies. You might think I’m exaggerating slightly, but I can assure you I’m not. I can smile about it now (which I’m doing as we speak) but hope I will never get in a similar situation again. We skipped the Rodon peninsula – I looked pictures up on Google instead – and drove straight to the town of Kruja using a normal road to visit a fortress instead, stick to what you know in this case as this was Albanian fortress 7 out of 7! After a short tour and a warming lunch it was time to drive to Tirana airport to drop off our beloved car and visit Albania’s capital city.

What a surprise the next morning to see some blue sky and sunshine, a nice present for our last day. We woke up early to see as much as possible of Tirana in the 24h we had left together. This included a visit of the Bunk’Art museum (underground tunnel/communist-era bunker turned into a museum on the police and security services in Albania during the 20th century, horrifying and very interesting and well done), strolling in the cool Blloku district, doing a street art walking tour, having cocktails at the Hemmingway bar, lunch at a super hipster place, Albanian dinner at yet another slow food movement restaurant, walking around the biggest park of Tirana and of course last but not least having coffee with cake to follow the Albanian tradition. Full day but it gave a great impression of the city and I was positively surprised by the friendly vibe, the juxtaposition of all the different building styles and the optimism and will to build a new future you can feel around town.

There is so much more to say about those 10 days in Albania and so many other anecdotes to tell (our super weird hotel in Tirana where the windows didn’t close and the cheapest (in the bad sense of the word) breakfast ever for example or my scary encounter with a running turkey in an alley) but this blog also needs to come to an end. I hope I haven’t scared you with all my rainy stories because this countries is definitely worth a visit and we were just unlucky for the second half of this trip – we blame climate change.

One last thought on Albania, which cannot be left unmentioned when writing about this country: can someone please explain why most Albanians seem to have a death wish as soon as they get into a car?! Everybody I had spoken to who had been to Albania warned me for the Albanian drivers so I did come prepared and perhaps that’s why I wasn’t as shocked as I would have been otherwise, but it’s still quite surprising. Stopping your car in the middle of a roundabout is not unusual, parking or walking on a highway either, only fools (us) use their signalling lights when turning or moving lanes, speed limitations are mere suggestions, overtaking happens left and right and we still haven’t figured if any rules apply. There is a lot of police stopping cars on the highway but that doesn’t seem to make a difference.

Albania – The end!

This will be my last story on this trip so if you want to hear what happened next, I would happy to come tell it live, but in short this was the rest of my itinerary:

  • Bus from Tirana to Montenegro for 5 days in this small but spectacular country with the enchanting little towns of Kotor and Perast where you travel back to the Venetian times with beautiful pallazi on the shore of the bay of Kotor, endless mountain ranges and delicious food – I had one of the best lunches of my trip in a restaurant in Perast.
  • Bus from Kotor to Dubrovnik; without a doubt Dubrovnik is one of the most beautiful and impressive cities I’ve ever visited. The views over the old town have left me speechless and I can still feel the happiness and feeling of freedom I felt when diving from the rocks at the foot of the old town’s fortress into the Adriatic sea and admiring those century old walls from a dolphin’s perspective (how poetic). Some other key words are: octopus burger, wine tasting, ice cream, corona beer and sunset watching, amazing hotel (big contrast with hostel in Montenegro) and running into a friend from university by total coincidence and having dinner together.
  • From Dubrovnik I flew to Faro, Portugal and then a bus brought me to Lagos, a cute little Algarvian (is that a word?) town where I can easily understand you just simply forget to leave. I also ended up staying way longer than expected because it felt so comfortable and didn’t know what to do next. Of those 2 weeks in Portugal I spent 1 week at a surf camp (Tiny Whale Lodge for those interested – highly recommended) and although I still have no talent for the sport, it is a lot of fun! The weather was perfect for the first 10 days and it was so nice to have the feeling of summer again.
  • Flight from Faro to Amsterdam!

Foto’s

2 Reacties

  1. Maman:
    10 december 2021
    Quelle aventure! J’ai aimé ce voyage en terre inconnue! Merci Pauline pour la belle histoire. 😘
  2. Renske:
    12 december 2021
    Op deze druilerige zondagmiddag is dit laatste reisverhaal het perfecte leesvoer! Heel leuk dat je het nog hebt gepost! Op naar het volgende avontuur!!