The taxi ride was interesting… Road rules were much akin to those in SE Asia, where you are at liberty to drive in the middle of the road until another car approaches from the opposite direction, at which point you should swerve back onto your side before colliding head-on…all made more difficult by narrow, winding roads with blind turns. As we approached some barren hills, the taxi driver kept glancing at the hills, later explaining to us (as best he could in his very, very limited English) “soldiers” – perhaps on the lookout for illegal crossers? At one point, our taxi driver had to pull over to remove the “TAXI” sign from atop his car, since he is only licensed in Montenegro. Finally, we approached the border…and then crossed the border without incident.
Part of our skepticism in traveling through Albania was the result of the…interesting…things we read in The Lonely Planet guidebook...
“Both buses and furgons are privately owned and don’t follow a timetable – they leave when they’ve got enough passengers to make it worth their while. The furgon and bus drivers seem to take it in turns to strike, each looking for some concession from the government to restrict the activities of the other…”
After arriving at our first destination of the day, our taxi driver dropped us off near the furgon (minibus) “station”. By “station”, I mean the corner of a major road in front of a gas station. We sat in the furgon for at least 30 minutes while the driver attempted to drum up more passengers. Finally, we were off on a 2.5-hour ride to Tirane, Albania’s capital and our final destination for the day, picking up and dropping off passengers at any given location on the way.
“The Albanian people are generally kind, warm, and unquestionably generous. If you ask for directions, don’t be surprised if you’re guided all the way to your destination.”
Our furgon driver made sure to get us a taxi that would take us to our hotel in Tirane. Our taxi driver in Tirane went to all lengths to find the hotel we had booked for the night. We must have driven around for almost an hour and visited three other hotels asking for directions before we finally found it. The entire time, he just kept looking back at us with a hopeful and determined expression on his face, saying, “no problem, no problem”.
“Getting out of Tirane can be extremely confusing, as much for locals as anybody else. You have the option of buses or furgons, which leave from several hubs on the outskirts of the city that are prone to move from time to time…Keep asking until someone points you in the right direction… Macedonia-bound buses going through Struga and on to Tetovo, leave from the patch of mud in front of the train station.”
Luckily we were able to benefit from the niceness of the people. We found a very helpful travel agent (who spoke English, a rarity) who without asking for anything in return, called his friend who frequently travels our proposed route and found out the exact times of departure of our bus and the location of the bus “station” (the station was actually the parking lot of a closed down factory). Even more, he offered to have his friend (in our destination city) help us find reasonably-priced lodging if we needed it and recommended a good restaurant at which to eat. We made plans to leave at the crack of dawn the next morning.
Despite our luck the night before, actually getting a taxi to the bus station was more difficult. Our hotel called us a taxi. Unfortunately, neither him nor the taxi driver spoke English. We tried to communicate that we wanted to go to the bus station to Sarande , repeating multiple times, “Sarande bus station, bus Sarande”. Finally after going back and forth with general language confusion, Andy whipped out our trusty Lonely Planet guidebook and said, “stacion autobusi Sarande”. “Oh, stacion autobusi Sarande, yes”. Whew! We made it to the bus station with plenty of time to spare before our 6am (-ish) departure.
“Nowadays the road infrastructure is improving… The coastal road from Vlora to Sarande is particularly treacherous. Highway signage is bad and there are a lot of road works going on to accommodate the explosive growth in vehicle numbers. In short, it’s a really, really hard place to drive, and local driving habits are best described as free-spirited.”
The bus ride from Tirane to Sarande (our destination and a coastal city not far north of the Albania-Greece border) was 9.5 hours long. Yes, that is right, for 9.5 LONG hours, we sat in a bus that smelled of dust, and well…a bit like people had been sick in the bus. Sure enough, once we were on the road, the first thing the bus crew guy did after collecting money was to pass out blue plastic bags. Gross. I tried not to think of that as we drove along the windy sections of the trip. In any case, the roads were not nearly as horrible as I (we) had pictured…until about 6 hours into the ride where we passed through a town where the roads were in complete upheaval (they were being resurfaced but presently were simply gravel tracks). We had to close the windows (a horrible, horrible thing in a long bus ride in the afternoon with many passengers lax about deodorant) to avoid the dust clouds. To make things worse, large back hoes and bulldozers crowded the already incredibly narrow roads often leading to complete standstills as our bus was stuck facing a line of heavy machinery traveling in the other direction. It’s amazing that we were even able to drive through the town at all, much less make it out without so much as a scratch.
“On the hillsides, beaches, people’s front gardens and generally most surfaces in Albania, you will notice small concrete domes gazing at you through rectangular slits. Meet the bunkers: Enver Hoxha’s concrete legacy, built from 1950 to 1985. Weighing in at five tons of concrete and iron, these little mushrooms are almost impossible to destroy, as they were built to repel an invasion and can resist full tank assault – a fact proved by their chief engineer, who had to vouch for his creation’s strength by standing inside one while it was bombarded by a tank…an estimated 700,000 bunkers were built.”
After breaking ties with both the Soviet Union and Chairman Mao’s China, Hoxha left Albania without allies and embarked on a scheme to protect his country from invasion…by building all 700,000-ish bunkers throughout the country. We saw many of these bunkers along the road from Tirane to Sarande...and true to Lonely Planet, they were in fact, all over the place. There did not appear to be much strategy involved in placing the bunkers, as they were located randomly, often not near each other nor anything of significance...but perhaps we are just too naïve to understand military strategy.
“As Albania was closed for so long, black and Asian travelers may encounter some curious stares; in fact most visitors to Albania, male or female, can expect to encounter such stares! Studiously ignoring the man sitting next to you on a furgon, as he bores holes into the side of your head, will have no effect, so you may as well get used to it.”
While in Tirane, we didn’t really notice the “curious stares”, at least not nearly as much as what we had received in Montenegro. But that was Tirane. The bus ride was a completely different story. You would think that after several hours, much less 9 hours, that one would get tired of “glancing” at the Asian person on the bus. I’m pretty sure that I looked exactly the same at the end of the bus ride as I did at the beginning (perhaps a little sweatier and dustier). Although I didn't quite have anyone "bore holes into the side of my head", I nonetheless received multiple (as in every 20 minutes or so) “curious stares” from the same passengers throughout the entirety of the bus ride.
We finally arrived at our destination, Sarande, where we stayed overnight before taking a short hydrofoil to Corfu Island, thus leaving the country of Albania and entering Greece.
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