Thru the Balkans………Albania

Ian must be frightened of Linda……….he wouldn’t phone her to say we weren’t coming to Turkey, so begrudgingly he agreed to ride thru’ Albania.  I stopped sulking 🙂

We then had to go back the direction we had come and past the Skadarsko lake – half of which is actually in Albania

and inland thru’ the mountains to the capital city – Podgorica

We rode around Podgorica about 3 times trying to find an ATM as we didn’t know how much they were going to charge us at the Border.  Eventually we found one

The border area was fairly quiet, we weren’t quite sure where to go for visas, insurance and whatever else we needed and nobody seemed to understand English.  Eventually I just said , well let’s just go thru the border control and see what they say.  So we did. They stamped our passport and waved us on!  Nothing to pay – no visa – no insurance!

Ian was worried about this and was convinced that the first police patrol we saw were going to stop us and ask for documents. We never saw any.  We knew about one of the few (only?) campsites in Albania from the internet.  It is run by a Dutch couple and is just outside of Shkoder. Most of the roads are ok, there were a few “dodgy” ones,  and there are various different types of traffic on them 🙂

Everybody waved as we passed by – in the villages the children all run alongside shouting hello – they maybe don’t see many motorbikes, especially Tigers from England! This is Shkoder and the Rozafa Castle in the background

We found the campsite easily enough – it wasn’t very busy, but we had some nice neighbours:)

The couple who ran the campsite very kindly cooked us a meal of sausage and chips – which was well received!  They also told us there were no problems with police stopping you or with border officials, they said it was alot of scaremongering done by people who didn’t want Albania to have tourism.  Seems a shame really that the country has this reputation – it sort of reminded me of Turkey 15 years ago and will probably become more popular in years to come (is this such a good thing???) Anyway, when we left the next morning Ian was feeling more relaxed – I however left with 31 mosquito bites – and that was only on my lower legs!

Mileage 14455

Riding towards Tirana I hadn’t really seen any “food” places where I would be able to get something “non foreign” (no McDonalds, KFC etc…..) so when we eventually stopped at a place in the mountains I was trying to plead “non hunger”. We had noticed on the way in a half  side of “something” turning on a spit.  We asked the guy for a menu – “no menu” – so asked what they had “lamb or cold meat” Ian then asked what the cold meat was “lamb”  – Obviously!  So lamb it was, for him then.  I had a plate of french fries! He had a plate of ……….bones!!! Looking around, everybody had a plate of bones too – so he got stuck in!

Some of the roads were busy, others not so

Tirana

I love the brightly painted blocks of flats

I began to think the Ian was on some kind of mission – he was!  To my annoyance he said he wanted to be in Greece before dark, he was worried about the bike as we had no insurance and didn’t know where we would stay.  I wanted to go along the coast – he wouldn’t – made some excuse about the roads there being bad – I didn’t believe him – but as he was riding and not me, it was his choice 😦

It was about 8.00pm when we reached the border, and fairly quiet.  We got thru passport control without a problem and then saw this guy waving a piece of paper at us.  I knew we didn’t have anything that looked like that, so fumbled around in the bag for a few minutes, chatting away and smiling at him all the while.  I found our V5 (vehicle registration document) and handed it to him saying this is what you need – he looked at it, looked at us, mumbled something in Albanian and waved us away!  I still don’t know what we were supposed to have, whether he was finishing his shift and couldn’t be bothered with a couple of English people who he didn’t understand or whether he was in a good mood and letting us thru, and I don’t really care!  So, to anybody that asks – no, Albania is not a problem, you don’t have to pay a fortune to get in and out and you don’t get stopped by the police.  They need to do something about them bones tho’!

Coming into Greece was not so good.