Hotel Arvi Durres

... army to various victories against the Turkish empire. <br>On the road from the bus station (stop) there is a street of wooden shops (that ironically looks very turkish and was selling predominantly turkish goods!).

... von Envar Hodscha jedenfalls ist heute eine Disco, Envar Hodscha, d** Albanien 40 Jahre lang regi**t hat, ist heute in einem namenlosen Grab auf einem gewoehnlichen Friedhof begraben. Seine Statue ist ebenfalls z**truemm**t, auf dem Zentralplatz steht nur noch die Statue von Skand**beg, dem nationalen Helden.<br><br>Albanien geho**te auch zum ottomanischen Reich, ab** ein Alban**, d** von den Ottomanen in Byzanz ausgebildet wurde, hat einen Aufstand ausg ...

... and zither music, with occasional accordian thrown in for luck. If you've never heard Albanian pop before, consider yourself lucky - imagine a cat in a washing machine, to a background of thousands of mosquitos, and you have an idea. We soon discovered that the point of the music videos was to distract our attention from the shocking state of the roads we were hurtling down in the dark, with potholes the size of small cars, random piles of rocks everywhere ...

... to cover to get to the Greek border, so we thought it would maybe take us half a day at the most.....we were wrong. The road got a lot worse, single lane, really windy, and a ************. We took about 2 hours to cover 40km, stopped for a swim and then took another 2 hours to cover the next 30 km. The road was really narrow, and if you met another car you had to have a face off to see who went backwards! As we were 4 vans we usually won, except ...

... 8am the previous day, we were thankful to be out of albania 2 taxi rides, 2 furgons, 1 ferry ride and 24 hours later. The hotel was meant to pick us up from the port and take us to check in. We were staying at a backpacker resort called the pink palace. The driver showed up an hour late, which was fine, but then left us sitting in the hot van for another 3-4 hours waiting for the ferry from venice to show up, as she had other passengers she needed to pick up ...

... and enjoy the views for a brief spell. Albania's been a highly intriguing stop in the trip, which is especially great given that I originally wasn't even sure I'd add it to the itinerary. Gjirokastra and Berati were fascinating destinations filled with history and Tirana turned out to be a good deal of fun to pass a couple evenings in. The best thing without a doubt has been the people - easily the friendliest and most welcoming I've encountered ...

... including the Greek names Epidamnos (&#917;&#960;&#943;&#948;&#945;&#956;&# 957;&#959;&#962;) and Dyrhacchion (&#916;&#965;&#961;&#961;&#940;&#967;&# 953;&#959;&#957;), the Latin Dyrrachium, and the Italian Durrazzo. For other names by which Durrës is known see other names of Durrës. History Epidamnus in antiquity Greek foundation The city was founded as ...

... They formed nice lines and seemed extrorinarily well behaved. The girls were all wearing white aprons. We guess that this was part of the school uniform. The same went for the Roman stadium as for the archeological museum, minus the school children. From there, we climbed up a hill past the Palace of Albania's former king Zog. It's a military base though and we couldn't get very close to check it out. I walked towards a sand-baged guard post ...

Finally made it to Albania after 3 days traveling via bus, taxi and furgon (a mini van with random people getting on and off along the way, very confusing) and its capital Tirana was a full on culture shock after the lovely seaside Croatia. The centre is bustling and modern but the outskirts are amazingly run down and there are roadworks (actually digging up the road, path whatever) all over the place with cars ...

After several days kicking back in the sun, it was time to get back on the road. For the next 36 hours it seemed all we did was catch ferries. The first one took us from Korcula Island (Croatia) back to Dubrovnik (Croatia)- it seemed to be massively overcrowded as there was literally more bodies than deck space - we even overheard an older Australian lady make a formal complaint that she thought it was unsafe!!! We survived however by sitting downstairs near the reception area ...