The roads in Albania are awesome

Trip Start Mar 25, 2007
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Trip End Feb 16, 2008


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Thursday, August 23, 2007

  We crossed the border into Albania with very little paperwork, just €10 per person in tax, nothing for insurance (we're assuming that meant we weren't covered!) and a new stamp in the passport. The road was absolute crap (narrow and patched so many times that it was like driving on rumble strips constantly), and there were piles of rubbish everywhere. It was almost like being back in Africa. There were heaps of abandoned fuel stations in varying degrees of being finished. We drove through Shkodra, which was just like being back in the souks of Syria, with heaps of market stalls selling everything imaginable on the side of the road, stray dogs running everywhere and no traffic laws at all. At this point we were wondering what we had got ourselves in for but we carried on and found a big sandy beach with heaps of cars parked on it and people as far as the eye could see. Unfortunately the beach was also covered in rubbish, and due to the ex-presidents paranoia some of the 700,000 concrete bunkers that he had installed in the country during his reign. They were absolutely everywhere, in fields and especially on the beaches and on hills overlooking the coast. Makes for an ugly coastline.
 
The next day we just carried on our way, tried to stop at a beach near Durres for a swim but were put off by the smell and the bits of toilet paper floating in the water. We stopped again in Vlora for the night, the water was a lot nicer here and the beach only had a small amount of rubbish on it, although it was rocky not sandy. We had been seeing heaps of meat being roasted on a spit since we hit Croatia but had yet to try some so we sampled the local restaurant's selection (actually there was no selection, it was lamb, lamb or lamb!). It was good, but NZ does it better!
 
The next day we had about 120km 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 shit surface. 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 when we met a concrete truck and had to try and squeeze into a non-existant gap! We made it, hot and bothered, to the blue eyed spring, a cold water spring. It was beautiful and cold, and awesomely fresh ( amazingly there was no rubbish here!) so we all had a swim and filled our drinking water containers. Then we headed to the border, where we crossed a nice new road, and joined the massive queue to get out of the country!
 
If anyone is thinking of driving through Albania, get an up to date road map before you do it. We took what looked like the main road that followed the coast, but after seeing the interior road we think that may have been better. They are working on their roads and the area around Tiran actually had quite a good dual carriageway system. In a couple of years the roads will probably be up to European standards. Hopefully at some point they start doing something about the rubbish too!
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