Mad, bad, Albania

Having left Nicola in Dubrovnik, I made for Ulcinj, back in Montenegro, where I spent 2 nights. There was nothing I particularly wanted to see there, it just happened to be the closest town in Montenegro to the Albanian border which I wished to cross. It was actually OK. The main town beach was pretty hideous, wall-to-wall people & beach umbrellas, but I walked further round the coast & found some nice rocky beaches. I was expecting it to be a real hassle organising my transport to Tirana in Albania, but the father & son who owned the apartment I was staying in were absolutely brilliant. Basically, a lot of people travel using private minivans called furgons. These leave from pre-arranged places, usually just the side of the road somewhere. The father was great, he rang up the driver to find out where it was leaving from, then personally walked me there at 6am. This furgon was heading to Shkodra, the first town over the Albanian border, so he also gave strict instructions to the driver to make sure I got on the right furgon to take me from Shkodra to Tirana. He also got the driver to swap some of my money for Albanian leke, so at least I had some local currency on me! The driver of the furgon to Tirana was also great. They don't get many foreign travellers, so a big fuss was made of me. He insisted that I sit in the 'best seat' of his minivan, which happened to be the only one with a window that could be opened!

Albania was pretty crazy, as soon as I crossed the Montenegrin border it was like stepping back in time 50 years. Very rural with donkey & carts sharing the roads. The country is riddled with concrete igloo-shaped bunkers, a legacy of their paranoid former dictator, Hoxha, who apparently had 750 000 of them built! Tirana was unbelievably hot, it can't have been much off 40 degrees. It was also dirty, dusty & frantic. I stayed the night in a fairly recently opened backpackers right in the city centre. 3 Hungarians & 1 Swedish girl were the only other people there. The city centre has the widest boulevards imaginable, another throw-back to its Stalinist days. There was also the biggest police presence I have ever seen in a city. Nearly every second street corner had a policeman on it. I didn't actually see any of them do anything apart from lounge around! One thing that is pretty cool is that the current mayor of the city has encouraged people to paint buildings in bright colours in an attempt to brighten the place up. Concrete communist-style architecture is rather depressing really...