Category: Albania
-
Our final day in Albania… Hello Macedonia!
An early start. To say we woke up cold would be a huge understatement…. We were freezing. The alarm sounded at 5am but there was no chance we were going to get out of our sleeping bags then, it wasn’t fully light and the only movement possible was snoozing the alarm and burrowing ourselves deeper…
-
Leskovik to Mollaj- Albania’s South East
The south east of Albania has been quite a contrast to many of the parts of the country we have seen before, most of the towns and villages we pass through are forgotten backwaters. Once centres of industry and manufacture during Communist times, they have been forgotten in the years since and are shunned…
-
Croissants, campfires and communist memorials….
I’m going to be brutally honest here, Albania has some roads that are quite seriously beyond shite and they nearly got the better of me today. Imagine the surface of the moon, now imagine someone has lobbed a few sticks of dynamite at it, throw in someone dodgy mercedes driving and then you get an…
-
Punctures, punctures and bunkers.
When we arrived back at the petrol station/hotel/coffee shop after visiting Gjirokaster yesterday, one of the guys working on the pumps came over gesticulating wildly at our bikes “Goma, goma!” He proclaimed. Goma indeed, Sam’s tyre was flat again and so this morning, we had yet another repair to carry out. Once that was done,…
-
Albania – castles, crashed planes and drug lord villages.
Albania is a strange creature, it is very different to a lot of the countries we have visited so far in a variety of ways. On of which is their petrol stations. In most countries, petrol stations are a good bet for a little shop where you can pick up a cold drink and a…
-
Steel of the party!
Today we left Elbasan to the town of Fier… it was a tough day. The roads were beyond terrible which resulted in it taking much much longer than expected! It was an interesting day as we passed the huge factories of Elbassan, another abandoned airfield with more decaying fighter jets and then into the stinking…
-
Albania’s forgotten trains
It seems I have to admit something… Sheena has known for a while but I have been reluctant to be true to myself and have been hiding a secret deep inside. Sheena takes the piss out of me for it, and as much as I really don’t want to it turns out I really love…
-
Recovering in Durres
“You should have come here ten years ago, Durres was beautiful. Now we have all these apartments, enough for a million people – when the hell will there ever be a million people here? The police do nothing and they keep building them. I still love Durres, Durres is my city, but you should have…
-
A day trip to Tirana
Our initial planning for Albania indicated that cycling into Tirana would be a behemoth task, rumours of over congested ring roads and maniac driving led us to take the decision that, as much as we might wish to, we would skip touring the capital. In this instance, our long recovery from food poisoning had a…
-
Stumbling upon Albania’s military past….
An abandoned airbase in Albania. Cycle touring may be one of the slowest ways to travel, but one of its main bonuses is the unusual and unexpected things you come across during your day. We often find ourselves in places or situations that just wouldn’t happen if you were on a bus or passing through…
Sam and Sheena Cycle 