6AM Thurs 14 August
Not even a minute to sit down and write yesterday.

Woke up at 5, to catch the 6AM bus to Saranda. I was told it would be a 6-hour trip. Not fun to contemplate after a full day of plane-sitting but I was looking forward to getting a sense of Albanian countryside. Part of the reason that I chose this departure time is that its route runs along the coast, rather than the slightly inland route of the 8:30 bus. The other reason was to avoid the afternoon heat.

I’ll start right off with the bad news. It took 10 hours, not 6. One short break at the 3-hour mark, a longer one at 5 ½ hours at a restaurant – I skipped the meal because I thought we were close to the end (yes, I could read the map, but I figured that the road must get better and we’d zip through the rest of the trip; though I was still puzzled at taking such a long break so close to the end of the trip). I arrived in Saranda at 4PM hot, hungry, tired.

But the good news more than fills the glass. The bus ride was interesting and/or stunning, and my first face-to-face meetings with Auron (Ani) Tare (our Albanian liason, and so much more) and Jeff Royal and George Robb of RPM were really good.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

For those of you who are reading this because you are contemplating a trip to Albania, a bit of practical advice. Credit cards are rarely accepted here, even at good hotels. Neither are dollars. But ATMs are everywhere.

The buses really are air-conditioned, as advertised. Nothing like the Turkish buses, however: no lemon cologne, no cushy seats, no toilets. But they do offer radio entertainment –- constantly and at a substantial level, except when the blessed mountains cut out the signals. Mostly bad rock music, in many languages. I wondered if anyone wanted to hear it. The hip younger people on the bus had their own music with them and surely this wasn’t what the adults listened to at home? The bus driver spent much of the trip talking on his non-hands-free cell phone, which worried me at some of the more dangerous or tricky parts of the drive.

The first half of the drive was uneventful, driving-wise, the only challenge being to pass slower vehicles on this two-lane (one each way) highway. It is a major highway, so there is lots of slow truck traffic to be passed. There are no shoulders, so the passing all needs to be done into oncoming traffic. But not a situation that requires two hands, apparently.

For the first couple hours we drove through countryside that surprised me because it was so green –- water was plentiful, small farms filled the vista, the bus driver stopped for apples. I saw the occasional mosque and, more often, traces of the old ways: donkeys pulling wooden carts, people cutting crops by hand in the fields, old men herding flocks of big turkey-looking birds.

Around Fieri, we transitioned from the Balkans into the dry landscape, olive groves and vineyards of the Mediterranean. In the guidebook I read that at Vlora we crossed from the Adriatic into the Ionic. Here, too, we came to the first of the two mountain ridges we would cross in this trip. Jet lag and the steady bumpety-bump of the rolling bus had been threatening sleep, but the dramatic views and roads/navigation of the mountainside woke me right up.

The mountains faced us suddenly, vaulting from the flat floodplain of ancient Apollonia. We twisted and turned steadily for the better part of an hour. I was reminded of my first trip to the Mediterranean, in the 80s, before all the highways had been built in Greece. The short crow-flying distances of featureless maps in reality long hours of crawling bus rides through stupendous views and hamlets whose isolation was now obvious. And like those long-ago Greek roads, yesterdays’ roads were 1.5 vehicles wide, turns carved by and for tractors, and yet somehow there was two-way traffic and the bus drivers could make those turns. The only difference is that there are no good-luck charms dangling along the top and sides and from the mirrors of the windshield. Nothing. A result of the decades of official atheism??

Here the mountains mostly cut out both the radio signals and the phone airwaves. Thank goodness.

We stopped at the top of the pass south of Vlora, where a small restaurant had been built next to a spring welling from the mountainside. This is the lunch I skipped, though I did spend the time collecting wild blackberries. The mountain air mitigated the noon heat and I sat at the view, munching the sun-drenched sweet berries.

The northern side of the ridge, our climb up, had been tree-covered; the southern expanse was a bare, sheer tumble down the mountain. At one point I counted 8 long switchbacks below me. Yes, there were no guardrails to block my vision. The radio and phone signals had nothing to block them, either.

Not this high up, but everywhere further down and all along our route, the view from the highway was marked by dumps of trash. My day on the road in Albania makes it clear to me that two major challenges for this country are its road infrastructure and its trash.

They are working on the roads. Much of the reason it took another 4 hours to drive from Vlora to Saranda is the road projects. The partially paved tracks winding through the villages are being replaced by a two-lane tarred road. Our bus negotiated ever so slowly the narrow winds of the old road, the tractors and dump trucks and bridge-builders, and lurched dustily along the newly graded but not yet asphalted new roads. Here I remembered the other skill for which I forgave bus drivers’ swagger in the old days: how they negotiate villages. The “highway” that now runs through the towns were first built as donkey, maybe cart, tracks snaking between the houses. Those houses have stood there for generations. The roads are not easily widened. The topography governed the paths in the first place, and there are not easy alternative routes to be found. Somehow two directions of traffic now pass through those villages. Their ability at inches gives the bus drivers bragging rights. The inhabitants sit on their balconies – often level with my bus window – and watch the show. Horns blare. The driver’s helper gets out and gives directions. Very occasionally the bus driver must squeeze out of his door to look himself. The radio is still playing. The traffic in either direction is piling up. More horns. Dogs start barking, donkeys bray.

I recognized the shape, but could not see the colors, of my suitcase when it was pulled out of the hold at Saranda. Probably very dusty myself, I walked along the promenade, along the sparkling sea. I found my hosts sitting in the cool shaded darkness of a balcony, an old stone house just off the waterfront. But I shall have to continue later…