Where we left off ... was where ... we were left off ... the bus
If you missed the first installment of this adventure, we had crossed the remote mountains from Greece to the border of Albania here.
------------------------------
The big problem was that our bus took off without us, and we were stranded in the middle of nowhere without our luggage or anything. On the positive side, we did have our passports!
We walked out of the passport office and looked around. All you could see were hills surrounding us, and a few worn taxis with dangerous looking drivers waiting for victims. No one spoke English. We were sixty miles from civilization.
Fiona and I looked at each other, "what are we going to do?" We decided to just sit and wait. At some point, we would figure out what to do. It was still early, before six in the morning. We went back inside to talk to the passport officer. We told him our bus left us behind, and he didn't seem surprised and didn't seem to care.
"Welcome to Albania ..."
Without any options, we continued to wait. "I'm not getting in one of those taxis", Fiona said, and I agreed. We waited. Lo and behold, after quite a while, another bus came along. Maybe this is our chance!
We explained to the bus driver in sign language (nobody spoke much English in those parts) about our predicament, and he motioned "no problem, just get on my bus, only you'll have to stand ..." and he continued "maybe I can catch the bastard."
So we stood. The bus was full people and kids and chickens and goats, but hey, we're moving. The driver was really moving too, careening over the sometimes steep hills on bad roads and we had to hang on or we would fall over.
Eventually to our surprise, we caught up with the other bus! Our guy starts honking and gets our original bus to pull over. The driver comes back and sees us and says (I'm paraphrasing here) "Hey, what happened to you guys?"
"You left us behind - you turkey!"
And the driver replies "Turkey?"
He looks around puzzled "Theese not Turkey, theese Albania!"
If we weren't so upset, this would have been quite funny.
So he invites us back to our first bus, but we're still ticked off. We'll just get our bags and ride our rescue bus. We reached Korce, Albania, sometime mid morning.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the way during the bus ride, we kept seeing these bunker like concrete structures built into the slopes alongside the road. It seemed like they were everywhere. They looked like rounded concrete defensive structures where soldiers could be inside with slits for the guns to shoot out - which is exactly what they were.
There seemed to be hundreds, even thousands of them. They were everywhere. In fact, according to some sources, there are over 700,000 of them!
I asked the bus driver about them, and he was able to explain in broken English (along with help from another passenger), that the former communist government was very paranoid. They thought that America and the West were going to invade Albania at any moment, so they built these fortifications all over the country, designed to be manned with armed soldiers.
I almost laughed. They couldn't be serious! Why would America - or anybody else for that matter - every invade this small, impoverished, third rate, isolated, dysfunctional country for any reason? Most people couldn't even find this place on a map if they had to.
At this point, they assured me, there are no soldiers anymore. The former president was overthrown and died and "Now we have anarchy!"
This is why you travel, to learn things like this that defy common sense, and even reality.
--------------------------------------------------------------
We finally reach Korce after driving through some fairly primitive countryside.
Not knowing how long we'd be there, we had to find accommodations. Some guy points us around the corner up the street and says "hotel". We walk there and look up at this big, old, ominous Soviet bloc building. We pause, and then walk inside.
The clerk says they have rooms available, for cheap, and gives us a key and instructions upstairs. We get to the room, and take one look, and know immediately we're not staying there. We open the solid metal door, and it's like a concrete cell, with cots for beds and bars on the windows. It's very cold and there is no heat. For all we knew, it used to be a prison. No thanks.
We walk downstairs and hand back the key, he doesn't seem too surprised. We ask if there is anything else with a little better quality in town, and he just stares at us. Customer service is non-existent in this country. He shakes his head.
We start to wander out and he says there might be a "luxury" hotel up the road a ways off, but it's very expensive!
We'll take our chances there. We find it, but it's not what any traveler would call luxury. Actually it was not too bad, even had a working TV. It was only about fifty bucks a night - expensive?
So we need to get some local currency. I have a some American dollars and ask the clerk at the front desk if there is a bank nearby.
Clerk: Bank? Oh no, we don't have banks, this is Albania.
Me: Hmmm, I need to change some money, how do I do that?
Clerk: Oh no problem, you can do that.
Me: Where do I go?
Clerk: Just walk down the road here and take a left and go to the plaza, there's a money changer there.
Me: Like an office?
Clerk: No, no office, just a big mean looking guy.
Me: How will I know who it is?
Clerk: Oh! Ha! Don't worry. When you see him ... You will know!
This sounds funny and again, under different circumstances, it would have been. But I was nervous walking around. Albania was rather notorious for violence and such. But I come to the plaza and look around and sure enough there is a huge mean looking guy with a big black coat standing on the corner.
I walk up and hold out a bunch of dollars and the guy looks at me and grunts. He reaches inside his coat and pulls out a wad of money as big as a roll of toilet paper, and peals off a few notes and hands them to me. I look down and try to count them and we waves me off, like get outta here - now.
When I get back to the hotel, Fiona asks me if I got a good exchange rate! I replied, "I have no idea, HA! and I wasn't gonna negotiate with that gnarly looking thug. You take what you get and move on!"
------------------------------------------------------
The next step was to find our contact, and all we had was a name we had written down on a piece of paper. It was a missionary who could point us in the direction of the refugee camps for the Kosovars. Keep in mind, this is a long time ago and there is no phone book or other resource to find someone or contact them, especially in Albania.
We ponder the situation; how are we going to find our contact? We asked the clerk how to find this person and he looked at us as though we had just dropped out of a space ship. No help. We were on our own.
I hatched an idea - why don't we just start walking down the street and see if we can find him? Fiona looked at me like I was an idiot (which sometimes I am). She thought sounded like a ridiculous idea. But okay, this town is big but not that big, and we can just ask around and keep wandering and see if we discover something, and ... do you have a better idea?
So that's what we did. We walked around with a curious look on our face. Eventually we found a guy who looked like a person from the West. You know, you can usually tell when someone is not local. For one thing, he had a decent haircut.
Excuse me, do you speak English? I asked him. He turned to me and looked shocked. "Yes, ... yes, I do!" It's just that he had not encountered anyone, especially on the street, that spoke English to him. We talked for a minute and ducked inside a coffee shop to discuss things over a cup of seriously strong Albanian coffee. Geez, do they put Vodka in their coffee?
--------------------------------------------------------
Turns out this guy was from Canada and he was working there with a foreign aid program. He had been there about a year, and didn't have a lot of good things to say about the country or the people. We explained our goal on the trip and he was amazed we would come there on our own and attempt something like this.
He did have a good idea though, and led us to a building with a big metal gate, and banged on the door. This country is really concerned about security, it's kind of a lawless place. They let us in once they realized who he was and he mentioned the name of the manager, who turned out to be a lady.
She was also intrigued by our quest, and she had some contacts who might know this person or how to find him. We thanked our newly made friend and set off to a place the lady sent us. It was another upstairs office across town where we got some more clues, and this went on for a while, until we got an address. This whole thing took all day.
We walked to this address and banged on the door. It was around dinner time by then, and when the man opened the door he was astonished. How did you find me?!?! How did you get here?!?!
He was dumbfounded, and once he overcame his shock, he invited us in. He had a family with a wife and a couple kids.
We explained our goal to work with the refugees from Kosovo, and were trying to make contact with agencies who could point us in the right direction. We explained that we took the midnight bus from Thessalonika, and his jaw dropped.
"You took the midnight bus? And lived to tell about it?" He was astounded. "Even the local people don't do that!" I think he figured we were out of our minds for this whole adventure, but we just figured, well you gotta do what you gotta do.
So we talked for a while into the evening shared ideas and plans and agreed to meet again the next day. At one point a colleague of his came to the house and joined the conversation. We started to leave and he asked how we were going to get back to the hotel. We said we were going to walk and he said - "No, you don't want to walk here at night! It's not safe! My friend will take you back to the hotel. And keep the doors locked in the car!"
------------------------------------------------------
We got back to the hotel and felt right asleep, exhausted. When we awoke in the morning, we turned on the funky TV which surprisingly actually had the CNN international broadcast. The headline came on when they showed Kosovo and Albania. There were tanks and soldiers and people climbing fences and running. What was going on?
Well, the Russians had beaten the Americans to the punch (pardon the pun) and invaded Kosovo with tanks and foot soldiers to stop the bloodshed of Serbians killing Kosovars. Just like that, the war was effectively over.
The people climbing the fences were Kosovo refugees leaving Albania to return home. By the looks of it, they couldn't wait to get out of Albania. Within days the refugee camps were empty. Our trip was all for naught. There would be no refugees to help.
Well, we gave it our level best, and I don't think the effort was wasted - we had a terrific adventure. To follow up, we were able to reach our local contact and we agreed there was no point in pursuing a humanitarian aid as all the "displaced persons" had gone home. Although the future was still uncertain (isn't it always?), there was no place for us here in Albania.
We left the next day. This time we took a daytime bus. I'm not sure I would recommend Albania as a place for tourists.
------------------------------
The big problem was that our bus took off without us, and we were stranded in the middle of nowhere without our luggage or anything. On the positive side, we did have our passports!
We walked out of the passport office and looked around. All you could see were hills surrounding us, and a few worn taxis with dangerous looking drivers waiting for victims. No one spoke English. We were sixty miles from civilization.
Fiona and I looked at each other, "what are we going to do?" We decided to just sit and wait. At some point, we would figure out what to do. It was still early, before six in the morning. We went back inside to talk to the passport officer. We told him our bus left us behind, and he didn't seem surprised and didn't seem to care.
"Welcome to Albania ..."
Without any options, we continued to wait. "I'm not getting in one of those taxis", Fiona said, and I agreed. We waited. Lo and behold, after quite a while, another bus came along. Maybe this is our chance!
We explained to the bus driver in sign language (nobody spoke much English in those parts) about our predicament, and he motioned "no problem, just get on my bus, only you'll have to stand ..." and he continued "maybe I can catch the bastard."
So we stood. The bus was full people and kids and chickens and goats, but hey, we're moving. The driver was really moving too, careening over the sometimes steep hills on bad roads and we had to hang on or we would fall over.
Eventually to our surprise, we caught up with the other bus! Our guy starts honking and gets our original bus to pull over. The driver comes back and sees us and says (I'm paraphrasing here) "Hey, what happened to you guys?"
"You left us behind - you turkey!"
And the driver replies "Turkey?"
He looks around puzzled "Theese not Turkey, theese Albania!"
If we weren't so upset, this would have been quite funny.
So he invites us back to our first bus, but we're still ticked off. We'll just get our bags and ride our rescue bus. We reached Korce, Albania, sometime mid morning.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the way during the bus ride, we kept seeing these bunker like concrete structures built into the slopes alongside the road. It seemed like they were everywhere. They looked like rounded concrete defensive structures where soldiers could be inside with slits for the guns to shoot out - which is exactly what they were.
There seemed to be hundreds, even thousands of them. They were everywhere. In fact, according to some sources, there are over 700,000 of them!
I asked the bus driver about them, and he was able to explain in broken English (along with help from another passenger), that the former communist government was very paranoid. They thought that America and the West were going to invade Albania at any moment, so they built these fortifications all over the country, designed to be manned with armed soldiers.
I almost laughed. They couldn't be serious! Why would America - or anybody else for that matter - every invade this small, impoverished, third rate, isolated, dysfunctional country for any reason? Most people couldn't even find this place on a map if they had to.
At this point, they assured me, there are no soldiers anymore. The former president was overthrown and died and "Now we have anarchy!"
This is why you travel, to learn things like this that defy common sense, and even reality.
--------------------------------------------------------------
We finally reach Korce after driving through some fairly primitive countryside.
Not knowing how long we'd be there, we had to find accommodations. Some guy points us around the corner up the street and says "hotel". We walk there and look up at this big, old, ominous Soviet bloc building. We pause, and then walk inside.
The clerk says they have rooms available, for cheap, and gives us a key and instructions upstairs. We get to the room, and take one look, and know immediately we're not staying there. We open the solid metal door, and it's like a concrete cell, with cots for beds and bars on the windows. It's very cold and there is no heat. For all we knew, it used to be a prison. No thanks.
We walk downstairs and hand back the key, he doesn't seem too surprised. We ask if there is anything else with a little better quality in town, and he just stares at us. Customer service is non-existent in this country. He shakes his head.
We start to wander out and he says there might be a "luxury" hotel up the road a ways off, but it's very expensive!
We'll take our chances there. We find it, but it's not what any traveler would call luxury. Actually it was not too bad, even had a working TV. It was only about fifty bucks a night - expensive?
So we need to get some local currency. I have a some American dollars and ask the clerk at the front desk if there is a bank nearby.
Clerk: Bank? Oh no, we don't have banks, this is Albania.
Me: Hmmm, I need to change some money, how do I do that?
Clerk: Oh no problem, you can do that.
Me: Where do I go?
Clerk: Just walk down the road here and take a left and go to the plaza, there's a money changer there.
Me: Like an office?
Clerk: No, no office, just a big mean looking guy.
Me: How will I know who it is?
Clerk: Oh! Ha! Don't worry. When you see him ... You will know!
This sounds funny and again, under different circumstances, it would have been. But I was nervous walking around. Albania was rather notorious for violence and such. But I come to the plaza and look around and sure enough there is a huge mean looking guy with a big black coat standing on the corner.
I walk up and hold out a bunch of dollars and the guy looks at me and grunts. He reaches inside his coat and pulls out a wad of money as big as a roll of toilet paper, and peals off a few notes and hands them to me. I look down and try to count them and we waves me off, like get outta here - now.
When I get back to the hotel, Fiona asks me if I got a good exchange rate! I replied, "I have no idea, HA! and I wasn't gonna negotiate with that gnarly looking thug. You take what you get and move on!"
------------------------------------------------------
The next step was to find our contact, and all we had was a name we had written down on a piece of paper. It was a missionary who could point us in the direction of the refugee camps for the Kosovars. Keep in mind, this is a long time ago and there is no phone book or other resource to find someone or contact them, especially in Albania.
We ponder the situation; how are we going to find our contact? We asked the clerk how to find this person and he looked at us as though we had just dropped out of a space ship. No help. We were on our own.
I hatched an idea - why don't we just start walking down the street and see if we can find him? Fiona looked at me like I was an idiot (which sometimes I am). She thought sounded like a ridiculous idea. But okay, this town is big but not that big, and we can just ask around and keep wandering and see if we discover something, and ... do you have a better idea?
So that's what we did. We walked around with a curious look on our face. Eventually we found a guy who looked like a person from the West. You know, you can usually tell when someone is not local. For one thing, he had a decent haircut.
Excuse me, do you speak English? I asked him. He turned to me and looked shocked. "Yes, ... yes, I do!" It's just that he had not encountered anyone, especially on the street, that spoke English to him. We talked for a minute and ducked inside a coffee shop to discuss things over a cup of seriously strong Albanian coffee. Geez, do they put Vodka in their coffee?
--------------------------------------------------------
Turns out this guy was from Canada and he was working there with a foreign aid program. He had been there about a year, and didn't have a lot of good things to say about the country or the people. We explained our goal on the trip and he was amazed we would come there on our own and attempt something like this.
He did have a good idea though, and led us to a building with a big metal gate, and banged on the door. This country is really concerned about security, it's kind of a lawless place. They let us in once they realized who he was and he mentioned the name of the manager, who turned out to be a lady.
She was also intrigued by our quest, and she had some contacts who might know this person or how to find him. We thanked our newly made friend and set off to a place the lady sent us. It was another upstairs office across town where we got some more clues, and this went on for a while, until we got an address. This whole thing took all day.
We walked to this address and banged on the door. It was around dinner time by then, and when the man opened the door he was astonished. How did you find me?!?! How did you get here?!?!
He was dumbfounded, and once he overcame his shock, he invited us in. He had a family with a wife and a couple kids.
We explained our goal to work with the refugees from Kosovo, and were trying to make contact with agencies who could point us in the right direction. We explained that we took the midnight bus from Thessalonika, and his jaw dropped.
"You took the midnight bus? And lived to tell about it?" He was astounded. "Even the local people don't do that!" I think he figured we were out of our minds for this whole adventure, but we just figured, well you gotta do what you gotta do.
So we talked for a while into the evening shared ideas and plans and agreed to meet again the next day. At one point a colleague of his came to the house and joined the conversation. We started to leave and he asked how we were going to get back to the hotel. We said we were going to walk and he said - "No, you don't want to walk here at night! It's not safe! My friend will take you back to the hotel. And keep the doors locked in the car!"
------------------------------------------------------
We got back to the hotel and felt right asleep, exhausted. When we awoke in the morning, we turned on the funky TV which surprisingly actually had the CNN international broadcast. The headline came on when they showed Kosovo and Albania. There were tanks and soldiers and people climbing fences and running. What was going on?
Well, the Russians had beaten the Americans to the punch (pardon the pun) and invaded Kosovo with tanks and foot soldiers to stop the bloodshed of Serbians killing Kosovars. Just like that, the war was effectively over.
The people climbing the fences were Kosovo refugees leaving Albania to return home. By the looks of it, they couldn't wait to get out of Albania. Within days the refugee camps were empty. Our trip was all for naught. There would be no refugees to help.
Well, we gave it our level best, and I don't think the effort was wasted - we had a terrific adventure. To follow up, we were able to reach our local contact and we agreed there was no point in pursuing a humanitarian aid as all the "displaced persons" had gone home. Although the future was still uncertain (isn't it always?), there was no place for us here in Albania.
We left the next day. This time we took a daytime bus. I'm not sure I would recommend Albania as a place for tourists.
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