We get up around 8 and I still feel destroyed but we are leaving Shkoder today. After breakfast at the hotel we walk to the center where the busses to Tirana stop and get into one of them.
The drive is hot and very slow. The road connecting Tirana with the north seems to be completely blocked with cars. After three hours we arrive in Tirana and get into another bus that would take us further south and to the coast. The bus to Vlorë finally leaves the station at 1:30 and has no air-conditioning or maybe it’s just very weak. We sit in the front row and get a good view on what our driver does, who is apparently a little crazy or at least hyperactive. I try to sleep most of the time but I’m still witness of him filling water from one bottle into another while driving, of peeling and eating an orange and of balancing his checkbook on his head.
We also stop several times to let people in and out in the middle of the highway or to have people put packages with phone numbers into the bus. The driver seems to be in a very bad mood and has a grumpy comment for anyone entering, leaving or paying.
We arrive anyway. After three more long hours we are finally in Vlorë, where my mum has booked a pretty luxurious appartment at the seaside. We get picked up by the owner at the bus station once we are able to communicate where we are and driven to a big building not too far from the center but also not to close. The appartment is amazing and we can see the sea from the balcony. It is very hot and I haven’t eaten all day. Nevertheless we first go out to check if we can get a rental bike for these days and to do some grocery shopping. We don’t have success with the bike for now but we do have success with groceries and after a quick snack and a quick jump into the water at the closest beach it’s evening and we have dinner at home.
While exploring the surroundings and walking the 1,5 km to the center we get some more impressions of Vlorë and of Albania in general. The center seems quite fancy or at least in progress of being very fancy in the near future. There are many construction sites that block entire pedestrian walks without offering alternatives. In the area we live, however, this still reminds us very much of a third world country. Huge piles of rubbish around the bins, blocking half of the bike road, slums in first row of the beach, ruins in first row of the beach, street dogs and chickens running around and eating from the rubbish, small kiosk sheds with people selling watermelons and plastic beach utensils…
In general we see none to little foreign tourists. The whole beach area along this coastline seems to be mainly for locals and Albanian tourists. We realize that for the beaches with the clear blue water that we had imagined we should have probably gone further south to Sarandë.
Anyhow, the Appartment is nice, we have finally eaten (after only one small crisis when my mum thinks she broke the oven) and showered and cooled down and look forward to exploring the area tomorrow.
