Albanian Highlights, so far

Phillip and I are in Tirana, Albania, our second Albanian city. Before we left Shkoder, Albania, we took an all-day tour to Theth National Park, traveling about 50 miles northwest of Shkoder in a van with a guide, Renalto, and five other visitors. Renalto drove from Shkoder into the Albanian Alps, with our first stop at the highest point in Albania. 

view thru the Albanian Alps from the high point

At that viewpoint, we saw structures built over the road. Renalto said they were to slow down rockslides and to protect cars during avalanches in the winter. 

structures over the road in rockslide/avalanche areas

Our route took us under the structures. The road had dozens of switchbacks as we traveled up and down the mountains. In addition to maneuvering the switchbacks, Renalto had to be alert for animals.

one of the cows walking on the road 

The highlight of the trip was our walk to Theth's Blue Eye, a pool of blue water in the mountain. The six-mile hike (climb!) began across the river from where Renalto parked our van, in the village of Nderlysaj. The picture is Renalto leading us across a walk bridge made of wooden slats. Phillip and I were enough ahead of the rest of our group as we crossed the bridge, that he, behind me, started bouncing on the bridge. When I heard him giggling as I frantically grabbed the handrails, I realized what was happening. 

Once we began the climb up the mountain, and it was quite a climb, Phillip didn't kid around with me but made sure I was OK as the path became narrow and high. 

view back toward our start, but only about 1/5 of the way to Blue Eye

Our trek took us up and down a walking trail. The site I booked the tour on called it "moderate." Another site called it "moderately challenging." I guess if you are 35 years old and in excellent physical condition, it may indeed be only "moderate." For two 67-year-olds, in decent but not great shape, it was strenuous. We did make it and saw Theth's Blue Eye. 

Blue Eye: some visitors swam, the water was 7 degrees C, 44 degrees F

About 2/3 of the way on the trail, a man in a small shack sold bottles of water, quite reasonable at 100 lek ($1.15) each; we would have paid much more for it! We had seen piles of horse manure on our climb up the mountain. On our way back, we saw the maker of the piles who was also the transport for the water:

carried the water up the mountain trail

As we returned to the trailhead, we noticed the skies began to darken to our north. At the bottom, looking back toward where we had been, we could see rain. 

Just as we made it to a covered resttaurant area near the trailhead, the rain began. While we ate lunch, the rain continued. Renalto drove to our next stop, a waterfall, but the rain had made it unsafe for us to clamber down the hill to the waterfall, so we had to skip it. We stopped at a church where a priest in olden times had created the Albanian language. Some of our fellow travelers went into the church, but we didn't. Renalto turned the van back toward Shkoder, retracing the route up into the Albanian Alps and back down toward town. 

A boulder on the narrow mountain road

The Theth tour was the best activity we did in Shkoder. The day after the tour, we took the bus to Tirana, the capital city of Albania. Five euro ($5.75) per person for a two-hour bus ride! We did splurge once we arrived at the Tirana bus station for a taxi ($17) to our hotel (20-minute drive). The bus station area was under construction and walking to the city bus stop to continue via bus would have been very hot, dusty, crowded, and stressful. 

Our hotel is about a kilometer north of the city's center, Skanderbeg Square (Skanderbeg was the Albanian military commander who led the successful rebellion against Ottoman rule in the 1400s). While I was in school and college, Albania, under their leader, Enver Hoxha, was as closed as North Korea is today. In the years since his death in 1985, Albania has really opened up and welcomed international investment and interest. Phillip and I saw this in the buildings and construction viewed from Skanderbeg Square:

It looks like a face!

Tricolor high-rise building

Today, we rode the city bus (40 lek =$0.47, per person, for a 32-minute bus ride) to the cable car that took us up the nearby mountain. No fortress at the top, only views. The best views, however, were from the cable car as we ascended and descended the mountain.

bunkers in the mountainside, viewed from the cable car

Tirana city in the distance

good supports!

another bunker seen in the hillside seen during cable car descent

In the same neighborhood as the cable car's lower station was the Bunk Art'1 facility. Although called a bunker, it was more like an extensive bomb shelter. 

This bomb shelter was built into the mountain during 1973-74

Hoxha built this bomb shelter to be his command center when the Western powers dropped nuclear bombs on Albania. Hoxha was a paranoid leader who, starting in 1971, had over 170,000 bunkers built throughout Albania because of his fear of nuclear attack from the Western powers. The exhibits in Bunk Art'1 included rooms with mock-ups of what they contained when built:

a living room in the living quarters area 

communications equipment of the early 1970s

One of the rooms included displays of gas masks as Albanians at the time were all trained on the use of gas masks because mustard gas deployment was another fear of the Hoxha administration. Even the horses had gas masks ready for them:

As we walked thru the bomb shelter, I had no problem going thru the doors. Phillip had to duck, but he did forget to crouch down once. Just once.

"Mind your head" as you walk thru the halls said the signs

When we reached the exit, the final door wasn't just a metal door. It was a six-inch thick concave concrete door. 

curved door and its curved doorstop

Tomorrow, we have a cooking class! Yay! I've been looking for them throughout our trip and this is actually the first one I've found at a reasonable cost. I spoke with a tour guide who said that they did not reappear after Covid stopped tourism. So sad, but at least I found this one for Albanian dishes. 

Two fortress cities: Kotor and Budva, Montenegro

We visited the Adriatic coast again, this time in Montenegro's coastal areas. We traveled from Podgorica, in the interior of Montenegro, to Kotor. We spent four nights in Kotor before going by bus about an hour south to the town of Budva. Both Kotor and Budva have seaside fortresses. Kotor, however, also had a cruise ship pier and that meant crowds of people. In Kotor, we were fortunate to get a room in a hotel within the Kotor fortress walls!

our hotel had formerly been the old town hall

Even with the crowds of people, we enjoyed walking around and in the fortress. 

We could walk along the top of a portion of the fortress wall

narrow, cobblestone alleys inside the fortress

In addition to exploring the fortress, a major activity in Kotor is to take a speedboat ride to see the attractions in Kotor Bay. Although I'm not a fan of speedboats, we did take the 3-hour tour. I sang the Gilligan's Island theme song to Phillip before we departed, but our boat had eight passengers, not five, who "set sail that day for a three-hour tour." 

Our first stop was a submarine tunnel, an actual man-made cave from the 1950s, used by Yugoslav submarines to avoid detection from the West.  Three tunnels, interconnected when they were in use, dotted the rock shoreline.

wire held rocks over the entrance to disguise it from the air

Our boat was small enough to go into the tunnel and turn around.

inside the submarine tunnel, looking out

We went past, but did not stop at, a former prison island, Mamula Island. A fortress was built on it in 1853 and during WWI and WWII, the fortress was used as a prison. In 2016, an Arab sheik bought it from Kotor and turned it into a luxury resort. 

former prison fortress, now luxury resort

Our next stop on our boat tour was at Blue Eye, a cave where the water seems extraordinarily blue.

After stopping inside the cave for pictures, the boat anchored just outside the cave for passengers to swim if they wanted to. I chose not to as it meant jumping off the perfectly good boat and climbing back up the side of the boat. Phillip did go for his swim in the Adriatic Sea.

Phillips swimming beside the boat at the Blue Eye cave

Our boat headed back toward Kotor as we were just outside the Bay when we stopped at Blue Eye. 

Our last stop was at Our Lady of the Rocks, a man-made island in the bay with a church. We got off the boat for pictures here, but Phillip and I didn't pay to go into the scenic church. 

On our next day in Kotor, we escaped the crowds of tourists by heading up the goat trail behind the Kotor Fortress. 

beginning of the trail up the hill

We could have paid 15 euros each to use the steps to go directly up the hill to viewpoint, but many travel blogs and guidebooks relate that the goat trail is free; well-maintained; and an easier, more gradual climb.

view from about 1/4 of the way up the trail

We made it about halfway to the top of the mountain before I wanted to stop, not because it was too steep or hard to climb, but because the trail had no defined edge. Not being a fan of heights, I was quite anxious when walking right next to the drop-off. We were on the switchbacks shown in the next picture when we headed back down. The trail wound to the back side of the mountain, so the view of the sea diminished the higher we walked, and that sea view had been the reason for going up the trail.  

We left Kotor for Budva, only an hour away but with a lot fewer tourists blocking the sidewalks and fortress alleys. The trip took the full hour even though the distance was only 15 miles. Workers were widening the road so we had construction delays for almost the entire journey. We had a nice hotel for our stay in Budva but the wifi would not support uploading pictures, so this post is being competed in Albania. 

While in Budva, we visited its fortress, directly on the sea.

Budva had a boardwalk that went north and south from the fortress. On the day we visited the fortress, we walked south until the boardwalk ended. 

At the end of the boardwalk, people (not us!) were jumping off the rocks into the sea. 

looks like he'll hit the rocks, but he didn't

On our final day in Budva, we walked north on the boardwalk and stopped for a few hours at a beach. For ten euros, we rented two chairs and a beach umbrella for the entire day. We only stayed a few hours. The weather was perfect and the beach umbrella was big enough to keep the sun off of us. The water was cold, but I did go out and swim in the Adriatic Sea! 

We left Budva and returned to Shkoder, Albania. This visit, we stay for three nights and see the city and the area. I was more careful selecting our bus to get here, ensuring that it dropped passengers in the city center, not two miles away like the bus from Kosovo to Shkoder did. We were dropped of a block from our hotel this time, much better! 

Three more countries: Kosovo, Albania, and Montenegro

Phillip and I have been in three more countries since my last post five days ago. From North Macedonia and our pirate ship hotel, we traveled to Kosovo, spent one night in Albania (we will return there next week), and moved on to Montenegro. 

Kosovo countryside from the bus

We deviated from the tentative itinerary that we left with our family because of transportation concerns. We planned two stops in Kosovo, but only visited one Kosovan city, Prizren, a city not even on our initial list. Prizren did, however, have decent bus connections with Skopje and towns in Albania. 

river thru Prizren, Albania

We spent two nights in Kosovo which meant just one full day for walking around the city. That full day would have been Friday, June 6. However, that was a national religious holiday for the country. We weren't traveling that day, but we did go to the bus station to get our onward ticket a day early. No buses, no staff, no one at all around except a man from Istanbul and a man from London, both planning to take a bus out of town that day. I used Google translate on a notice taped to the bus station's ticket window to learn about the holiday. 

no traffic on the national holiday

Prizren had a really nice stone bridge over the river.

And a fortress on the hill next to town. Phillip and I did not trek to this fortress as there was no cable car, it's just ruins and piles of rocks, and guidebooks note the extreme steepness of the path to the top. And, most importantly, the temperature was above 90 degrees. 

top of the hill fortress

It wasn't too hot to walk on the level streets, although only restaurants near the stone bridge were open. All around town, we saw "hero" monuments. They were statues of local men killed in 1998 during the fighting between Kosovo and Serbia. Several of them had the word "hero" with the name and dates of the deceased soldier.

near the stone bridge

On Saturday, we left Kosovo and entered Albania.

Albanian countryside as seen from the bus

We stayed in Shkodar, Albania, for a night because no buses were scheduled from Shkodar to Montenegro after our bus from Kosovo. We didn't walk around Shkoder when we arrived because we plan to return to Shkodar. Also, our bus from Kosovo dropped us off over two miles from downtown and we walked with our suitcases to our hotel in the heat of the day. We weren't upset that the bus drop-off was at the edge of town, we just considered it part of the adventure! I do plan to order new wheels for our suitcases because they are taking quite a beating on this trip. 

The bus yesterday from Shkodar to our current stop, Podgorica, Montenegro, did load in town, just around the corner from our hotel. Another border crossing and into our 10th country of the trip. We've had no issues at the border crossings. The bus unloads at the crossing when leaving a country and the passengers file up to the window and present their passports. Back on the bus, and travel a few hundred feet to the next country's border stop. We unload and file up to that country's officials to get our passports stamped to enter the new country. Back on the bus and we proceed onward. No pictures because a border crossing is considered a secure area and photography is not allowed.  

Podgorica is the capital of Montenegro. We could have continued on to the coast but decided to stay a few days before going to the tourist area that is Kotor. Not much to really see here, but we did walk around and found another stone bridge.

Podgorica's stone bridge, not in a developed area like Prizren's was

The best views were from our hotel restaurant terrace. We ate dinner here with these views of the surrounding mountains. 

view from hotel terrace

Tomorrow, we travel to Kotor, still in "little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!" (a quote from chapter 4 of The Great Gatsby, when Gatsby showed Nick his medal from there). Kotor will put us back on the coast, about 200 miles south of Split, Croatia, our last coastal town before we turned inland a few weeks ago.