Aug 27 - Get the host up early to make breakfast for 7:00, and across town and on bus by 7:40. The bus leaves at 8:00 but is already almost full. Ten minutes later and we would have been seated on stools in the aisle. For awhile it looks like we are going down the coast, but the driver does a full loop around a traffic circle after another driver shouts some news and we head down the Vjosë River valley instead. I’m guessing that the traffic on the coast is bad. We stop about halfway, park in an abandoned gas station, and everyone is invited to eat at a smoke-filled café. It is about here I begin to notice that road signs are in both Albanian and Greek.
Later on the route, the valley widens out and there is some serious acreage for crops. I see a lot of corn, but the stalks are baked and brown at the tops. It could be that the cobs have already been picked and they have been left to dry out. I do hope so or that would be a lot of ruined food.
Turn up through a side canyon that leads south to the coast, and into the cramped city of Sarandë. It isn’t quite what I was expecting: noisy, full of traffic, and dominated by hundreds of nearly identical apartment buildings. Make out way to the apartment, wait an hour for the host to show up to guide us through the warren of passages and stairs to where we are staying.
We walk around, eat, and note that food prices are at least 50% higher than elsewhere in Albania. Corfu is clearly visible across the straits. There is really a sense that we are in a different part of Albania, one that is mixed with Greece. Buy a tour for tomorrow, more of a glorified taxi ride, but it will get us to several places that would take forever to do on our own, I will read up on the background tonight so I know what we are looking at.
Albania