Downtown Shkoder

Visiting the town of Shkoder was very much an after thought in the great scheme of the trip.  Having visited Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia already on my travels, it was going to be a challenge to get from Albania or Macedonia, to Bosnia.  The original plan was to get back from Albania to Skopje before getting an overnight bus through Serbia to Sarajevo.  As it worked out however, we found that it is possible to get from northern Albania to southern Montenegro by taxi, meaning that I will be revisiting a lot of places I have already seen for the next week, but as I think Montenegro is one of the best places I have been, this isn’t really a hardship.  It also should mean no more overnight buses.  Shkoder is the main gateway from Albania to Montenegro as it is located by Lake Skada, a lake that is mainly Montenegrin but is named after Shkoder.  To get from Berat to Shkoder we decided to test the furgon system out by getting a furgon from Berat to Tirana and (deciding we didn’t want to waste another night in Tirana) we aimed to get a connecting furgon to Shkoder.  I think that it is proof of how good the furgon system is that the first furgon was kind enough to take us to the point where the second one left - and what was actually quite a complicated journey only took just over four hours.  By the time we got to Shkoder though, where we are staying at the Hotel Collosseo, there was only enough time for a little explore of the pretty town centre before getting some dinner.  The hotel is a four star place (though costs about 25 pounds each per night) as nowhere else was responding to the emails I sent out to make a booking.  I’m sure that we will survive - though the advertised swimming pool hasn’t actually been completed yet and having the same thing happen in Vladivostok it is getting pretty annoying.

View from the castle

The next morning we got a taxi to the Rozafa Fortress above the town.  The castle, originally built by the Illyrians but added to by Venetians and Ottomans, is named after a woman called Rozafa who is set to have been buried alive in the walls as an offering to the gods to make sure the castle would stand.  Apparently she requested to have two holes drilled above her so that she could still breastfeed her children (this whole legend is one of the oddest I have ever come across).  Shkodra stands at a real tactical spot, overlooking several major rivers and with the coast and Lake Skada nearby.  The views from the castle were really good and the castle itself was in pretty good condition.  Walking around it was an adventure in itself as it was fairly deserted and there were none of the ‘closed to the public’ areas you would find at English castles, which meant that we could explore any mysterious staircase that we felt like.  The large amount of open wells and crumbling arches meant that we didn’t get TOO adventurous.

The Ottoman Bridge, Shkoder

It must have been one of the hottest days we have had so far and by the time it had got to midday it was unbearable in the heat, so we went and sat in our room and watched some of the pretty good action films that are on Albanian TV.  When it had cooled down a bit we went back out and hailed another taxi (it turned out to be the same guy) and made our way to an old Ottoman bridge on the edge of town.  Our driver can’t have exceeded about 15mph on the way, because he didn’t want us to be uncomfortable on the potholed roads.  He drove a Mercedes and this brand of car is quite a talking point for travellers.  There are more Mercs per person in Albania than in Germany itself - according to the Independent, three out of five cars in the country are Mercedes, but as many as 80% of these are thought to be stolen from the richer European countries.  They are definitely everywhere and the amount of British number plates far exceeds the amount of British people that we have met.  Anyway, back to the bridge, when we arrived we found that as scenic as it was, the water that flows under it has either dried up in the heat or has been diverted, leaving it as a bridge over a dry and rubbish filled valley.  It has been the story of our Albanian experience really - a fair bit of potential as a tourist location, but (and it isn’t much of a surprise) in desperate need of some TLC.

The public transport system in Albania may lack timetables, but what it loses in reliability it makes up in flexibility with the furgon system.  Furgon is the Albanian word for van or minibus and is the main way that locals get around - essentially any vehicle, ranging in size from people carrier to bus, will stop and take people to the place that they are advertising in the front window.  It is essentially a massive share taxi scheme and it works extremely well, as long as you can find out where the furgons to a certain city tend to hang out.  To do this we got a taxi from the hostel to a random street corner where a lot of cars with ‘Berat’ in the window were.  It cost us 500 leke each (about three pounds) for a two hour journey and was quick and surprisingly comfortable, despite the insane driving of Albanian motorists.

View from the hotel

Rubbish at the castle

View from the castle

Berat - the city of a thousand windows

The overnight bus (hopefully our last) was probably the worst of the lot.  The battered Macedonian bus had some major faults with it, the worst of which was the fact that the engine growled loudly in the low gears.  The route from Skopje to Tirana is almost entirely through terrifying mountain passes, so it was very rare that we got out of the low gears and therefore we didn’t get much sleep.  The bus arrived in Tirana, the capital, at 4.30 am and we made our way to the hostel in the dark.  What the city is missing in street lighting it makes up in potholes but we luckily made our way to “Freddy’s Hostel” where they let us in to sleep through to midday.

Skanderbeg Square, Tirana

We had only set aside a day in Tirana and by the time that we got going this had shrunk down to half a day.  The  city is dominated by communist concrete architecture but it is interesting to see the historical parts that weren’t flattened, as well as the capital of a nation that has only just opened up to tourists.  We started at Skanderbeg Square, named after the Albanian national hero who fought the Turks.  His name means ‘Lord Alexander’ in Turkish as he named himself after Alexander the Great.  The statue of Skanderbeg was the only thing that hadn’t been removed in the square when we visited as there was major construction work taking place.  One side of the square has some rather attractive Italian style buildings which are used by the government and we had lunch at an Italian restaurant opposite.  The maps show that the city is divided in half by a river, but this is quite an overstatement as the river cannot be more than a metre in width.  On the south bank of the river is 'the pyramid’.  This was supposed to be the mausoleum of Enver Hoxha, the communist dictator, as well as a museum glorifying his life.  Now that the communists are gone it has fallen into a state of disrepair and while Lonely Planet says it is still used for conferences, it seems unlikely from the amount of graffiti and damage on the exterior.

'The Pyramid’, Tirana

The main boulevard through the city passes through Skanderbeg Square, across the river past the pyramid and then to the buildings of the communist government including the current prime minister’s residence and congress building.  Both of these are fairly ugly concrete buildings and the ugliest of all surround Mother Theresa square in the south of the city - a memorial that pales in comparison with the one in Skopje.  On our way back to the river we passed one of the most visible remainders of the communist regime - the Hoxha Bunkers.  After the relationship between Albania and the USSR, particularly after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Enver Hoxha decided to construct an enormous array of bunker pillboxes.  As many as 700,000 were built at twice the cost and using three times the concrete as the French Maginot Line.  The engineer who designed them was asked by Hoxha to prove their strength by standing in one while it was fired at by a tank and the remarkable strength of the bunkers has proved to be a huge problem in modern day Albania.  Weighing in at around 5 tonnes each and located in parks, squares, beaches, gardens and pretty much everywhere else, it would require an enormous amount of time and effort to remove them.  As a result they have just been left, though there are stories of people spending months taking them apart with sledgehammers in their gardens.  The one that we saw was opposite the prime minister’s residence and had only been partially destroyed.

The remains of a Hoxha Bunker, central Tirana

Ellie inside Ethem Bey Mosque

After seeing the bunker we headed to the Blloku district, an area where only the main players in the communist party were allowed to visit.  The opulence of the buildings and houses, particularly that of Hoxha himself, shows just who the winners were from Albanian communism.  Unfortunately the only areas of the city that weren’t flattened are those that the party deemed to be of 'national cultural importance’, so on our way back to the hotel we stopped off at the Ethem Bey Mosque.  The mosque is pretty tiny as they go, but has an amazing painted roof and as it is positioned on Skanderbeg Square, it is a pleasant break from the larger government buildings.  The last remnants of pre-communist Tirana that we were able to see were the old clocktower, an old Ottoman bridge and the pretty dilapidated remains of a roman era fortress.  The locals haven’t let their city be totally ruined by communist architecture though, if that is the feeling that comes across from reading this blog.  They have done what they can, by painting the drab grey concrete in a real array of colours so that while the architecture itself is pretty dire, the city does actually have quite a lively and vibrant feel.  It was definitely worth visiting for a day on our way to the more scenic parts of Albania.

Brightening the mood