50€ a night

Albania

Rain. Rain. Rain. It is inescapable here. They say Podgorica, the capital of Crna Gora, receives somewhere in the area of 1.6m of rain per year, and most of that falls from autumn through spring - and we are not so far away from there to imagine that the coast will be any less rain-blasted. It certainly was yesterday, pouring down buckets all through Vladko's discourse on the history and geology of the Land of the Black Mountain. Reality bears out this prediction, for the rain picks up over the night to belt down gushes of water on our flimsy orange tent, whose feeble walls yet remain resistant enough to protect the two terrified cyclists inside...

...and continues into the morning. During a break in the rain - or, rather, a slight lessening thereof, for there are no real breaks in this rain - we seek refuge under the gas station awning once more, eating breakfast over cappuccini from the café inside. This provides us with an opportunity to warm up, get dry, wash dishes, all the usual morning chores that have long since become routine. We wait for the rain to let up again, which it hesitantly does around 0900 - and we are off, running back to pack the tent and cram everything back onto the bikes and get them back up to the road, sparing no effort in attempting to beat the return of the rain.

But return it does, and we are soon travelling up and down the coastal hills. With our cycling jerseys drenched, our shoes soaked through, my arm hair protruding from thousands of goosebumps, we are a sorry sight indeed; but there is no choice. We must continue; there is very little along this section of the coast, perhaps some smaller towns up ahead but nothing sizeable. We are not so far from Albania, a nervewracking thought - for although we knew nothing of Montenegro, it at least has that familiar currency and affiliation with the vague political monstrosity that is the European Union, and therefore has at least some symbolic comfort value. Albania is new, and to make matters worse second-hand reports have been wildly contradictory. According to various reports, Albania is: dangerous, dirty, only considered dangerous and dirty by those who have never been there, full of junkies and criminals, home to the nicest people you will ever meet, in the Middle Ages and utterly without decent roads, moving forward so fast that all other reports must be considered inaccurate. The only certain thing is that nothing is certain; owing perhaps to its closed-off-ness from the rest of the world until relatively recently, Albania is an informational black hole. It promises adventure - and so we must go there, even though we are admittedly more than a bit hesitant to plunge headlong into the unknown.

As we approach Albania, the nature of the road changes. First, it heads away from the coast and up across into the highlands, for there are no border crossings along the river that flows out to the sea; we must head inland to enter Albania. In the highlands it is noticeably colder, and the roads are waterlogged in parts that have worn away under the repeated abuse of buses and trucks whose combined bulk has proven unamenable to decent asphalt maintenance - but we manage to pass through the highlands, and are soon descending again along less and less paved roads. Not a good sign; if we haven't even reached Albania and the roads are already pockmarked, how will we ever expect to get through Albania without a trailer out back to carry an entire store's worth of extra tubes, tires, and patches?

And suddenly - BAM! We turn the corner and there it is - the Albanian border, greeting us in all its glory with newly-constructed border post offices and a backed-up line of cars that we are fortunately able to bypass. As cyclists, we can simply saunter up to the kiosk, hand over our passports, have them tossed around between various personnel, scanned, inspected, brought across the lane to the real customs and passport officials, scanned again, recorded in their computer systems, inspected once more for good measure, and stamped before we are on our way...

...along road that seems suspiciously nice. Perhaps Vladko was right after all, and most reports are wildly inaccurate; after all, this appears to have been recently paved, and is in unusually good condition compared to the condition of the villages it passes through - homes hastily constructed out of spare cement blocks and corrugated metal siding, children playing with discarded bicycle tires, and now-defunct turrets that stand witness to past conflicts. And yet, despite the poverty of the rural northern regions, the children all look happy - in stark contrast to the petulant American youth who pout over receiving the wrong Christmas present. Happiness and wealth are not necessarily correlated, despite what years and billions of dollars of mass brand advertising would have you believe...

...but there is evidence also of rapid modernization. The road, as noted, is obviously new; the nearby city of Shkoder hosts several hotels, a host of shops, countless makeshift internet cafés, delicious food stands selling byrek or roasted chestnuts. We find this one hotel in an old building marked with a sign constructed out of an old bicycle. The sign is a good omen, a signal that we could do worse than to inquire here - so we do, and find that the cost for a full room with TV, shower, four beds, and hot breakfast in the morning is merely 50€. Of course, we have the good wisdom by now to deal in local currency, and they offer a price of 6000 LEK. Although the exchange rate is in fact 140 LEK to the euro, we soon find that most shops price at 120 LEK to the euro; given the commission overhead of exchanging currency, this might be fair...

We peruse Shkoder for a bit, grab some food - the byreks from this one street vendor are delicious, served piping hot out of a hole-in-the-wall store that serves as a front for the massive oven behind - and head back to the hotel, but are waylaid by someone who overhears us speaking English; as fate would have it, he did some construction work in Calgary before returning to Albania upon taking some losses during the whole economic crisis shebang. He offers us a jacket to protect ourselves from the cold, seeing as how we only have the one rainjacket, and offers the sage advice that with our education we could make easy money building websites and advertising campaigns for rapidly modernizing Albanian businesses...

...but we are somewhat too tired to fully appreciate this for the moment, having just made our way through a couple of very wet days. We reach the hotel, watch a couple of Robot Chicken episodes, check our email, and drift off into blissful sleep under three nice and warm blankets as the rain continues to drum on the roof above...