2nd Day! 6:00 am: direction Albania. The plan was to arrive in Saranda at 7:30 pm. The information on the internet were expired. Our first stop was in Shkodra/ Shkodër, the arrival time was unknown. We had to go with the flow and the chaos. We took a dolmus (a small mini van), an antique one. We understood why the day before it was broken! The weather was quite cold and fogg, at a certain point we enjoyed a sunrise, sorry no time to stop and take picture! This time, we went through the mountain and out of the sudden reached Albania. At the customs, it lasted 1 hours as usual. Everyone in the bus had their passport back but me ! From far away I heart someone calling my name : Ingrid. I was surprised as it was one of the customs official. He was talking to me in French (!!!) so I understood that he wanted to show off! He just asked me where I was going and why and that was it… I got my passport back and we kept on driving to Skhoder. After 1 :30 ride we finally arrived where a strong lady picked us up. We did not have the time to think and we were already in the bus. Welcome to Albania! From our point of view, it looked like chaos but it is the Albanian system and it works.
We have a pleasant journey from Skhoder to Tirana but cold… no heater in the bus! Once in Tirana, we relived our experience of Skhoder but at a bigger scale. We were in the capital ! Unfortunately we did not stay, our next job was waiting for us in Saranda! Tirana- Saranda was even better as the sun warmed us up! We are in Saranda! Videos: the first one is Skhoder from left to right: on the way to Tirana - Entering in Tirana - on the road to Saranda
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Dubrovnic HR Once in Dubrovnic, we called The Lanisters up but unfortunately they had an emergency and had to dissolve a new plot J. We thanked them warmly and waited one hour at the bus station where it rained cats and dogs. We had few Kuna left, we decided to change them. Our next country to go is Montenegro. The first question was: which currency does Montenegro have? We checked on our favourite app: OANDA. No information. We went to the currency exchange service and asked about it. It would have been a great moment to record our expressions on our faces when the lady announced: EURO! Montenegro has got Euro as a currency. We had to trust her and exchanged about 70 Kuna that made about 10 Euro. After recovering from this shock, we had thousand questions crossing our minds and were aware that we did not anything about Montenegro. You, reader and follower do you any idea? Our friend Wikipedia was at that moment missing. What kind of questions: what is the mother language? what is/are the religions? Why does Montenegro have Euro? What role has the country with the EU? How big is the country and what is the capital? Etc.. We had to wait until we arrived in Saranda to read about it after two days travel. We did not have access to Internet. Driving from Dubrovnic (Croatia) to Ulcinj (Montenegro) by bus was the occasion to discover the landscape and to get our first impressions of this country. A small country that reminded of Chili as the coast and the mountain are very close and in between narrow roads are squeezed. Since Dubrovnic, it was raining and even pouring and it had not stopped until we arrived at Ulcinj. We could perceived that we left the EU as it looks poorer, buildings were not really in a good shape and the communism still left its mark. Unlike Croatia, Montenegro has mixed religions. We could see in some villages more churches and even orthodox one in other more mosques. Advertisements, signs were bilingual: Russian and Latin. We arrived exhausted in Ulcinj at 3:00 pm (9 hours travelling), we still had to find either the next bus to reach Albania the same day or stay overnight. We could forget the first option because the bus was out of order that day. Thus we searched for a hostel. It was easy as in front of the bus station there were ROOMS TO RENT. After negotiating the price and checking the room, we chose to go to town. It was around 4pm. We could not wait any longer to have a hot shower and warm meal but it we did so we would have gone to bed at 5pm! Ulcinj Municipality is the centre of the Albanian community in Montenegro and has a population of about 20000. The majority ethnic group in Ulcinj are Albanians, followed by South Slavic nations and Roma people. The largest spoken language is Albanian and the major religion is Islam. Since the creation of the town, Ulcinj's main ethnic groups were Illyrians and Albanians, with a large number of Black people and South Slavs. Like lots of cities in the Balkans, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians and Ottoman ruled in the region and also in Ulcinj. In 1880, Ulcinj became part of Montenegro. Ulcinj's old town is a very well preserved castle-looking community that is left over from medieval times. The old town sits atop a mountain overlooking the shore and is a tourist attraction on its own. As far as we are concerned, we had a short but a nice time. We enjoyed walking to the old town and in the old town. We had the same experience as in Korcula, no one in the street. We arrived on time for the sunset. What stroke us are couple of things.: it is usual that men stand in the street talking, smoking cigarettes or just being in the street whereas women were totally absent. I had a strange feeling…The main street remained named after Tito, it might be still a hero? People were at the first sight quite cold but once having a conversation, they were friendly. We had a nice meal for 6 Euro for two people: a goulash and a beef stew (home-made!) included water and bread. Finally around 8pm we were back to the room where we had a hot shower and a nice sleep until 5:30 the very day. |
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