"Cycling in Albania" Albania Travelogue by timlloydlangston

Under Hoxha?s Stalinist regime the bulk of the population were plunged into an almost medieval existence. Private ownership of cars was prohibited and, for the vast majority, financially impossible anyway. After the regime?s collapse cars became a possibility and the Albanians were taken directly from the horse and cart to modern 170mph vehicles in one step. The consequences of this were strewn along the roads with several of the trees having mangled wrecks wrapped around their base. A combination of lack of experience, high powered cars and the appalling state of the roads was clearly having an eroding effect on the local population. Looking more closely though, the carnage wasn?t as bad as I?d first thought. The wrecks we were seeing were the cumulative smashes of 10 years of motoring. Rather than being carted off to a local scrap yard it appeared that the smashed cars were preserved as a kind of memorial wherever they came to a halt, be it against a tree, upside down in a ditch or buried in a wall. The more recent had flowers and messages on cards, the older one?s were simply rusting away. Whatever the reasons for leaving the cars in situ, they certainly provided a powerful warning as to where the most dangerous bits of the road were (none of it could strictly be called safe).

Curiously the motorised traffic was split almost exactly 50:50 between agricultural vehicles (mainly tractors, but there were some other unusual and indeterminate things with wheels that must have worked on the farms) and Mercedes. Clearly the Albanians were not concerned with small, Eastern European, cars such as the Trabant. They?d gone straight from walking to the executive limo. The majority of the ones that we saw also seemed to be fairly new. It was slightly incongruous that, in Europe?s poorest country, the percentage of vehicles on the road that were Mercedes should be higher than anywhere else in the World. Of course I had my suspicions about the source of these vehicles. A Merc in Southern Germany could be stolen on one day and, after a thorough test drive could be in Albania a couple of days later.

The pecking order on the roads soon became clear to us as well. The horse and cart ruled and everything, even the newest Mercedes, gave way to them. Next came farm vehicles, followed by pedestrians and, fortunately, cyclists. At the bottom was the motor car. Although they tended to travel incredibly fast on open stretches there seemed to be no reluctance to slow to an absolute crawl whilst some peasant farmer ambled along with a cart load of straw. In the UK road rage would probably lead the driver to kick the peasant into the ditch, set light to the straw, and then disappear in a cloud of tyre smoke. It?s wholly possible that the Albanian drivers know that they will soon be dead and so don?t mind postponing the inevitable for a little while longer.

Our cycle tour covered the following route, a circuit around Athens, due mainly to the lack of direct flights to Albania at the time.

From Athens we took the train to Meteora and cycled around the monasteries. We then took a bus over the mountains and cycled into Albania. From there it was down the Drinos valley to Gjirocastra and Tepelena. After a bus short-cut to Tiranna we took a day trip by train to Durres on the coast. Then we took the train inland to Pogradec before mounting up again and cycling round lake Ohrid. From Ohrid town it was a combination of buses and a bit of cycling that got us back to Greece and the train back to Athens.

Most holidays we do more cycling than this, but Albanian main roads are best avoided in anything except a tank and industrial towns such as Elbasan will strip the lining off your lungs.

It worked though, we saw a lot of Albania in the time.

To see the most of a country its often better to combine cycling (through the pretty bits) with a bit of cheating, letting the bus take the strain. An example of the advantages of this form of combined travel can be seen in our trip from Vlora to Frier:

From Vlora we headed by bus North and entered the oil country around Frier. The presence of asphalt, bitumen and burning gas had been noted by the Greeks in the first century and the fields had been economically important ever since. In antiquity the bitumen was a valuable resource for the ship-builders on the coast. The contemporary view from the bus was somewhat less romantic. There are a number of small chemical and industrial plants, shrouded in their own self created smog. In the actual fields themselves decay has clearly started to set in. Many of the reserves are now either dry or uneconomical to work and abandoned derricks cluster around the low hills. It?s heyday was between the wars when the oil concessions caused a lot of political tensions between the British, French and Italians who all wanted to exploit the fields.

The biggest player to emerge was the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which went on to become BP. The scenery wasn?t standard tourist fare, but it was fascinating to look at. I was just glad that we were in the bus and not trying to cycle through some of the denser patches of industrial fumes.

On arrival at Fier the bus dumped us on the outskirts and let us find our own way into town. This is where the bikes really come into their own again. A three mile trudge into the town centre with luggage would have been a real strain. Although there were taxis around they seemed to be defying the rules of physics by remaining in constant motion. I saw plenty of them, but never once did I witness one stop to take on or drop off any passengers. Fortunately three miles is nothing on the bike and we soon pulled up in Fier?s main square.

The road started off exactly as we?d planned, a fabulous ride along the lake. By Albanian standards there was more than an average amount of tarmac and the views were spell-binding. The plan was simple. Cycle round the lake, through the border with Macedonia and then on to Ohrid town for the night. What we hadn?t planned on was the location of the border point. After a small cluster of houses next to the lake that didn?t even seem to warrant a name (I?ve since found out it?s called Lini, but it doesn?t have any signs either on the edge of the village or any pointing to it) the road suddenly veered away from the lake and headed up into the mountains. As with the Pindos mountains in Greece these were not mere foothills and remain snow-capped for much of the year despite their Southerly latitude. There appeared to be a never ending succession of hairpin bends that swept their way straight up the steep mountain side. The climb levelled out at just over 1,000m and a narrow pass was visible that led North once again and must be our entry point to Macedonia. The one advantage of this long climb was that it afforded us unprecedented views out over the lake and to the mountains on the other side.

One of the big advantages of cycling up a hill is that you will invariably have the benefit of going downhill again at some point. The road immediately turned back towards the lake and our first few miles in Macedonia were a blissful freewheel with a fantastic view. If we?d had a more detailed map we?d have noticed that the road didn?t run all along the lake but takes a six mile detour to go via Qafa e Themes. On the scale of our map this chink didn?t feature and hence our misconception about the route we were to take. However it wasn?t long before we were back close to the lake and covering the small rolling hills that led to Ohrid town.

If you happen to be cycling around lake Ohrid from Albania to FYROM then I'd highly recommend this route.