Entering Albania!
After waking up in our moisted room we packed the car again, ate some bread and enjoyed the nice scenery. When we stepped out of this room a tremendous paranorama is presented to us. We departed in the direction of Albania today!
After some ours driving we stopped for a picknick at a field near a lake. We were watching a herd of sheep which was grazing in the field next to us . They seemed to be very interested in us, because they followed us pretty closely. We saw some small snakes in the lake. I also found a pig skull. After this relaxed break we continued. At around 17:00hrs we were already close to the border of Albania, but there was no sign to be found there. We continued in the direction of Konitza.
When we arrived in Konitza, still no signs . After some small indication we checked with someone at a gas station which direction we had to go for the border, because somewhere we had to to eastward and we were looking for a small intersection. We only saw a very small sign but were not sure this was the right direction. This should be right the. It’s like Albania just doesn’t exist for the Greek.
After some kilometers we entered a small border post. The greek border post didn’t know how to understand our papers from the car it seemed. I tried to explain it but the because of the language barrier I was not able to help him very well. It took quite some time and I think he gave up. I got my papers back. He asked us why we wanted to visit Albania. He told us that in the 24 years he worked here he had never seen dutch tourists here at the border post who wanted to enter Albania.
We were allowed to continue. We drove further but did not see he albanian border post. We drove over a long bridge and at the other side was the albanian border.
We were curious if we would be able to get in. It seemed no problem, if was possible to buy the visa for us at the border post. The friendly people were looking a bit amezed, to have dutch tourists today. They got very enthousiastic to see us dutch people here who are interested in their country and want to voluntarily visit it. Like some people told me before, the albanese people really LOVE Mercedes. One look around at the border post proved this fact already; There were 6 cars and four of them were old Mercedes cars. The fact that Albania is hardly visited by tourists was clear to us when we drove by, all the people were watching as if aliens entered their area. The old and the young, man and women, small and big.
At the first intersection we stopped to see if we had to go to Permet or Korce. There was a bar were some people sat outside, soon one of them came towards us and asked where we wanted to go. At least, we think he said that.
We couldn’t understand a word from him and he didn’t understand any english. In fact, he wanted to explain what was on the sign. “Permet” and he pointed left, “Korce” and he pointed to the right. “Ah yes” I said “But we can read signs too” I thought by myself 
Because we didn’t have a good map of Albania (we only had the map of Europe) we made the decision by guessing and went to Permet. This route as far we could see didn’t lead us into the northern direction. We didn’t have enough details on the actual map of course, so it was pretty difficult to find these things out. As a result we drove back to the intersection again, waved at our friends on the terrace and now went into the direction of Korce. This road hopefully went north, because this Korce place was not on our map we couldn’t verify anything.
We were astonished by how beautiful Albania is. It was already 19:30 and so we decided to find ourselves a little hotel to sleep. Of this 80km we drove until now it was clear to us: Albania is marvellous, tremendously beautiful!
Because we drove some part in the dark we were disappointed that we couldn’t experience it all. It was so full of green, lots of mountains and beautifully shaped. All human intervention you see is this small tiny tarred road that cuts through the landscape.
No signs, no houses, no parking places, no garbagecans, bars, restaurants etc. etc. No form of human intervention except for the road. Sometimes we saw a river and sometimes great waterfalls now and then. This is probably the fact that it all looks like a fairytale, because most of the time anywhere else in Europe you alway see all this marks of human intervention. Sometimes we pass a group of houses, but that is really once in a while.
The mainroad to Korce is a pretty bad road with a lot of stones and holes. We then passed a small village, where we drove versy slowly to look around. Everyone was watching us. This village was mainly one big street and everyone was outside, a police man walked around looking happy. As I already wrote, Mercedeses everywhere, lots of W123’s here. Furthermore one can say that it all looks very poort and miserable. The flats and houses are not much more then concrete cages.
We asked the police man if there was a hotel here. We really want to stay here and have a look at the daily lives around here. It felt very remote and with all people outside walking around and chatting we had the feeling we should stay here and experience this. Unfortunately the police man told us there was no hotel here (‘No hotel!, Korce!’) and because of that we had to continue. Because when it gets dark here in Albania it gets really, really dark because there are no street lights through the country, finding a hotel this way will become impossible then. And thus it became a very long trip, because driving through the mountains with only hairpin bends in the dark and the bad roads isn’t really easy.
At last, at 21:30hrs (20:30hrs local time) we seemed to enter a village. The first two buildings we pretty big and more or less looked like hotels but there was no sign or something which underwrote this. So, we stepped out of the car and walked towards the building where they seemed to have a cafe downstairs, there was a lot of light and some people were sitting in this room. We walked in, the music was turned on very loud. ‘Is this a hotel?’ I asked, while making a gesture that represented this place.
He pointed at the other building. That had to be a hotel. So we thanked and left the overexposed place. We walked towards the other building. The lights were on downstairs and carefully we opened the door.
There were some people sitting there. They felt silent (Where did we experience that befor? Ah yes… ) and a woman asked us, eh, something. We tried to explain we want to know if this was a hotel and if we could stay for the night.
It was very difficult to explain this, because she really did not understand a WORD what we said, and vice versa. Even ‘yes’ and ‘no’ wasn’t understood. We stood there, staring at each other, not knowing how to explain things to each other.
She was very sweet and laughed a lot, she wanted to express how amazing this was, us standing there not able to communicate. It seemed that besides the word ‘hotel’ the word ‘Accoord’ (all-right) was common with both of us, that’s at least something.
It was very interesting to see how we could solve this. We wanted one room, for two persons, for one night, and one bed. In the end we had laughed a lot and understood each other. She showed us the room and in 5 minutes we were sitting there in this nice room where all the furniture was crafted from wood. We only had to pay 15 euro’s for this relaxed place.