Albania doesn’t have Uber or Bolt, or any of the other ride services where you can get a quote for your ride BEFORE you get in the car. I’m sure there are honorable and honest taxi drivers, I just never seem to meet them. In Tirana, there is a taxi stand right outside the airport but you don’t actually get a taxi that way. You have to decide if you want to “rent a car” or negotiate heavily with the taxi driver before you get in. “Rent a car” is essentially Uber, you show them the address you want to go to and they calculate on the spot what it will cost, you pay and get a paper receipt and then they find you a driver. In my case, after 5 handoffs which made me push my own carry on just in case.
I ended up with a second year dental student who spoke perfect English and came from two generations of dentists. He claimed that Albania has become a “dental destination” much like other countries are known for medical and pharma tourism. I learned quite a bit about the university system in Albania as well as comparisons between Donnie and their dictator when the 15 min ride promised by Google Maps morphed into a 107 min car ride due to a few major traffic jams.
Between the traffic and all my airline issues, I arrived at my booked guesthouse 6 hours after I should have and the office was closed. My updated international Verizon phone plan seemed to have skipped over covering Albania and I couldn’t get on the internet to message through Booking.com. At this point, after a not great day, crappy food, and LOTS of walking, I contemplated if I could fit on the sidewalk in front and just call it. Common sense prevailed and I headed over to the attached bar to have a cold beer and figure out the next steps instead.
Luckily for me, the hotel and bar/restaurant were related in some way and after a little negotiation on my waiter’s phone with someone who spoke American English, I handed over 40 euros and my new friend Said was able to get me into the guesthouse. Had I planned to stay in Tirana for a few days or even longer, the little guest house was in the perfect location, close to bars, restaurants, cafes and fruit stands. I just wasn’t sure I’d love schlepping up and down three flights of slippery steps multiple times a day.
The booking included a free breakfast at the same bar/restaurant, which ended up being the best breakfast I’ve had on my trip so far.
The Albanian pita bread is actually more like a round baguette and really spongy in the middle, absolutely delicious.
The breakfast came with chewable coffee, and maybe 2 oz of coffee came with two sugar packets??
Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought to get some Lek at the airport and no one was taking euro. Said explained the grocery store attached to the restaurant would change a little into Lek if I bought something. They grudgingly exchanged my euro at a crappy exchange when I bought a couple of drinks for the bus ride, and I had about $5 equivalent of Lek left in coins and small bills for the trip to Sarande.
I had booked the bus to Sarande at 12:30 pm, figuring I was heading into a slower paced environment and I should allow for PLENTY of time to get there. That turned out to be one of the better decisions of the weekend. I finished breakfast around 10am and the taxi that was 5 minutes away, according to my new waiter friend Said, arrived just after 11am. Google Maps showed I was 12 min from the main bus station, but the taxi took more than half an hour to get there, which put me at 11:45am for a noon check in. The bus station was just an open field with dozens of vehicles ranging from minivans to legit tour buses. The taxi took my last small euro bill and coin, and I was allowed to board the bus early so I could sit.
I was interested to see if local buses were better or worse than Croatian ones, since my Flixbus adventure to Dubrovnik was an epic fail. Barring the b.o. from the passenger right in front of me, which mellowed a little with time and other passengers, it couldn’t have been more different. First of all, the A/C worked and worked well. The driver even turned it on full blast row by row. All the seats were working and I wasn’t forced to half-recline for the four hour trip. The best part is the driver had a car trip playlist, ranging from traditional arabic/greek songs with haunting horns to club music that you’d probably hear in half the dance clubs in Ibiza.
My seatmate on the trip was Mack from Australia, who is currently working as a lift operator at a ski resort in Austria and wanted to do a long weekend in another country during their low season. He regaled me with funny stories of his hostel stays and I told him some of the weird things that have happened to me on this trip. As the bus started, he politely said he was going to listen to his own music since he didn’t like club music and that was fine. I was cool, in a working seat and had plenty of new-to-me music to make the trip go faster.
One thing that I’ve learned from all the bus travel I do is to go to the bathroom and buy food/drinks at any opportunity it’s offered. Most buses outside the U.S. have drivers with limited English and you don’t get any insight to stops or breaks. I didn’t dare enjoy the drinks I had bought at the grocery store because I couldn’t tell if we were going to stop during the four hour “direct” journey. It turns out, “direct” still meant we did at least a dozen stops the first 90 minutes picking up single riders at various unmarked spots on the highway, so I started to think our ride might be closer to five hours. Luckily for me, at least two men of a certain age had already walked up to the driver and asked about a rest stop, so planned or not, we stopped at a truck stop about an hour away from Sarande.
I ran over to the toilet portable first and then headed over to see if there was something for lunch. The truck stop had a store that was larger than any grocery store I’d been in while in Croatia and offered everything from snacks to food to even local wine.
I wanted something a little more substantial than a bag of chips or a candy bar, and was lucky enough to score the very last bureks on offer, a spinach/feta one and a chicken and “cream” one that tasted like a chicken pot pie. My drinks were pretty warm by then so I got a sour cherry juice while I was at it.
Right after the truck stop, we started to drop off riders along the highway, including Mr. B.O who fittingly was dropped off at a sheep ranch, and yet we still made it to the bus stop at 5pm as scheduled.
At this point on a Sunday, I knew the only choice was to take a taxi. I never go with the taxi drivers that come up to a bus, because I know they will overcharge, but after the third legit taxi driver couldn’t figure out where my homestay was, I had no choice but to go back to one of the unmarked taxis and see if someone could help me. It didn’t help that the Booking.com contact had a Danish phone number and the street of my homestay doesn’t have house numbers. Two calls, a helpful clerk from a hotel and my GPS app reboot later, the driver and I had a general idea where to go.
I tried to negotiate the price before I sat down, but the driver wouldn’t give me one because he stated he didn’t know how much he might need to drive around to find the house. I kicked myself again on not getting Lek because there wasn’t an ATM to be found and I only had a 20 euro bill in my pocket. A short ten minutes later, we had located the street but no house looked like the picture on the booking. I finally got fed up and told the driver to let me out and I’d figure it out. He stated the ride was 2000 Lek and that the exchange rate for euro was 25 Lek/one euro. I retorted that it was 94 Lek/euro the last time I changed money and 100 Lek/euro officially and the taxi ride I’d taken earlier in Tirana was three times longer for 10 euro.
He tried to play the trick of keeping my roller suitcase hostage and I stated if he wanted a bunch of dirty laundry in my size, feel free. He could take the 20 euro I was offering or nothing, especially since I still had to find the place. He muttered some choice phrases in Albanian and drove off.
After walking a mile uphill and stopping a few friendly teens and one shopkeeper, his wife looked at the homestay pictures and connected them to her friend Flora’s house. She sent her husband to walk me to the front door, where Flora greeted me with a warm hug. The Albanian kindness and warmth I had read about did exist, just not in the taxi industry.
It is obvious that Flora’s husband was a builder because the stairs down to my little home were made from various end cuts of marble tile and countertops. The apartment has a beautiful view of their garden and the farmland below. I have two balconies, a full kitchen minus a microwave and a total of four beds to sleep on.
The complex also has two gardens and Flora’s husband is building a two story building just around the corner.
I have just under three weeks to chill here until I fly up to Lisbon and meet my brother for a cruise, so I am looking forward to sea and sun. I also want to test drive Sarande to see if it might be a good place to move later when I am done traveling.