Day 11: Bye Bye Mountains, Hello Civilization
Today I woke up with the thought that wolves hadn’t eaten us, not even disturbed us during the night.
So we had some tea, packed the stuff and went to the coffee for some yoghurt to our muesli. Well spent 3 euros.
This is our little friend who kept us company at the breakfast
Environmental challenge: Shower in 1 liter of water
We wanted to wash ourselves in the stream we saw yesterday at the coffee, but couldn’t find it, so we had to wash ourselves with the water from our drinking bottles. A liter per person was enough, which makes the average 8-minute shower with it’s 62 litres of hot water source really funny. Or not. We should do this at home. The environmental savings would be so huge!
We said bye to this lovely place and continued our way. Unfortunately we didn’t find the turn back to the mountains from the valley, so we had to make the hike one day shorter.
Say goodbye to the mountains!
Crazy trip through Kosovo to Tirana
We managed to get a ride to Bajram Curri, where we hadn’t spent even half an hour. We just bought some food and jumped to the bus to Tirana. It went through Kosovo, so the driver was unsure if we can go with them without passports, just with our IDs, but we looked it up and it was ok.
Bajram Curri looked really poor
On the bus we met a very friendly girl who was very keen to communicate with us in English but didn’t really know much of it. We exchanged a few sentences always tumbling over the language bridge. She was quite young, but already married which isn’t anything unusual over here I think. She lived in Kosovo and before leaving the bus she asked me for my facebook contact and I invited her to come over to Czech Republic. We’ll see if she connects with me.
Pilaf e Mish (rice with meat) - we had this delicious dish on the way to Tirana
Our trip continued. During the whole time there was Albanian / Kosovan music playing on the video. I actually found it quite educative as all those videos were portraying rich people singing probably about love. It was interesting to see how they imagined being wealthy. To my surprise there were also some videos featuring people in traditional national costumes and of course many of those songs had the south / middle east melodies. The videos with the Albanian scenery / countryside kept us amused for all the time so even the 5 hour long trip didn’t seem too long.
Arrival to Tirana
After the arrival we found the most luxurious place we visited on our trip but for the lowest prices we’ve seen so far. That was a nice change for once. On the first look Tirana seemed as a very crazy and hasty city, with many cars, too many klaxons and crazy drivers. We found a hostel - the ZigZag hostel - which looked very much the way we wished. It had a small garden hidden from the city hustle behind a wall and the hostel itself was very simple - something between a house and a wooden cabin.
We went for a short walk in the city and saw some crazily lighten up churches but otherwise not much. We asked some locals where some good place for a drink was. We passed some expensive “American” bars, and found a bar with cozy armchairs, where we had a shot of rakija. There was also a friendly waiter and above all no noise and no smoke. We enjoyed ourselves, talked about future, research, consumerism, antipasti, etc.
Crazy church in the center of Tirana
A note on travelling
We think that travelling is a lot about consuming and we discussed if it’s bad or not. It’s neither, of course. The good thing about travelling to distant places - unknown or even uninhabited (that’s why we like to go to the mountains) is the fresh new thoughts it brings. If one stays at one place, works at one task, one doesn’t have the opportunity to let the mind wander, find new ideas. And even for old ideas you get new context, see them from a different perspective, which always helps. We also discussed how it helps one not to drive into too much detail of their regular lives, that one has for once a more global view.
We returned to the hostel and enjoyed the night in a soft bed for once.
