Tirana to Berat: Not sunny or bike tourism ready

I named this blog “Sunshine and Albania” shortly after arriving. It was early July, summer was popping, and everything was bright and new to me. Day after day of clear blue skies. Both the climate charts and the residents agree that Albania enjoys a remarkably high average of sunlight.

Large doses of sunshine are good for tourism promoters. In July and August, I saw everything through rosy-lensed sunglasses. Colors looked photoshopped. I couldn’t figure out why everyone in Europe hadn’t booked their flight or ferry to Albania already.

Clouds

Now it’s September, and things are changing. As clouds roll in, the sunny outlook is getting harder to maintain. We’ve already seen about eight wet days this month, including last Friday when I decided to bike from Tirana to Berat.

I met a traveler named Brody (also a Denver native) who is touring Mediterranean Europe and the Middle East by bicycle. Somehow I convinced him that I could keep up with him on his next stretch of road from Tirana to Berat in a day. “It’s around 70 miles,” he warned me. “Around 70 kilometers” is what I decided to hear. That was only like 40 something miles, right? “No problem,” I told him. “Let’s do this.” Forecast: cloudy.

Potholes

The next morning, the sky was solid gray as we made our way onto the patchy highway that was still dark and puddled from rain the day before. Traffic was loudly misbehaving as usual, and the pollution was forming its own haze.

Without a need for sunglasses, I began to see my surroundings for what they really were: a lunar landscape of concrete and potholes. Bad ones. Brody, who has been living on a bicycle for awhile now, said that these were some of the worst road conditions he’d seen yet on his trip. I slid and tumbled down twice.


Lavazh - the car wash

By the time we reached a restaurant for lunch, I was so mud-splattered that the waiter didn’t even let me come in. He pointed me to the lavazh -- the car wash.
In Albania, the solution to bad, dirty roads and a suspicious abundance of Mercedes Benzes is a car wash every 100 meters.

I wandered in and found the hose gun. It was actually really fun to get my legs and bike hosed down with high pressure.


Berat

After about 6 hours of pedaling, I was slowing down. Brody coached me along with a countdown announcement of my first “metric century” when we reached the 100 km mark. Sometimes he’d start literally pushing me along from his own bike. Finally, we reached the small city of Berat. 120 km total.

The historical center of Berat has earned it designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Hillside residences are uniformly whitewashed with big frame windows that peer outward. I didn’t count them, but supposedly Berat is the “city of a thousand windows.”

We climbed to the Berat castle ruins above the city just in time for golden hour lighting. The sun finally made a brief appearance just to illuminate the clouds for great sunset. I just watched and wondered why everybody in Europe hasn’t booked their flight or ferry to Albania already.

The forecast

For the avid bike tourist, the Albanian stretch of their trip is a rough but doable challenge. For the less experienced, it is still too much of an “adventure tour.” The roads have a ways to go before companies like Outdoor Albania can package this route. But, given the rate of change in Albania, five years from now might be an entirely different story. Long-term forecast: sunny.

Express: Up Mount Dajti by cable lift and down by bicycle

Tirana is a city that is working on its image. Its current mayor, Edi Rama, is an artist-turned-politician who is eager to introduce Tirana as a vivid European capital. For the city, this means beautification projects like a fresh coats of colorful paint for formerly gray buildings and a total re-landscaping of the central Skanderbeg Square.

Tirana is indeed looking better, but perhaps the most beautiful part of the city is the nature around it. Majestic green mountains hover around the city. One of the highest points on the horizon is Mount Dajti. Just 26 km outside the city, it measures 1,613 meters of altitude. The mountain is known as the ‘balcony of Tirana’ and has been declared a national park.

Just a few years ago, a gondola cable lift called the Dajti Express was built to carry site-seers from the city to the mountaintop. For adventure seekers, the best part of the gondola lift is that there is room for bicycles on board. Outdoor Albania offers a guided excursion that takes visitors up by cable and down by bike through surrounding villages.

The highlight of the trip is a stop at the restaurant built around a panoramic view of the capital below. It is world class. The restaurant has outdoor seating in lush garden terraces. Stunning infinity pools swarm with the trout that also appear on the menu, and lamb roasts slowly on its traditional-style spit. Inside the restaurant, the presidential table is reserved for political personages who bring guests to this little-known lookout above the city.

The bicycle ride down kept me wide-eyed and white-knuckled. Good brakes and a fearless streak required. There is no better way to enjoy the paradoxes and contrasts of Albania: rural versus urban, cattle versus traffic, and fresh mountain air versus the noise and pollution of the city. This day trip is also evidence that Tirana is underrated. Travelers pass through to other parts of the country without realizing the exciting possibilities in and around the city. This is definitely my favorite OA day trip so far.

Headquarters: Tirana, Albania

This is the first post from Tirana, the capital of Albania. The adventure began with a google map search of where on earth Albania is. This is a small country in the Balkan region of southeast Europe, just north of Greece and an overnight ferry ride east of Bari, Italy. I stumbled upon it because of a web internship opportunity with Outdoor Albania, where I’ll be working for the summer.

In the first few days of street-wandering in Tirana, I was surrounded by evidence that I wasn’t in the western Mediterranean euro zone anymore. Traffic is loud and chaotic; even the stoplights are confused. Sidewalk markets pop up each morning, offering everything from locally grown produce to mass-produced plastic wares to used shoes, and then vanish at sunset. The street food situation is promising: my favorite so far is the byrek, a pastry filled with surprises like spinach, yogurt and feta cheese. It might take awhile to get tired of these. Ubiquitous corn on the cob is another plus. The local currency is the Lek, and a US dollar buys around 108 of them. One byrek: 30 lek.

One of my favorite sites around the city is the Blloku district, whose access used to be limited to the communist ruling elite. Now it is the city’s fashionable bar and restaurant district, where anyone willing to pay too much for a drink can go to be seen. Another fun spot is Aquadrom, the city pool, where everyone goes to stay cool in the summer. The current OA intern and I spied on the VIP area, where 300 lek extra buys you a lounge chair near the pool that tries to be a daytime discotheque. No thanks. I prefer strolling in the city park for free. The lack of landscaping is endearing. Footpaths lead to a little man-made lake, where I have been meeting each day to work on my secret side project.

My “home” in Tirana (for now) is a backpacker hostel near the heart of the city. The local staff is good patio company, and it is a just a short walk to the OA office, where I’ll be working full time. The indoor hours with Outdoor Albania will be many, but the payoff is great: experience in the field of sustainable tourism plus enjoyment of the outdoor recreation that this beautiful country has to offer.

The meeting point: city park lake

McDonalds fail. The real thing hasn't made it here. Yet.