Sophie's travels 2011-2012: 15/8/2011 Lake Ohrid, Macedonia to Tirana, Albania

After admiring the morning light over the lake we set off for Struga – a cute little lake side town in Macedonia. We relaxed on some sun beds by the lake after checking out the village before heading on to the boarder between Macedonia and Albania. Driving into Albania was almost like driving into scenes out of a war zone there were old bunkers everywhere throughout the hills and streets from the war that had just been built around and some of them are occupied by the homeless. The scenery was amazing – big mountains and valleys with red cliffs and train tunnels running through the mountains. There were lots of decrepid old houses much like Asia emphasising the countries poor economy, the roads were also pretty bad! We drove past lots of horse drawn carts and donkeys carrying things on their backs along the road side. The houses have stuffed toys or scarecrow looking things hanging out the front that are said to be to distract people from looking at the houses. Albanians believe that if someone looks at the house with jealous eyes the owner will be cursed… Some of the scarecrow looking ones were quite scary, looked like small children being hung! We stopped at Elbasan and wandered around for an hour – while walking down the street we walked past a man waving a big gun around which was fairly scary, turns out he was waiting for money to be transported out of a bank into a security vehicle but still scary! We drove on to Durres a town where steep mountains plunge into the Adriatic sea, where we were supposed to stay for the night. Turns out we had been booked into the countries other hotel in Albania which is in Tirana – the capital so we drove on to Tirana to our massive hotel rooms looking out over the city for the night – luxury! Albania is also not safe to camp in… We celebrated our night off from tents with a room party before getting a few hours sleep in a real bed.