May 6 - June 13, 2010
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Stage 8: Corfu, Albania and Montenegro
Our hotel in Corfu was only a five minute walk from the airport. After settling in, we took a bus downtown and toured an old fort and the Old Town.
The next morning we took a hydrofoil ferry from Corfu to Sarande, Albania.
After some confusion, we finally found the place to catch a bus to Tirana, the capitol of Albania.
It was a great ride and we saw much of the country as we went along ...
Our driver did a great job negotiating many narrow, steep roads as we went through mountainous areas.
As we got closer to Tirana, we saw many buildings still under construction as this country continues to emerge from decades of communist seclusion.
Upon arrival, with no maps, we found a taxi and asked to be taken to the "center." As you can see, the main square definitely needs a face lift.
We found a nice hotel near the main square and then set out to find dinner. We thought we might try the one big, fancy hotel on the main square first and took its elevator up to the restaurant on the third floor. Imagine our suprise when we stepped out of the elevator to find a very elegant cocktail party under way! We asked a fellow by the elevator what was going on. He turned out to be a member of the Albanian Secret Service and explained that this was a party being hosted by the head of the U.S.-Albanian Business Association and that he himself was there because the President of Albania was in attendance. Ray asked if we could meet the President and he walked away to find him for us. Hannelore took the opportunity to insist that we beat a hasty retreat back into the elevator ... ;-)
We found another, very nice restauanrt down the street with great food ...
... but a menu in need of a bit of fine tuning.
The next morning, we took a walk through the central area before catching a train at noon to Shkoder in the north of Albania.
We also stopped by the small shop where Ray had met 13-14 year old Inis the day before, shown here with her mother. Inis speaks near-perfect English and was very helpful as we tried to figure out how we were going to move on from Tirana.
The train ride from Tirana to Shkoder was, in many ways, the highlight of our trip. First, it was a train that stopped at almost every village along the way. Second, it was pretty full so there was a constantly changing series of other passengers in our compartment. As we set out, we had these three village ladies dressed in black. They were going back to their village with things they had bought in town, PLUS a large number of big plastic bags filled with empty plastic bottles of all sorts!
When we got to their village, to save time, they opened the window in our compartment and threw the bags of plastic bottles out and then got off the train.
Here you see the road to their village and folks who had come out to the tracks (no station) to pick up passengers
Our next visitors were there two brothers, Mirsad and Mustafa, who seemed quite interested in us and anxious to tell us about everything we were seeing as we went along.
Next up was this lady who works with the Catholic nuns in orphanages. She was then joined by the man next to her who happened to know her. He was the policeman on the train and convinced us to let him take us to the 30-mile distant Montenegro border after we arrived in Shkoder.
We were then joined by these three young ladies. We showed them photos of our son, Peter, the basketball player, and they all volunteered to marry him. We took this picture to let him decide.
All in all, it was a very pleasant afternoon.
After arriving in Shkoder, the train policeman drove us to the border.
When we arrived at the border, he handed us off to another guy who then drove us another 20 miles or so to Podgorica, the capitol of Montenegro.
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