Albania is wild, man, wild! I’m in Tirana the second day now. At the moment I’m in a TV/media building in the city centre. I will go on later today to Skopje/Macedonia and south Bulgaria. Here is how I got here from Pula:
I got a lift of my friends Virna and Tatjana from Pula to Rijeka. At the last minute I jumped on the ferry to Dubrovnik where I met with Barbara from Pula who got the tickets for me. It was evening and we found a nice spot for our bags and matrasses on the outside deck where hundreds of people had already prepared their camp for the night.
Arriving in Dubrovnik the next afternoon we saw the opening of the 55th annual theatre festival. The mayor handed over the key of the city for one month to the artists in a big ceremony with fireworks and all. I slept in a crack in the rocks at the beach. The nearby huge abondoned hotel was too scary and I didn’t dare to put myself there.
The next day Barbara and me spend all day on the island Lokrum near the city, sunbathing, reading and swimming. Barbara dived for some things on the ground and I saw a sea cucumber for the first time. What an ugly thing, yuk! At night I met some fire juggler’s from Rijeka in the streets and I stayed with them in the storage room of a club in a former hospital.
I started hitchhiking to Montenegro the next morning. Village by village people took me closer to the border 30 km away. A kinda funny Hungarian couple in a pickup took me over the border and 100 km to Kotor. From there I to the bus to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. I walked around the city centre looking for a place to stay. Their main roads in the centre are car-free every evening from 5pm! I started raining a bit and I ended up in the students resident house where a warden, after some haggling, let me stay on the couch in the lobby. He took my passport as a refund..
The next morning around 6am I walked out of the city towards the Albanian border. There are no busses, trains or even signs to the border, hmm.. For a small fee someone in an old Lada took me and the guy standing next to me to the next town. This is the common way of public transport here. Just stand at the road, looking at the drivers passing and someone will stop and ask you where you want to go. In a bakery someone paid for me because I did not have the small change for the stuff I bought. Everybody pays in Euros here btw. An Albanian driver trading some goods took me over the border for a little money again. At the border I met a young couple from Berlin in a shiny yellow car. They were on their way to Greece and took me all the way near Tirana. We were passing through chaotic towns with all sorts of funky stuff happening beside the very bad roads. There were car wrecks every 50 metres, burned out and picked to pieces, some with many bullet holes.. On the road pigs, goats and cows were doing their animal thing, standing around, grasing, looking. The further south we got the better the roads and everything around got. It is said that governmental forces have not yet regained full control of things in the north after the riots in the nineties. Starting early this day paid out and so I arrived to Tirana at noon in a local minibus. I called Claude, a friend of a Danish guy that I met in Pula, and stayed with his family and met his friends. Claude’s father is a well known Albanian painter. He showed me some of his work in the studio ontop of their flat and I fixed a small thing on his computer.
The next day I met many different people at the National Art Gallery, where Claude’s friends meet. Also Martin and two other people from Denmark arrived. They are on their way to south Bulgaria as well, unfortunately the car is more than full. I helped Elisabeth from Berlin to prepare her radio show today on Oxygen FM, a local free, low/budget music station. I will also talk in the show about the Transhackmeeting in Pula. I will go to pick up my bag now, come back to the radio station, go to an opening at the gallery and then take the bus. I think I’ll be offline for two weeks or so – read you then! =)
[Update:] I just decided to stay another day in Tirana to see the opening and be at the big party afterwards tonight. 🙂 My radio interview went well. It talked about the Transhackmeeting, my travel route, sustainable development and free software. Let’s go party!