Euro Trip - working in Albania

I treated myself to a private transfer (well, I say private, there were 4 of us plus the driver) from Kotor to Albania because it was 2 hours quicker and only 5 euros more, what a bargain eh. 

I began my time in Albania in the capital, Tirana.  I had 3 days here and I was very fond of it.  It felt like a 5 year old had been allowed to design the city whilst high on sugar - it was great.  There were random sculptures dotted around and interesting architecture and colourful buildings, it was weird and wonderful.  Also - a really interesting history! Gotta say, this trip was really opening my eyes and making me realise how naive I was when it came to European, well, everything. 

I stayed in a 4 bed dorm in Mosaic Home, Tirana which was awesome - really friendly, great chill out spaces, free breakfast, nice layout, everything was swish and new and lots of lovely little touches like pouches next to your bed to put your phone and other little things.  The first night I had the room to myself too - anyone who's ever stayed in dorm rooms will know what an absolute score this is!! And then Rohan decided to spoil my peace and quiet and came to join me for the next 2 days.

I did a free walking tour which I HIGHLY recommend, from memory it starts at 10am outside the Opera House and we had Eri - he was probably one of the best tour guides I have ever had - so funny and knowledgable. I had no clue that Albania was basically Europe's North Korea in terms of communism and secrecy until as recently as 1992, and they were pretty much isolated from the rest of the world from 1945 - how insane is it to think that up until '92, there's a whole bunch of people who didn't know any Michael Jackson songs, know that Ikea furniture existed, or Kentucky Fried Chicken was a thing?! In fact, KFC only recently opened up its first restaurant in Tirana, and to date there isn't a McDonalds. We visited the main bunker 'Bunk'ART' in Tirana, which is very eerie - the dictator Enver Hoxha was massively paranoid and ordered 750,000 bunkers to be built throughout Albania (I believe just under 175,000 were completed).  Bunk'ART is the largest of them all, built to house the government in the event of nuclear attack.  It never ended up being used and so now it's a museum you can visit and go get lost in all the dark tunnels - super creepy!  Albania's history also made me understand Tirana's weirdness a little bit more - basically because they were so oppressed, all of the art and sculptures and colours and architecture is all about demonstrating their new found freedoms and they're celebrating it as much as they can, pretty cool huh!

Albania also wants to join the EU (sigh, maybe they can take our spot) and so I was super happy to see in Tirana they had electric police cars, loads of rubbish bins, and loads of electric car charging spots.  But, they also would put out a new table cloth each time someone ate at a restaurant, and bin the existing one....win some lose some I guess.









From Tirana I made my way to Berat, a UNESCO world heritage town.  By this point I was getting a bit travel weary (I know, I know...I'd been away less than a month at this point!) so applied to work at a hostel for 2 weeks.  I was looking forward to being in one spot for a bit and being able to make meaningful relationships with people rather than the 'hey, where are you from, where are you going next, ok cool good to meet you bye' you get with the transient nature of travels.

Berat was....nice... for a day or so, not so good for a longer term stay.  I was drawn in by the pictures of the beautiful river, with the delightful Ottoman style houses in the background - but don't be fooled, this is literally Berat, there's nothing else nearby unless you have a car (I didn't) and the river is polluted so you can't swim in it, and the temperatures whilst I was there were in the high 30s, so it taunted me daily!

it looks so nice! but don't be fooled...
 

I was working with a girl called Kellina from Canada, and luckily we got on like a house on fire.  The instructions given by the hostel owners were sparse to say the least, so we muddled through it together.  I was left in charge the first day I got there for the night shift, 7pm till 12am.  It mostly went without mishap...but I did manage to fill up their Raki bottle with water (Raki being a spirit drunk throughout the Balkans) because they'd asked me to fill up all of the water bottles ready for the next morning - and for some reason were also storing their Raki in guess what...a water bottle.  I owned up to it and tried to pass it off as I was doubling their profits but I don't think they were too happy....the following day the washing machine also broke, and I begun to think I was cursed!

All in all the experience was a good one, I really enjoyed interacting with guests and reading and having some down time, but there were definitely some frustrating parts too - there was nowhere really to 'escape' to, so when we weren't on shift, the only place to hang out in was the garden with the rest of the guests, so they would assume you were working and basically you were always 'on'.  There also wasn't really specific guidance given to us regards working hours and time off - the advert said 5 days of 5 hours with 2 full days off, but we had to really push for our days off.  We also didn't get any food (all the places I wwoofed at in New Zealand you got food and board), so we were essentially working for $2 per hour as accommodation was $10 euros a night in a dorm room.  We had the choice of a dorm but swapping beds if the room got full, or sleeping on the roof, so we chose to sleep on the roof as at least we didn't have to keep moving our stuff every day.  We also could only shower when the rooms were empty, which was kinda annoying.  Basically there was next to no privacy for the 2 weeks I was there.  If I were to woof in a hostel again (which I would!) I would do a bit more research and make sure it was in a place that I actually wanted to visit and had enough to do.


sweaty after a morning hike up the hill behind the hostel, Berat in the background








As mentioned before, Berat is pretty dull if you're here more than a day or two.  The castle is nice and well worth a visit, but I'd recommend going up in the evening as the walk is steep and it's super hot in the summer.  It's a great place to grab a beer and sit and watch the sunset as I did a couple of times.  The Old Town is also nice to explore, though it's definitely not as large as the other old towns in Montenegro or Croatia.  Berat is super cheap too - you can get main meals for around £4.50, what an absolute bargain!!  The local dish is 'lamb with yoghurt', which I assumed to be literally lamb with yoghurt on top, but it turned out to be more lik an eggy lamb soufle with a bit of yoghurt in it. It was a bit strange but edible!

We negotiated some time off and the hostel owner very kindly lent us her car, so one afternoon we went to Bogove waterfall - I'm glad we did this by ourselves as there's tour companies that do £15 tours to it and I would have been sorely disappointed to pay that! In the end it's a 50 minute walk to a nice (absolutely freezing!) waterfall but it's nothing spectacular, unless you've literally never seen a waterfall before.

the waterfall

On another day we drove to Dhermi, which is a beach town.  It was so nice to get out of Berat and see a bit more of Albania - the drive was stunning, if a little hairy - the road quality is terrible so you'll be driving along at 60kmph and suddenly the road will dip and rise and dip and rise then there'll be a huge unavoidable pothole, then the person in front of you will suddenly brake and the person behind you is right on your arse and will swerve madly out the way to avoid hitting you, then later on the person in front will stop suddenly and open their car door so you have to swerve to avoid missing it, then you'll be driving really slowly up and over a very windy mountain pass and the people behind will be sitting on your tail and get annoyed at you being slow (safe!) and overtake on a blind bend, then later you'll have someone driving at you because they're on the totally wrong side of the road without a care in the world.  Don't even get me started on roundabouts and junctions...  Honestly I was a ball of nerves sitting at the wheel and very very grateful nothing happened!!!




Dhermi was nice but I think it had been hyped up too much (or perhaps I have been spoilt with the amazing New Zealand beaches).  The sea water was incredible and warm and a beautiful colour, but the beaches themselves were crowded and a bit dirty and super touristy, the kind of place you have to pay to lie on a sunlounger.  We also did a day trip to Gjipe Beach, which is meant to be a 'secret' beach - well let me tell you, that secret is definitely out!!!! A 10 minute drive down a single track road with few passing spots, then a 30 minute walk in the baking sun takes you to a beautiful beach at the end of a canyon, but it was super busy with boats dropping off and picking people up all day and 4x4s driving down.   Personally I wouldn't recommend it, I didn't think the journey to get there was worth it but Kellina and Amelie liked it. 



I also celebrated my birthday in Berat! As luck would have it, Kellina's birthday was the day before mine so we had a joint celebration :) We went for a team dinner on her birthday and the following day joined the hostel tour to the Osumi Canyon which was a pretty neat way to spend turning 32!  We hiked/walked/jumped/swam along the canyon for 5ks and it was stunning! Such a cool thing to be able to traverse a river like that.





My final days in Berat were spent playing with Djielza the hostel puppy and the unnamed cat and drinking beers and having shared meals with Kellina and the owners - it was lovely and just what I needed, I was definitely itching to get back on the road after 2 weeks off. 

Comments

  1. Thanks for continuing to keep us updated about your travels. I love the pictures too.

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