On my way to Greece!

Russian roulette on the roads

Saturday morning, early, we left for Greece!  I was able to hitch a ride with one of my Embassy colleagues, Lisa, and her son Cejdro – they had planned to head down to Thessaloniki to spend the weekend on the beach, leaving her husband and daughter to have a Daddy-daughter weekend.  I, on the other hand, had no intention of lying on the beach – I wanted to explore the city and experience Greece for the first time!  So we set out in Lisa’s Honda CRV… the distance between Tirana and Thessaloniki is only about 425 kilometers (265 miles), so you’d expect that it would take around 4 1/2 hours… but no, not quite.  It took us more like 9... including a couple of stops for lunch & coffee. As mentioned earlier, Albania is very mountainous, and as Lisa so aptly put it, the Albanians never learned to build roads through the mountains, but instead built them probably following the ancient tribal cattle trails that had wound up & down the mountains literally for millennia. Many parts of the drive were, simultaneously, breathtakingly beautiful and hair-raisingly precarious, as we wound our way up & down mountain after mountain, with “guard rails” that were less than confidence-inducing… Lisa’s expert driving on those narrow roads was all the more laudable if one considers our fellow travelers on the road!  Any road markings or lane separator paint is generally ignored, and impatient drivers behind you “leap frog” ahead of you no matter if there’s a curve immediately ahead.  And invariably, there is a curve immediately ahead! You just never can tell if an oncoming car is going to be zipping around the next curve…

Needless to say, our progress through Albania was slow, but fascinating.  We descended into a valley, down through a blanket of smog into the industrial city of Elbasan; around a good portion of beautiful Lake Ohrid, which is shared by neighboring Macedonia (formerly a part of Yugoslavia), and toward the border with Greece… and as we neared the border, I noticed more and more of a peculiar construction, in some areas dotting the landscape – bunkers.  I had heard of these defensive hide-outs, built during the Communist period by the order of Hoxha as a means of fending off the invasion that never came.  Hoxha was convinced that Albania would be attacked by Yugoslavia or Greece.  These concrete domed structures look eerie and unearthly and are reminiscent of an early, 1970s-vintage Star Wars movie – you know, the one when Luke Skywalker was a boy and they lived in fear of attack from the Dark Side… forgive me if my recollection isn’t correct?!

Minaret in Elbasan

Up close & personal... one of Enver Hoxha's bunkers

Bunkers dotting the landscape...

Lake Ohrid, overlooking the town of Pogradec



"Guard rails"....??



Albanian driver in need of driver's ed