I can’t seem to motivate myself to write anything about my recent travels. I keep meaning to get to it but I get sidetracked on different things. One of my projects is my ongoing story I’ve been writing in Turkish for the past 5 months. Well, I’ve been writing it in a language that resembles…
I’ve run into a snag with my Albania stories. Maybe I’ll get back to them in a while, but for now I’ll branch off on another topic. Not that I don’t have good stories (for example being accused of being a Russian spy by an old man because I wanted to take a picture of…
I arrived to Tirana airport in the mid-morning, collected my backpack and tried to leave the airport. I had been told that I could catch a furgon from the airport to Shkoder instead of taking a taxi to Tirana and then taking a furgon from there, as the airport is on the way to Shkoder….
I spent about three days in the hotel before heading back up to Uludağ to teach at another kid’s camp. I was relieved to have a little bit of rest; this was the first time in about two weeks that I had spent more than one night in the same place. I made a tally:…
The next day in Pogradec I enjoyed my complimentary breakfast of toast, fried eggs and Turkish coffee before departing the hotel. It was a nice, hot sunny day for my last few hours in Albania. Back in Gjirokaster upon first arriving in the country I had bought a number of postcards of places I had…
Nobody rides Balkan trains, and for good reason, too. Remember that fantastic scene in Casino Royale when James Bond meets Vesper on the train through Montenegro? It has fantastic dialogue but the idea of this actually being a train in the Balkans is completely implausible. In the Balkans the trains are old, slow, uncomfortable, and…
The ferry from Fierze to Koman goes down the man-made Lake Koman, cutting through the mountains, which makes for spectacular scenery. The boat was pretty full when we got on, with people sitting in the small seating area and everyone’s bags piled on the front of the boat. I found a place at the front…
The furgon from Valbone to Bajram Curri leaves every morning at 7:00. There’s only one furgonper day and I don’t know why it leaves at such a ridiculous hour. It’s not a long drive, only maybe two hours. It’s probably the case that there is literally only one furgon that makes the drive and it…
I kept going down the hill and eventually the boy on the horse caught up with me and passed me. He said his house was just a little bit further down and I told him I’d see him there. This village was not Valbone, but Rogam, the tiny village that you come across just before…
I started hiking around 7:30am. I was a bit concerned about how I would fare, as I haven’t done a lot of big hikes like this. I walk a lot in Istanbul and I’m naturally athletic, but I was afraid a seven hour hike might be a little bit difficult. But I figured that having…