13th-18th September 2016 – 252 km
After leaving Pa-emer campsite
next to the sea, we continued our way to Berat, one of the rare cities in
Europe to preserve almost the historical and cultural values through the
political changes in Albania. It’s also one of the oldest inhabited city in the
world. The unique architecture of Berat is the houses with white stone walls,
brown tile roofs and many windows towards Osum river. That’s why people remember
about this city as “The city of thousand windows”.
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| The houses with many windows towards Osum river in Berat. |
Walking around in the small alleys in the old town of Berat was another nice experience. The small houses stand next to each other and connected by rocky road and time totally stops here as you couldn’t find anything which belongs to the modern world. The only thing that makes the environmental volunteers quite upset about is the awareness of environment protection of the inhabitants. You can see plastic bags thrown everywhere, even to the river, despite the propagandas put in many places.
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| One unique thing in the old town of Berat is the small rocky alleys. |
After couple of hours sightseeing
in Berat, we didn’t stay the night there but continued our way in hope to get
to Gijrocaster earlier. This is the last Albanian city before we enter Greece.
Our original plan was to follow the national road to Fier and sleep there one
night, but a small unexpected event had changed our route and brought more
interesting stories to our days.
The story was, we were cycling
slowly on the national road when a huge tractor came from behind without any
intent of giving way to us. The result was that Péter was kicked out of the
road and almost fell down. By chance, there was a turn to the parallel road
which went around the villages on the mountains and we decided to take the
smaller road with less traffic. That’s how we ended up cycling uphill for 10
more kilometers exhaustingly at the end of the cycling day. First I tried to
pedal and later a donkey breeder helped to push my bike uphill, finally the
terrible 10 kilometers was left behind.
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| The traffic on the mountain... |
At sunset, we arrived at a village named Kafavaj where
everyone could speak all the foreign languages, except: English, German,
Hungarian and Vietnamese. We don’t speak any other languages than English,
German, Hungarian and Vietnamese. More than 10 people approached us, all made
phone calls to someone else or tried to show something to us with their body
language. We, in return could just smile. All of sudden, our angel was sent to
us. Anna is a highschool girl in the village who spoke well English and helped
us to have a comfortable night at Harun and Donika’s lovely house. The wife was
one the fastest cooks I’ve met in my life as she served us a nice dinner with
fried chicken, pasta with beef and vegie, fried fish after only 30 minutes of
preparing. Impressive!
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The kind couple in Kafavai
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The next morning, a fresh and
delicious breakfast was prepared just for us and even more food to go, on our
way to Tepelene. It was quite a hard cycling day, not because of the hills but
the very hot weather and for almost 70 kilometres, no shadows were found that
we could stop for a rest.
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The way to Tepelene
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Arriving in Tepelene, we cycled around to find lodging
without not much hope as the city was full of block buildings and no gardens or
garages. But by chance, a friendly family found us on their way walking and
offered us their undone flat. There was no furniture or not even a shower in
the flat, but we had a safe and comfortable night there.
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View from the window of the under-construction-flat in
Tepelene
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The main square in Tepelene where
people gathered and we could watch the beautiful full-moon above the mountains
the night before.
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Leaving Tepelene, we were so
excited to move forward to one of the most important cities in Albania,
Gijrocaster. Together with Berat, Gijrocaster was inscribed as World Heritage
by UNESCO because of its well-preserved culture and history from the Ottoman
time. There is a community of Greek minority in Gijrocaster as the city is the
natural boundary between Albania and Greece. Interestingly, this fun fact
brought us the chance to spend a terrific weekend with a nice Greek family
right at the city center.
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City view from the castle which retains a clock tower and a
bazaar from the 18th century.
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The story was, we were searching
around for lodging after some attempts to talk to some anti-foreign language
locals when a group of pupils walked by. We cycled to the opposite direction
and found a school for Greek children in Gijrocaster! Voila! There we met
Artemis, an English and Albanian teacher at that school who invited us to her
nice house right away.
That evening, together with the
whole family, we watch the live discussion among the active members of the
parties before the election on the local TV channel. The 17 old daughter of
Artemis was the representative youngster of the Liberal party. She started her
political career from the age of 12! The next day, we spent time at Artemis’s
farm on the mountain, a perfect place for a relaxing weekend.
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View from the balcony of Artemis’s house on the mountain.
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This farm
provides all the diary products such as: yoghurt, cheese, butter and that’s how
we learnt about the making process of these as well as enjoyed them during our
stay.
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The habitants of the farm on the mountain.
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In the evening, Artemis also
brought us to the best restaurant in town for dinner. Resort Kerculla is
located on the highest point of the city where we had the wonderful view of
Gijrocaster by night.
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Dining at resort Kurcella located on the nicest spot of the
city
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A wonderful dinner.
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Good-bye Albania, good-bye all the wonderful people we met, now we leave
for Greece, the last European city of our journey. During two terrible weeks in
Greece, we realised how precious the good previous days were...
(To be continued...)
Linh
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