Cycle trip day 69: crossing the Balkans
Written by Kat
We last saw you in Croatia, where it turned out Mat needed a few extra days recovery before he was cycling fit again. So we hired a car in Split, disassembled our bicycles and popped them in the back, then set off for Dubrovnik.
We stayed in the same places along the way that we would have stayed anyway, covering the distance it would have taken all day on a bicycle in just a couple of hours of driving. It gave us the chance to visit to places we would never have visited otherwise: a fort, an amazing cave (with a tour from the grandson of the man who originally discovered it as a boy), the incredible Biokovo park with its hair-raising drive up and a glass-bottomed skywalk.
After dropping the hire car off, we had another couple of days break in Dubrovnik where we spent a morning Scuba diving in the beautiful clear Adriatic waters. Then it was finally back on the bikes after a 13 day break!
Almost immediately after leaving Dubrovnik, there was a significant climb which was quite a shock to the system. Once past that it was a beautiful country ride to the Montenegro border. This was our first non-Schengen country so we had to show our passports and get them stamped. We also fell foul of mobile data roaming charges outside the EU and immediately got stung by O2 for using data, which they promptly capped at 5Mb. We reached our destination but couldn't find the apartment without internet, so we had to buy a Montenegro SIM card and then eventually after several wrong turns we arrived.
The next couple of days were spent cycling around stunning Kotor bay, somewhere that we'd visited many years ago on a day trip from Dubrovnik. The water surrounded by towering mountains is stunning - we could have caught a ferry and skipped it but we enjoyed the (relatively) flat journey and an extra day in Kotor. Leaving the bay was less tranquil as we followed a highway that was under construction for many kms, but we finally arrived at our beachside destination.
The next day was another beautiful country ride into Albania, and a much more low key border crossing. We were now prepped with our Balkan SIM cards and only needed to change some Euros into Lek once we arrived at our destination, Shkoder.
Albania immediately felt like a different world to all the other countries we've visited so far, in fact many things remind us of South East Asia: tangles of electrical cables in the street, many people on mopeds, people selling food at the side of the road, piles of trash and stray dogs. We'd heard real horror stories about the roads and drivers, but our experience so far has been hugely positive. There's no indicating, drivers will pull out in front of you or reverse onto a main road without looking, but everyone just goes around or stops. In general, drivers are extremely courteous and because there's other slow traffic on the road (horse and carts, low powered mopeds, bicycles, tiny tractors etc.) there's more tolerance of other road users.
That said, Albania is still incredibly hilly. We had a lovely ride into Tirana (stopping at a fabulous farm stay on the way), but we've booked a transfer across the next few 100km in order to avoid the most extreme terrain. Tomorrow we'll be dropped off on the other side of a long tunnel that you can't go through on a bicycle, and we'll have three further days of cycling before we cross into Greece.
Although there are quite a few kms still to cover, we feel like we're actually getting close to our final destination now!