Mandatory coffee breaks
I catch y
connecting bus in Elbasin and we drive out of town. The roads are incredible in
this part of the country. For a moment I you could think you were on a newly
renovated western European road - there is not a single pothole in the road. It
feels strange driving on a road with a pothole. It is sort of unnatural for
Albania. And the bus is doing incredible speed - it might be going 50k per hour
or something like this.
We drive on
for 45 minutes but then it happens - the Albanian bus drivers don’t seem to be
allowed to drive more than 40k in an hour it would be considered a breach of
the union contracts. Hence after 45 minutes we go for a 20 minutes long coffee
break. After the coffee break it is time to start driving towards the border at
Lake Ohrid. We drive up a road on a small mountain chain and the road change
from superb condition to standard Albanian condition and we bump along the
road.
The drive
in the mountain is quite scenic and I get a bit of a look of the many tiny
bunkers in Albanian as a constant reminder of the communist era.
I find a
car - Mercedes of course it is Albania after all - and I wake up the driver
asking him how much it is. The driver speaks no English so asking him for the
price to go to the border is a bit of a problem. The drive is not very long so
I expect to pay something like 3-400 leke or maybe 5€.
The driver
tells me a price of 15€ which is much more than I would expect to pay. Hence I
give him an answer sounding very surprised - if he really means 15€. He say no
no and the he corrects the price from 15€ to 50€. That doesn’t really comfort
me all that much - and the driver realizes this. Fortunately the car windows
are really dusty and the driver decides to clarify the price by writing it on
the dusty window. He write 5€ which is a bit more than it should be but I am
almost all out of lekes hence there would not be much of a point trying to
haggle about the price given I got no change. So I get in and we drive for a
few minutes to the border where I get out of the car and get ready to walk
across the border.
