After the PWA in Croatia, it was a pretty quick hop over to Gran Canaria as the World Cup started only 2 days later, so the only option was to leave my van in Croatia, with the local photographer (who happened to be English) – and to him I owe a huge thank you as knowing my van was safe with all my gear inside on his driveway gave me a lot of peace of mind.
The photographer’s name is Clive Bevan and you can check out his photography here: https://clivebevanphotography.zenfoliosite.com/home
However, this gave me a bit of a dilemma – I needed to get to Greece for the next training block and basically the only option is to drive through the slightly less developed areas of Europe. Namely: Montenegro and Albania (and as we found out on the morning we started driving, we were also crossing Bosnia!). When you google “driving through Albania” the UK Gov website says: “Albanian driving can often be aggressive and erratic. Deaths from road traffic accidents are amongst the highest in Europe.” And for that reason, I took my Dad on this trip!
It wasn’t a particularly long trip – I’ve certainly gone much further solo this year, but the roads aren’t exactly the same as in Western Europe. The Bosnian M6 (same name as one of the biggest highways in England) isn’t exactly the same… its definitely more of a dirt road! But running alongside it was one of the clearest rivers I’ve ever seen – it was definitely a different experience. This area is called the Dynaric Alps and its stunning – far prettier than I’d imagined it could be. Naively I thought we’d be on the highway for 2 days and not really see much but highways don’t really exist yet in these regions and its not hard to see why – the population of Montenegro is 47 people per square km, for comparison, in England it is 434! Most of the what we saw in Bosnia and Montenegro was open mountainous countryside with a few small villages.
Day 1’s most eventful moment was stopping for lunch in Bosnia. We went into a small supermarket to see if we could get a sandwich. With exactly 0 words in Bosnian between us, we ended up with a whole loaf of bread with some cheese and salami – it filled a hole for sure!
Arriving at our hotel in the Montenegro, I went for a run to take in the scenery and it was stunning, it felt like being in Lake Garda! Overall so far I’d felt pretty safe and I’d do the trip again trip again to this point, but fast forward a few days and when I arrived in Vass I found out there had been a mass shooting 2 days later in the town 20km from where we stayed in Montenegro so maybe I’ll pass on repeating this one…
Day 2 was time to take on Albania and based on the above review from the UK Government we were both pretty on edge. Off to a good start – the Montenegrin border force decided we didn’t have the right paperwork for the van to leave the country and they tried to send us back into Montenegro. After we pretty much begged them them and showed them all the papers we had, they let us carry on and into Albania.
Albania was different from anything I could have imagined. The first 3.5 hours (when I was driving) I don’t think we broke 30mph. It was pretty much stationary traffic the whole way with lots of police presence and people on the streets begging for money. It wasn’t the most comfortable experience, but within 5 minutes of swapping driving with Dad it felt like we barely encountered another vehicle for the rest of Albania. The roads were almost empty and the road quality improved drastically as we got down towards Greece. The debate of the day involved whether or not we saw a wolf – which culminated in a google of whether wolves live in Albania (they do, but not really where we were) and realising that there were lots of animals that we would really rather not meet in Albania.
Crossing to Greece was largely uneventful and we thought that it was going to be an easy last 30 minutes… That was until with 10 minutes to go and the taste of beer on my Dad’s lips, smoke started pouring out of the engine! Less than ideal but its not the first time its happened and normally after leaving it to cool for 10 minutes, it resolves itself – I’m sure one day it will blow up but for this trip we survived! Into Igoumenitsa we headed where Dad took the ferry to Corfu the next day to fly home and I continued south to Sweet Home Vassiliki!
