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| Tirana's main pedestrian street, heaving with coffee shops and old locals dressed in their suits drinking coffee. The most common dress code for men (aged 40-80) throughout Albania is the woollen slacks and tan blazer. |
Instantly after crossing the border into Albania there was a notable difference compared to Montenegro.... Along the highway there were a lot of large houses on big blocks, some really nice but the majority of them looked unfinished. They'd complete maybe the bottom floor and looked as though people were living in that - but levels above were just concrete shells. Also the traffic was chaos, there were a lot of people riding bikes along the highway, the odd horse and cart and broken down cars. The speed limit was slow and the bus would randomly stop at the side of the road to pick up or drop off passengers, there weren't many allocated bus stops. At one stage the bus driver even stopped to get himself some fish at a roadside market. Another noticeable thing was the amount of petrol stations dotted along each side of the road seemed strange...
We were heading for the Capital Tirana where we'd booked - Trip'n Hostel. The border crossing out of Montenegro was our slowest yet. The bus ride was typical of our Balkan experience but on the expensive side at 30 Euro's each.
The bus dropped us off randomly on the side of a street near the centre of Tirana, a handful of us got off scratching our heads thinking we would have been dropped at a station - never mind we kitted up and set foot in direction to our hostel which was a bit over a km walk. Considering the time of year the hostel was chokers, in our 12 bed dorm I think one bed may have been empty - which made for a rough night sleep.
Our main day in Tirana was jam packed - a cooked breakfast was supplied (win) and served up to you like at a restaurant, then a walking tour, lunch then a couple of other touristy adventures.
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| Flea market outside the gate of the Hostel. |
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| Couple'a Nokia's! |
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| White jock washing day by the looks. |
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| On route to the walking tour I thought I should get some cash out - dropped 5000lek on me when I thought it might have been split by 1000$ bills. The equivalent of $52.60AUD and not idea for tipping the walking tour guide.. |
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| Meeting place of the walking tour, a massive communist building and mosaic which is now the National Historical Museum. It was a pretty impressive building! We didn't get a chance to go there and maybe if we had an extra day we would have. |
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| Old bridge - built a couple of hundred years ago to get across the river, during communist periods they blocked off this section of river to allow for building developments. |
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| "The Pyramid of Tirana" this was build as a memory to the founding communist leader Enver Hoxha formally as a Museum to serve as his legacy - designed by his daughter and son in law. After the demise of the communist state it was used as an conference centre, then NATO in 1999, then a TV station. Now however it is well and truly abandoned and there have been petitions to destroy it. Its pretty sketchy but easily climbable, just a bit slippery coming down :/ At the time of completion it was said to be the most expensive structure ever built in Albania. |
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| The Peace Bell for anyone to ring, a couple of the chaps on our tour had a crack, it represents a memorial to the Children of Shkodra. The metal for the bell came from thousands of bullet cartridges fired off during the 1990's. |
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| A display of one of the 170,000 bunkers built around the country - the belief was that if the Germans or US attacked Albania they would be safe and be able to defend their country via these bunkers. Generally 3 or so bunkers were build in one area and were connected via tunnels. |
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| A fragment of the actual Berlin Wall. |
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| Couple of blokes dressed in their water proofs adjusting the height of the fountains. |
After the walking tour we had some lunch with a couple of the blokes we'd met from the hostel at a traditional Albanian place. It featured dishes such as sheep liver, sheep inner and sheep's intestine...
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| ODA - It was delicious, filling and affordable, this is only half of what we actually ate - $8AUDpp |
Following lunch we ventured out to a massive nuclear bunker which was built under the instruction of the Communist leader Enver Hoxha in the 70's. It has now been put to cultural use to tell the story of the times under the dictators rule, and Albanian history prior to becoming a Communist state. We caught a metro bus out to the site followed by a short walk.
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| Tunnel under a road leading to Hoxha's bunker complex. |
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| The entrance of the five-story bunker is pretty under whelming. Entry into the bunker was 5.20AUD per person which was pretty reasonable I think. |
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| Its a pretty serious structure, there were two of these doors to get through to get into the first main hallway of the bunker. Check out the thickness of that door! |
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| This treadly was used for stress testing soldiers. |
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| The sizeable concert hall inside the bunker! A pretty comfortable space. Used for jazz concerts now. |
Just above the Bunker (400ish metre walk up a reasonably steep hill) is the start of Tirana's cable car up to Mount Dajti. It works out well having the two attractions next to each other, you can sort of kill two birds with one stone. We took the ride to catch the sunset, have a beer at the Panorama Lookout and to reflect on the day with a couple of Americans from the hostel we had been hanging out with all day.
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| From this view point you watch the sunset over the Adriatic which is only about 40km away as the crow fly's. All day we'd carried around our coats thinking it would have been chilly, we were thankful to have them once the sun had gone down - she's starting to get bloody cold. |
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| We detoured back from a $4.50AUD Gyros and Heineken for dinner and headed out on the town to climb the Pyramid and visit the "sky bar" - also to catch some of the night life of Tirana. This is a photo looking over the city centre from the Pyramid. |
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| Sheep's heads and chickens on the rotisserie outside a restaurant on our way back to the Hostel. |
It was a pretty quick trip at Tirana just the two nights before moving on. We felt that was enough but well worth the visit!
Out of the 3 million Albanian's that live in Albania, 1 million live in Tirana. The city itself was pretty chaotic, the buildings seem to have been slapped any where without any real flow/plan/urbanisation. There was a massive contrast between old and new, private and public buildings.
The main central square was under a massive facelift at our time of visiting which was a shame because it will be/is a pretty central and significant area connecting a lot of the notable sites in the city centre. Renovations will see that something from every area/town of Albania is displayed - the idea is that anyone from Albania can visit their capital and be reminded of their home...
Tirana was not what we expected, it was rough around the edges but very lively and we really enjoyed what it had to offer!
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