Day 11: Tirana, Albania

Chinese Version / 中文版本

Today it's the time to leave the beautiful Macedonia and continued my long bus-riding day to Tirana. After bidding the real farewell to R and exchanged souvenirs with each other, I officially started my journey of today.

Going to Tirana from Ohrid was not as direct as I had thought. Firstly, I needed to go to the main street in Ohrid to take the mini-bus to Struga, a Macedonian city located in the northern shore of Lake Ohrid. There was no specific sign or an actual station, I was just told the bus would be parked opposite to the market. When I got there, I was immediately approached by some shared taxi drivers and they said they're going to Struga too. I then hopped on and few minutes later, the car was loaded up already.

The shared taxi took less than 30 minutes to get to Struga, some people got off on the way, but the vacant seats were quickly filled up. The worst thing was that the taxi didn't stop in front of the bus station in Struga, I was dropped in the middle of the highway and it started to rain cats and dogs. The driver showed me a very vague direction of the bus station to me, then I followed to walk towards that direction in the rain, with many big trucks along the road and industrial sites around.

My favorite Fornetti as breakfast

Approximately 10 minutes later, I saw the bus station within one of the industrial sites. I quickly bought the bus ticket at the counter and then waited at the station together with 2 other backpackers. Surprisingly, there was free WiFi in the bus station and it was very stable too. Therefore, I downloaded as many as YouTube videos of my favorite radio show in the station for me to kill time on the bus later. I guess I started to feel so bored with my iPod already. (Kudos to the developers of any kind of YouTube downloader)


The bus didn't leave from Struga, but somewhere else, maybe from Skopje. It should have arrived at Struga at 12:30 p.m., instead it came late and arrived at 1:30 p.m. eventually.  On the bus, I kept on indulging myself in the radio show and it seemed that the time would pass faster.

Before entering to the Albanian border, there was a short toilet/restaurant break. I finally got a change to talk with the 2 backpackers who happened to sit behind me. They are actually from Norway, Bergen to be exact. Both of them are students and studying biblical theology. Before school starts again in September, they decided to fly all the way to Turkey and are currently trying to hitchhike back to Norway. Because they heard it wasn't easy to hitchhike in Albania, they chose to take the bus to Tirana, and will couch-surf there instead. It is actually very inspirational to meet this kind of budget travelers on the road, I hope I will have that courage to do such thing like them someday.

Scenery on the way

The border crossing was easy, nevertheless, everything started to change in the last 2 hours of the bus ride. The bus began to move slower and more careful, since there were many potholes on the road, even on the highway. In addition to some traffic on the way, the bus finally arrived at Tirana at 8 p.m.. The sky was completely dark by the time I got off from the bus, it was definitely not part of my plan, as I usually hate finding direction in the dark. Besides, the bus didn't park in the bus station, just dropped us on one main street again. It was even harder as I had no clue of where I was located.

After asking for the driver, he showed me to walk down the street, then I would see Skanderbeg Square and from there I could follow the direction that the hostel gave me. Reality is always different than ideal, it took me more than half hour to walk to Skanderbeg Square, let alone I would need another 20 minutes to walk to the hostel. The worst part was that I didn't have any Albanian lek with me, so I couldn't even take the taxi. In the end, I walked with my heavy backpack for 50 minutes and my back was sore like crazy.

The hostel I am staying is Tirana Backpacker Hostel, located next to the shopping street Rruga Myslym Shyri. After a quick dinner, I went back to the hostel and began to do some research for my later on journey. On one hand, I want to go to Spain to meet up with R again. On the other hand, it's easier to catch a boat from Albania to Italy. It's so hard to choose......